The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument from Evil 71
myself of the charge of contradiction, for I believe that it is consistent
to say that free will is a mystery in this sense and that philosophers
today understand free will better than philosophers of the past have
understood it. I claim to have a better philosophical understanding of
free will than, for example, Augustine and Aquinas. By this I mean that,
although I find free will an impenetrable mystery, I have at my disposal
a better family of ideas, a set of unambiguous, sharply defined, and
more useful technical terms relating to the problem of free will than
Augustine and Aquinas had. And I know of all manner of arguments
pertaining to free will that were unknown (or only vaguely, gropingly
formulated) before the 1960s.
As to the charge of obscurantism—well, free will is a real thing. (If
anyone denies that free will exists, that is a theory about free will, or an
important part of one, and it commits its adherents to the seemingly
self-evidently false proposition that free will does not exist.) I will, of
course, include in my version of the free-will defense (that is, in the
version of the free-will defense that I put into the mouth of Theist),
some statements that imply the existence of free will. In my view,
however, none of these statements are ones that are known to be false or
probably false or unreasonable to believe. Remember that the free-will
defense is a defense, not a theodicy, and that the person who offers a
defense is not obliged to include in it only statements that are known to
be true. I shall, for example, suppose that free will is incompatible with
determinism, but that is not a thesis that is known to be false. There are
philosophical arguments that can be brought against ‘‘incompatibilism’’
of course, but that fact is nicely accommodated by my methodology,
by my placing Theist’s use of the free-will defense in the context of a
debate: Atheist is perfectly free to bring these arguments to the attention
of the agnostics.
Let us now return to that debate. I am going to imagine Theist
putting forward a very simple form of the free-will defense; I will go on
to ask what Atheist might say in response:
God made the world and it was very good. An indispensable part of
the goodness he chose was the existence of rational beings: self-aware
beings capable of abstract thought and love and having the power of
free choice between contemplated alternative courses of action. This last
feature of rational beings, free choice or free will, is a good. But even an
omnipotent being is unable to control the exercise of the power of free
choice, for a choice that was controlled would ipso facto not be free. In