The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Notes 163
8. See Antony Flew, ‘‘Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom’’; J. L.
Mackie, ‘‘Evil and Omnipotence’’; H. J. McCloskey, ‘‘God and Evil’’;
Nelson Pike, ‘‘Hume on Evil’’; and Alvin Plantinga, ‘‘The Free Will
Defense’’.
9. But there are other defenses, although none of them has been so carefully
developed or extensively examined as the free-will defense. There is, for
example, the ‘‘plenitude’’ defense: the Principle of Plenitude requires God
to create all possible worlds in which good outweighs evil; the world
we inhabit is one of these worlds; there are vastly many other created
worlds, in some of which good outweighs evil much more decisively than
it does in our world, and in some of which it only barely outweighs evil.
Versions of the plenitude defense are presented in Donald A. Turner’s
‘‘The Many-Universes Solution to the Problem of Evil’’ and in Hud
Hudson’s book The Metaphysics of Hyperspace. There is Alvin Plantinga’s
recent ‘‘felix culpa’’ defense, according to which the evils of the world are
a necessary condition for the immeasurably great good of the Incarnation.
(See his essay ‘‘Supralapsarianism, or ‘O FelixCulpa’’’.) There is the
‘‘radical Calvinist’’ defense, according to which God decrees evil in order
that his glory may be displayed in its final defeat; all created beings
who suffer, suffer justly (the defense contends) because God has created
them with evil wills—to demonstrate his glory and power by his ultimate
victory over them—and their sufferings are an ordinate punishment for
the evil actions that their evil wills lead them to perform. (A Notre
Dame graduate student, Christopher Green, defended this view in a term
paper in a seminar on the problem of evil, and made it seem more
plausible than I should have thought possible. A later version of this
paper, entitled ‘‘A Compatibi-Calvinist Demonstrative-Goods Defense’’,
was read at the 2003 Eastern Division meeting of the Society of Christian
Philosophers. It is as yet unpublished.) It may be that further development
and discussion of these or other defenses would lead me to revise my
judgment that the free-will defense is the only defense that has any hope
of success
For recent work on the free-will defense, including the seminal work
of Alvin Plantinga, see Adams and Adams, eds., The Problem of Evil, and
Peterson, ed., The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings.
The free-will defense derives, at a great historical remove, from St
Augustine. A useful selection of Augustine’s writings on free will and the
origin of evil (from The City of God and the Enchiridion) canbefoundin
A. I. Melden, ed., Ethical Theories, 164–77.
Three important book-length treatments of the problem of evil, all in
the Augustinian (or ‘‘free will’’) tradition, are C. S. Lewis, The Problem of
Pain;P.T.Geach,Providence and Evil; and Richard Swinburne, Providence
and the Problem of Evil.