#761 The Free Will Defense Once More

Dr. craig’s response

For those who lack your philosophical background, Brian, let me explain that the Free Will Defense is a response to the problem of evil in the world. In response to the question, “Why didn’t God create a sinless world, since such a world is logically possible?”, Plantinga suggests that it is possible that in any world which is feasible for God to create, people would have freely sinned. So although sinless worlds are logically possible, they are not feasible for God to create. Plantinga calls this situation “transworld depravity.”

The reason that some logically possible worlds are not feasible for God to create is because the so-called counterfactuals of creaturely freedom--that is to say, subjunctive conditional statements about how people would freely act in any particular circumstances--that happen to be true preclude God’s creating such worlds. Though it’s possible that people act sinlessly in any circumstances, nonetheless they would sin if placed in such circumstances.

It’s important to understand that these counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, since they are contingent, vary in their truth values from world to world. So when Plantinga hypothesizes that it’s possible that sinless worlds are not feasible for God, he means that there is some possible world in which the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom do not permit God to create sinless worlds. He’s not saying that this is the case in the actual world. In order to defeat the logical version of the problem of evil, all he has to show is that in some possible world the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom do not permit God to create a sinless world.

Now people frequently ask questions of the sort that you ask. “If God knew that certain persons would apostatize, then why didn’t He kill them off before they fell away?” “If God knew that some people would not receive Christ, then why didn’t He just not create those persons?” What those who pose such questions fail to understand is that when you make such suppositions, you are no longer talking about the actual world, but rather a different one. Since the counterfactuals vary in their truth value from world to world, one has to consider all over again whether the counterfactuals that are true in the actual world are true in the new world. Maybe not!

For example, consider the counterfactual situation “Adam would always have sinned at some point in every universe by at least time T in his life but not prior.” Suppose that’s true in the actual world. If God had cut short Adam’s life prior to T, then you have a different world than the actual world, and you have to ask whether in that different world Adam would have sinned prior to T in every feasible world. Perhaps in such a world different counterfactuals of freedom about Adam are true, including that he would have sinned prior to T no matter which world God created. Whatever time T you set for Adam’s death, there are possible worlds in which the counterfactuals of freedom are such that Adam would sin before T. But that doesn’t imply that “in every [world], Adam’s first moral action would have to be sinful.” There are plenty of possible worlds in which the true counterfactuals of freedom about Adam would permit God to create Adam without his falling into sin. But Plantinga’s hypothesis requires merely that there be some possible world in which the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom do not permit God to create Adam without his freely sinning.