Free Will Defense

The Free Will Defense maintains that evil and suffering is a natural consequence of (rather than punishment for) the misuse of free will.

Does it avoid anthropomorphism and account for all of the evil and suffering in our experience?

Well, unless we think that all natural disasters are the result of free will (which I don’t think is a very plausible position), the Free Will Defense doesn’t cover all varieties of suffering. But that might not be so bad, if the suffering that’s the result of natural disasters has some other explanation. If the Free Will Defense avoids anthropomorphism, it would at least account for the actions of people like Hitler, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

So, is this defense nonanthropocentric?

One reaction to the Free Will Defense is to complain that God should have given us free will while making sure that we didn’t misuse it, to which an advocate of the Defense would obviously reply that God couldn’t have given us free will without letting us screw up occasionally, that fool-proof free will is either impossible or else isn’t free will worthy of the name. In other words, the Free Will Defense, adequately fleshed-out, would be diagrammed as follows:

1. God would permit the types of evil and suffering necessary for free will in the world.

2. Any world with free will is better than any world without it.

3. God had a choice between making an all-good world in which we didn’t have free will, and a world with evil and suffering in which we did have free will.

4. God can’t grant us free will without permitting its misuse, and the consequent evil and suffering.

4

B |

2 + 3

A |

1

Once again, this defense depends upon placing restrictions upon what God can do, in this case the restriction that God can’t grant us free will without permitting its misuse, and the consequent evil and suffering. We’ve yet to decide whether or not God can do absolutely everything, and we won’t need to decide this issue if the Epistemic Contrast Defense can allow us to solve the Problem of Evil without placing restrictions on God. So let’s turn to that.