God, Freedom, and Evil by Alvin Plantinga
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God, Freedom, and Evil
Alvin Plantinga
Bibliographic Information
Author: Plantinga, Alvin Full Title: God, Freedom, and Evil Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Year of Publication: 1977 (Eerdmans edition; originally published Harper & Row, 1974) Pages: 122 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8028-1731-0 Series (if applicable): N/A
Author Background
Alvin Plantinga (born 1932) is widely regarded as the most significant Christian analytic philosopher of the twentieth century. Educated at Calvin College, the University of Michigan, and Yale (PhD, 1958), he held chairs at Wayne State University and Calvin College before joining the University of Notre Dame, where he served as John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy from 1982 until his retirement. His intellectual formation took place within the Dutch Reformed and Christian Reformed tradition — he was raised in the Christian Reformed Church and has remained a confessing member throughout his career — and the distinctively Reformed confidence in the rationality of Christian belief pervades his work, even when that work operates entirely within the idiom of secular analytic philosophy. His prior major publications include God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Cornell, 1967), which first established the scholarly case he extends here, and The Nature of Necessity (Oxford, 1974), the rigorous technical monograph to which God, Freedom, and Evil serves as an accessible companion.
This context is essential for locating the book correctly. God, Freedom, and Evil is not a work of biblical exegesis or confessional theology in the conventional sense; it is analytic philosophy of religion — the application of the formal methods of logical analysis, modal logic, and possible-worlds semantics to questions about the rational defensibility of theistic belief. Plantinga writes as a Christian philosopher whose confessional commitments are not hidden but whose arguments are addressed to any rational inquirer regardless of creed. The Theological Traditions Reference Guide's Ecumenical/Broadly Christian category is the most appropriate classification: the book appeals to no confessional standard and defends no tradition-specific doctrine, but it does defend the rational acceptability of classical theism — the belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God — against its philosophical critics. Readers should be aware that Plantinga's use of libertarian free will as the cornerstone of his Free Will Defense carries significant theological freight that he does not make explicit: the view that human beings are genuinely free in a way that precludes causal determinism is in deep tension with classical Reformed theology's account of divine providence, predestination, and the sovereignty of God — a tension the book does not acknowledge and that Reformed and Calvinist readers will need to work through on their own terms.
Thesis and Central Argument
The governing thesis of God, Freedom, and Evil is that neither natural atheology (philosophical argument against the existence of God) nor natural theology (philosophical argument for God's existence) succeeds in delivering proof of its conclusion, but that in each case the balance of argument favors the rational acceptability of theism over its denial. More specifically: Plantinga argues (1) that the logical problem of evil — the claim that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil — is demonstrably unsound, and that the Free Will Defense constitutes a valid and sufficient response to it; (2) that the evidential problem of evil — the weaker claim that evil makes God's existence unlikely — is also unsuccessful; and (3) that while the cosmological and teleological arguments for God's existence fail as proofs, a properly stated modal version of the ontological argument succeeds in establishing that theism is rationally acceptable — that there is nothing contrary to reason in affirming the existence of a maximally great being.
The book responds to a specific intellectual moment. Writing in the early 1970s, Plantinga was entering a field in which J. L. Mackie's argument from evil was widely regarded as having finally established the irrationality of theistic belief, and in which the ontological argument was considered a historical curiosity that Kant had definitively refuted two centuries earlier. God, Freedom, and Evil challenged both of these confident assessments simultaneously, and it did so with a rigor and clarity that the philosophical community found genuinely difficult to dismiss. Its proposed contribution is not pastoral or devotional — Plantinga explicitly distinguishes the philosophical problem from the personal and pastoral problem of suffering — but strictly logical: to show that the philosophical objections to theism are failures, and that the theist who believes in God on the basis of faith, experience, or Scripture is not thereby committed to an intellectually incoherent position.
