The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument Continued 79
God and free will. The first rests on a philosophical theory that, unlike
compatibilism, has been very popular among theists. This is the theory
that there are ‘‘true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom’’—and in fact
so many of them that an omniscient being would know what a creature
with free will would freely do in any circumstance. 2 That there are true
counterfactuals of creaturely freedom—for example, ‘If there had been
a peal of thunder at the moment Eve was trying to decide whether
to eat the apple, she would freely have decided not to eat it’—has
been accepted by a wide range of theists, among them most (if not all)
Dominicans and Thomists, the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuits, and
Alvin Plantinga. 3 An atheist might try to make use of the thesis that
such propositions exist to refute the free-will defense, to exhibit it as
an impossible story. The argument would be a generalization of this
example: Suppose the conditional proposition I just now used as an
example—‘If there had been a peal of thunder at the moment Eve was
trying to decide whether to eat the apple, she would freely have decided
not to eat it’—is true. Then God could have brought it about that Eve
freely decided not to eat the apple. Being omniscient, he would have
known that the conditional was true; all he would then have had to do
to bring it about that she freely decided not to eat the apple would have
been to cause its antecedent to be true—that is, to produce a peal of
thunder at the crucial moment. By adopting as a general strategy the
technique illustrated in this example, he could bring it about that every
creature with free will always freely did what was right; there would
then be no creaturely abuse of free will, and evil could not, therefore,
have entered the world through the creaturely abuse of free will. And
that is what a morally perfect being would, of necessity, do—at least
assuming that free will is a good that a morally perfect Creator would
have wanted to include in his creation. The so-called free-will defense is
thus not a defense at all, for it is an impossible story.
Plantinga has an enormously elaborate response to this argument, a
response that depends on a Molinist, rather than a Thomist, view of the
relation between God’s power and the true counterfactuals of creaturely
freedom. 4 (Thomists have generally held that each counterfactual of
creaturely freedom had the truth-value it did because God decreed that
it should have that truth-value; Luis de Molina and his followers held
that, as a matter of contingent fact, certain members of the set of
counterfactuals of freedom were true and the others false, and that
God was just stuck with a certain distribution of truth-values over the
members of this set, the distribution that happened to obtain, by chance