Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense - Criticisms

Criticisms

Critics of Plantinga's argument, such as philosophers J. L. Mackie and Antony Flew, have responded that it presupposes a libertarian, incompatibilist view of free will (free will and determinism are metaphysically incompatible), while their view is a compatibilist view of free will (free will and determinism, whether physical or divine, are metaphysically compatible). The view of compatibilists such as Mackie and Flew is that God could have created a world containing moral good but no moral evil. In such a world people could have chosen to only perform good deeds, even though all their choices were predestined. Plantinga dismisses compatibilism, according to which a person is free just in case she could have done otherwise if she wanted to do otherwise by saying that it is "altogether paradoxical". He thinks that "this objection... seems utterly implausible. One might as well claim that being in jail doesn't really limit one's freedom on the grounds that if one were not in jail, he'd be free to come and go as he pleased". Regarding Flew's criticism Plantinga concludes that "his objection is in an important sense merely verbal and thus altogether fails to damage the free will defense."

Another issue with Plantinga's defense is that it does not address the problem of natural evil, since natural evil is not brought about by the free choices of creatures. Plantinga's reply is a suggestion that it is at least logically possible that perhaps free, nonhuman persons are responsible for natural evils (e.g. rebellious spirits or fallen angels). This suggestion assigns the responsibility for natural evils to other moral actors.

Derk Pereboom while acknowledging that "many of those involved in this debate agree that Plantinga has provided a successful response to the abstract logical problem of evil", delineates a number objections, including the following:

• Michael Tooley insists that the more pressing problem is the logical compatibility of the existence of God with the actual evils in the world, a problem referred to as "the logical problem of horrendous evil" by Marilyn McCord Adams.
• David Lewis argues that even if each person would go wrong for some world segments, it would be possible for God to cause the person to do the right thing in just these cases, preserving selectively some significant moral freedom.

A recent objection to the defense is due to Geirsson and Losonsky, who question the interpretation of the fourth assertion in the definition of transworld depravity ("If S´ were actual, P would go wrong with respect to A"). This is a contingent fact: it is true in the actual world, but false in the world W. So one may ask if this contingent fact was up to God or not. If it was caused to be true by God, one may wonder why God actualized a world in which this person is transworld depraved when God could have actualized a world where this person, at least with respect to this action, would not suffer from such conditional depravity. If on the other hand, the fact is not up to God, we must accept that an omnipotent God has no power over contingent facts about the world; after all, there do exist possible worlds where the conditional statement in question is not true. Geirsson and Losonsky note that Mackie's reasons for rejecting Plantinga's defense were quite similar:

But how could there be logically contingent states of affairs, prior to the creation and existence of any created beings with free will, which an omnipotent god would have to accept and put up with? This suggestion is simply incoherent.

Despite these objections, many philosophers accept Plantinga's defense, with its implicit libertarianism, as a strong reply to the logical problem of evil. However, some recent papers argue that Plantinga's defense is unsuccessful.