Overview of Contents
Introduction — Philosophy of Religion and the Stakes of the Argument
The Introduction frames the enterprise with characteristic directness. Plantinga distinguishes belief in God (a personal, existential commitment) from belief that God exists (the acceptance of a proposition), then locates the book's concern entirely with the latter as an object of philosophical inquiry. He identifies natural theology and natural atheology as the two poles of the field, announces his intention to concentrate on the ontological argument and the problem of evil as their respective most important representatives, and introduces the possible-worlds framework that will provide the logical machinery for the entire argument. The Introduction is lucid, modest in its claims about what the book will accomplish, and admirably clear about the genre it inhabits: this is not devotional literature, not apologetics in the popular sense, and not a substitute for faith — it is philosophical analysis, and its results will be philosophical rather than religious in character.
Part I, Section (a) — The Problem of Evil: Natural Atheology's Strongest Case
This is the heart of the book and the section that secured Plantinga's place in the history of philosophy of religion. He opens with Mackie's challenge — set out in Mackie's 1955 essay "Evil and Omnipotence" — that the set of propositions {God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; evil exists} is logically inconsistent. Plantinga's first move is to demand precision: what kind of inconsistency is alleged? He distinguishes explicit, formal, and implicit contradiction with careful rigor, then shows that Mackie's argument succeeds only if he can supply necessarily true additional premises that, together with the three propositions above, formally entail an explicit contradiction. He then examines in sequence the most plausible candidates for such premises — the claim that a good being always eliminates evil as far as it can, various revisions of this claim, and ultimately the claim that an omnipotent God can actualize any possible world He chooses — and demonstrates that each either fails to be necessarily true or fails to generate the required contradiction.
The argument then turns constructive. Plantinga introduces the Free Will Defense, distinguishing it carefully from a theodicy: a theodicy tells us what God's actual reason for permitting evil is; the Free Will Defense claims only that there is a possible reason — sufficient to establish logical consistency. The specific possibility he develops is that God, though omnipotent, might have been unable to actualize a world containing moral good without also actualizing one containing moral evil — because genuinely free creatures, whose freedom God could not causally override without destroying, might have chosen evil in any world God could create.
This is the occasion for the introduction of the concept of transworld depravity — Plantinga's most original contribution to the problem of evil literature. A person suffers from transworld depravity if, for every world in which that person is significantly free and does only what is right, there is some action with respect to which, in the actual circumstances, that person would have freely gone wrong. The crucial logical point is that it is possible that every creaturely essence suffers from transworld depravity — and if so, then God, despite omnipotence, could not have actualized any world containing moral good without permitting moral evil. This possibility is all the Free Will Defense requires; the argument for consistency is therefore complete.
Subsequent sections address the amount of moral evil (showing that the same argument applies), natural evil (which Plantinga accounts for by suggesting the possible free activity of nonhuman spirits — Satan and his cohorts — following Augustine), and the evidential problem of evil (showing that the existence of evil does not probabilistically disconfirm theism, since we have no reason to think the relevant background possibility — that all evil is broadly moral evil attributable to significantly free creatures — is false). Throughout, the argument is developed with a combination of formal precision and concrete illustration (the aardvark, Curley Smith's bribe, Maurice's oatmeal) that makes the logical machinery unusually accessible.
Part I, Section (b) — Other Atheological Arguments
Plantinga treats two additional pieces of natural atheology briefly but with characteristic precision. He disposes of verificationism — the claim that theological statements are literally meaningless because unverifiable by empirical science — in a single paragraph of elegant dismissal: the verifiability criterion cannot be stated in a form that rules out theological propositions without also ruling out scientific and common-sense statements, and there is no reason why a theist should accept the criterion in the first place. He then turns to the problem of divine omniscience and human freedom — the argument that if God foreknows all actions, no actions can be free — and demonstrates that it rests on a modal fallacy: confusing the necessity of the conditional "if God knows P then P" with the false claim that God's knowing P makes P necessary. He then engages Nelson Pike's more sophisticated revision of this argument — that essential divine omniscience is incompatible with human freedom — and shows through careful possible-worlds analysis that Pike's premises entail only harmless conditional claims rather than the paradoxes Pike supposes.
Part II, Section (a) — The Cosmological Argument
Plantinga treats Aquinas's Third Way in summary form, identifying two significant logical defects: the premise that whatever can fail to exist at some time does not exist is not obviously true (why couldn't a contingent being exist eternally?), and even granting that premise, the inference from "every contingent being fails to exist at some time" to "there is a time at which all contingent beings fail to exist" is a quantifier fallacy — the same move as inferring from "everyone has a mother" to "there is someone who is everyone's mother." He notes that Aquinas's commentators have tried to repair these defects without success, and concludes that the cosmological argument, at least in this form, is unsuccessful. The treatment is brief — eight pages — and is offered as an honest verdict rather than a comprehensive engagement with the cosmological tradition.
