Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense

Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense

Alvin Plantinga's version of the free will defense is an attempt to refute the logical problem of evil, the argument that to posit the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God in an evil world constitutes a logical contradiction. Plantinga's argument is that "It is possible that God, even being omnipotent, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures."

Plantinga's defense has received wide acceptance among contemporary philosophers, though it only addresses moral evil, not natural evil, and some argue that the defense is flawed in that it presupposes a libertarian, incompatibilist view of free will.