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Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense is a logical argument developed by the American analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and published in its final version in his 1977 book God, Freedom, and Evil. [1] Plantinga's argument is a defense against the logical problem of evil as formulated by the philosopher J. L. Mackie beginning in 1955.
The greater good defense is more often argued in response to the evidential version of the problem of evil, [141] while the free will defense is often discussed in the context of the logical version. [142] Some solutions propose that omnipotence does not require the ability to actualize the logically impossible.
In Christian theology, natural evil is often discussed as a rebuttal to the free will defense against the theological problem of evil. [3] The argument goes that the free will defense can only justify the presence of moral evil in light of an omnibenevolent god, and that natural evil remains unaccounted for. Hence, some atheists argue that the ...
The alleged contradictions of the problem of evil depend upon the meaning assigned to the terms involved, therefore "the most common way to resolve the problem of evil is by qualifying, redefining or supplementing one or more of the major terms." [43] Plantinga offers a free will defense instead of a theodicy. [40]
Theodicies are developed to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil, thus resolving the issue of the problem of evil. Some theodicies also address the problem of evil "to make the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good or omnibenevolent God consistent with the existence of evil or suffering in the ...
The problem of free will has been identified in ancient Greek philosophical literature. The notion of compatibilist free will has been attributed to both Aristotle (4th century BCE) and Epictetus (1st century CE): "it was the fact that nothing hindered us from doing or choosing something that made us have control over them".
Twentieth-century philosopher Alvin Plantinga's freewill defense argues that, while this may be the best world God could have created, God's options were limited by the need to allow freewill. Alvin Plantinga's ultimate response to the problem of evil is that it is not a problem that can be solved. Christians simply cannot claim to know the ...
Plantinga's response to the problem of evil – the so-called free will defense, which argues that it is possible that God could not have created a world with a better balance of good over evil than does the actual world – provoked considerable scholarly discussion. [4]