Part II, Section (b) — The Teleological Argument
Still briefer, this section presents Paley's watch analogy and Hume's extended critique of it from the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, then endorses Hume's central objection: even granting that the universe exhibits design, the teleological argument provides evidence only for the proposition that the universe was designed, while leaving entirely ambiguous the further claims essential to theism — that it was designed by a single person, created ex nihilo, that the designer is omniscient and omnipotent and perfectly good, and that the designer is an eternal bodiless spirit rather than a committee, an infant deity, or a finite craftsman. Plantinga's verdict: "the teleological argument, like the cosmological, is unsuccessful." The brevity is striking; readers wanting a fuller engagement with these arguments are referred to God and Other Minds.
Part II, Section (c) — The Ontological Argument
The final and longest section of Part II is the book's second major contribution and perhaps its most philosophically adventurous. Plantinga works through Anselm's original formulation (in the Proslogium), Gaunilo's lost-island objection (showing why the parallel to islands fails — there is no maximum of island-greatness, since island-making qualities like palm trees and dancing girls have no intrinsic ceiling), Kant's famous objection that existence is not a predicate (which Plantinga reconstructs carefully before arguing that it is "simply irrelevant" to modal versions of the argument), and several defective formulations before arriving at his own modal version.
The modal ontological argument runs roughly as follows. Define "maximal greatness" as a property a being has just in case it is maximally excellent (omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good) in every possible world. Then: (1) There is a possible world in which a maximally great being exists; (2) If a maximally great being exists in some world, it exists in every world (because maximal greatness, unlike ordinary greatness, is essential to its bearer); (3) The actual world is a possible world; (4) Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world. The argument's crucial premise is (1) — that the existence of a maximally great being is possible in the broadly logical sense. Plantinga concedes that this premise cannot be proven; he argues only that there is nothing irrational or contrary to reason in accepting it. The argument's conclusion is therefore modest but significant: it establishes not the truth of theism but its rational acceptability. "What I claim for this argument," Plantinga writes, "is that it establishes, not the truth of theism, but its rational acceptability."
Theological Evaluation and Critique
Philosophical and Logical Method
Because God, Freedom, and Evil is a work of analytic philosophy rather than biblical exegesis, what the review template calls "exegetical and hermeneutical method" must be transposed into an assessment of philosophical and logical method. On these terms, Plantinga's performance is exemplary by the standards of his field. The argument is formally valid throughout: he distinguishes logical from causal necessity with precision, maintains consistent definitions across the argument, and is admirably honest about what his argument establishes and what it does not. The distinction between a defense and a theodicy — between showing that theism is possibly consistent with evil and explaining what God's actual reason for permitting evil is — is one of the book's most important methodological contributions, and it has become a standard distinction in the field. Plantinga never conflates the two, and he is explicit that the Free Will Defense offers no pastoral comfort to someone suffering under the weight of actual evil: it is a philosophical tool, not a spiritual resource, and he says so plainly.
The possible-worlds framework, introduced clearly and applied consistently, does the logical work Plantinga intends it to do. The argument for transworld depravity is formally rigorous, and the distinction between actualizing a world and creating the people in it (God actualizes possible worlds; He does not create the essences of which people are the instantiations) is a genuine metaphysical insight with consequences that extend well beyond this book. Critics from within analytic philosophy — Robert Adams on counterfactuals of freedom, J. L. Mackie's subsequent responses in The Miracle of Theism, and the extensive literature on transworld depravity and its critics — have challenged specific steps, but none has succeeded in establishing that the argument is formally invalid.
The one significant methodological assumption that goes unargued is the most theologically consequential: Plantinga assumes libertarian free will throughout — the view that genuine moral freedom requires the absence of sufficient causal determination, including divine causal determination. This is not a neutral or merely technical assumption. It is the point at which the book's philosophical argument intersects most directly with the classical theological debates over providence, predestination, and the compatibility of divine sovereignty with human freedom — and it is a point at which the book is, by design, a work of analytic philosophy rather than theology. The assumption is entirely appropriate to the argument's limited scope; but readers who approach the book expecting a comprehensive theological treatment of evil will find that the most important theological questions about divine sovereignty are assumed away rather than engaged.
Doctrinal Analysis
Measured against the ecumenical creeds, God, Freedom, and Evil raises no concerns. The God whose existence Plantinga defends is recognizably the God of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381): omnipotent, omniscient, the creator of the world. The book does not address specifically Christological or pneumatological doctrine, and its argument is concerned not with the content of Christian doctrine but with the logical structure of classical theism. The doctrinal questions it raises emerge at the level of the sub-disciplines it engages — moral philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of action — rather than at the level of creedal or confessional standards.
From a Reformed and Calvinist perspective, the most significant tension in the book is the one already noted: Plantinga's Free Will Defense depends on libertarian free will, according to which God cannot causally determine human choices without destroying their freedom. This is directly in conflict with the classical Reformed account of divine providence, which holds that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass — including human choices — without thereby destroying human responsibility. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), Chapter III, states that "God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures." Reformed theologians from Calvin through Jonathan Edwards, John Murray, and John Frame have maintained that compatibilist freedom — the compatibility of divine determinism with genuine human responsibility — is both philosophically coherent and theologically necessary. Plantinga dismisses compatibilism in a footnote, calling it "utterly implausible" and offering a brief rejoinder. This is the book's most significant under-engagement on doctrinal grounds, and Reformed readers should be aware that accepting the Free Will Defense as stated would require abandoning or substantially revising classical Reformed accounts of providence and predestination. This does not mean the Free Will Defense is wrong — it means its implications for Reformed theology are considerably deeper than the book acknowledges.
From a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective, the Free Will Defense fits far more naturally. The Wesleyan tradition's commitment to genuine libertarian human freedom — the kind of freedom that makes love and moral accountability possible — is precisely the freedom Plantinga's defense requires. The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784) do not address the technical philosophical question directly, but the Wesleyan account of prevenient grace, conditional election based on foreknown faith, and genuine human cooperation with divine grace all presuppose the kind of freedom Plantinga's argument deploys. Wesleyan readers will find the Free Will Defense not just philosophically satisfying but theologically congenial — and they will also note that the book's implicit anthropology (the view that human beings are genuinely self-determining agents whose free choices God cannot causally override) coheres more naturally with Arminian theology than with its Reformed counterpart.
From a Roman Catholic perspective, the book's engagement with Aquinas on the cosmological argument — brief, critical, and ultimately dismissive — deserves note. Plantinga identifies two genuine logical defects in Aquinas's Third Way, and his critique is not unfair. But Catholic readers will observe that Aquinas's argument is considerably richer in the Summa Theologica than Plantinga's summary captures, and that the Neo-Thomistic tradition — represented by scholars such as Herbert McCabe, Ralph McInerney, and more recently Edward Feser — has developed responses to both of Plantinga's objections that the book does not engage. The broader Catholic tradition's engagement with the problem of evil runs from Augustine and Aquinas through twentieth-century figures such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose Theodramatik develops a theodicy centered on the Paschal mystery, and from whom Plantinga's purely philosophical approach is methodologically very distant. Catholic readers shaped by Dei Verbum's account of Scripture and tradition as co-sources of divine revelation will also note that the book's engagement with the problem of evil is entirely philosophical in character, with Scripture functioning merely as illustrative literary quotation (Dostoevsky, Milton, and the Apostles' Creed are cited; biblical exegesis is absent). This is appropriate to the book's genre but limits its utility for readers seeking a specifically Christian, rather than merely theistic, response to the problem of evil.
From a Lutheran perspective, Plantinga's approach stands in interesting contrast with the Lutheran theologia crucis — the theology of the cross — that grounds Lutheran theodicy not in abstract philosophical defense but in the suffering of the crucified God. Luther's mature theological response to the problem of evil was not philosophical but kerygmatic: the God who permits evil is the God who entered evil in the person of the crucified Christ, and the meaning of suffering is disclosed not through logical analysis but through the gospel. This contrast is not a criticism of Plantinga's argument — it reflects a genuine difference of genre and aim — but Lutheran readers will find that the book, for all its logical power, addresses the problem of evil entirely at the level of rational credibility and not at all at the level of gospel proclamation.
Engagement with Secondary Literature
For a popular-level book of 122 pages, the secondary literature engagement is focused and appropriate. Plantinga engages Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence" (1955) — the most important statement of the logical problem of evil in the twentieth century — in sustained detail, and his treatment of Nelson Pike on divine foreknowledge and freedom is thorough enough to constitute a genuine scholarly contribution in its own right. On the ontological argument, he engages Anselm, Gaunilo, Kant, Charles Hartshorne, and Norman Malcolm with precision, and his own modal reformulation builds directly on Hartshorne's and Malcolm's prior work in a way that is acknowledged and credited. Cornman and Lehrer's evidential argument in Philosophical Problems and Arguments receives careful attention in the final section on the probabilistic problem of evil.
The most consequential omissions — appropriate in a popular text but limiting for academic readers — are the theodicy tradition and the emerging evidential evil literature. The tradition of theodicy from Leibniz's Theodicy (1710) — which Plantinga engages briefly only to attribute "Leibniz' Lapse" to him — through John Hick's Evil and the God of Love (1966, just eight years before the book's original publication) is largely absent. Hick's Irenaean theodicy — the view that evil is instrumentally necessary for soul-making, for the development of mature moral and spiritual virtue — is arguably the most important theodicy in the post-war literature, and its absence means that Plantinga's claim to have addressed theodicy comprehensively is overstated. The reader of this book alone would be unaware that a significant tradition of constructive theodicy exists that operates differently from the defense/theodicy distinction Plantinga deploys. Additionally, the evidential problem of evil — which in subsequent decades would be developed far more rigorously by William Rowe in his influential 1979 essay "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism" — is addressed here only in the relatively brief Cornman-Lehrer section. The later literature on the evidential problem, including the extensive debate between Rowe, Stephen Wykstra, and Alvin Plantinga himself in the 1980s, lies beyond this book's scope but represents the field in which its arguments have been most rigorously tested.
Strengths
The defense/theodicy distinction and its philosophical consequences. Plantinga's most enduring contribution to the problem of evil literature is his rigorous distinction between a theodicy — an attempt to specify God's actual reason for permitting evil — and a defense — an attempt to show that there is a possible reason that, if actual, would be sufficient. This distinction matters because the logical problem of evil requires only that the theist show consistency, not that the theist identify God's actual reason. Once the distinction is clearly drawn, the logical problem of evil becomes far more tractable: the theist need not know why God permits evil, only that there is a coherent possible reason, to establish that theism is not self-contradictory. The practical significance of this insight is considerable: it relieves the believer of the pressure to justify every specific evil as part of some identifiable divine plan — a pressure that has historically generated both bad theodicy and damaged faith — without thereby undermining the intellectual respectability of theistic belief. Plantinga is admirably clear that the defense does not constitute pastoral comfort, but its philosophical clarity is genuine and lasting.
Transworld depravity as a logical contribution. The concept of transworld depravity is not merely a clever neologism but a genuine logical insight with far-reaching implications. The insight is this: given libertarian freedom, God's ability to actualize a given possible world depends not only on His own power but also on how the free creatures in that world would choose under the relevant circumstances. This means that the space of worlds available to an omnipotent God is constrained not only by logical possibility but also by the conditional choices of free creatures — choices that are not within God's causal control, even in principle. If every creaturely essence is transworld-depraved, then God could not have created a world containing moral good but no moral evil, even though many such worlds are logically possible. The logical elegance of this argument — which shows that the atheologian's premise "God could have actualized any possible world He pleased" is false by demonstrating specific possible worlds that God cannot actualize — constitutes a genuine advance over all prior versions of the Free Will Defense, including Augustine's.
The modest, honest conclusion about the ontological argument. Plantinga's restraint in presenting the modal ontological argument is philosophically admirable and practically important. Having developed a version of the argument that he regards as formally valid, he declines to claim that it proves God's existence in any useful sense — because no one who did not already find the key premise credible (that a maximally great being possibly exists) would be moved to accept God's existence by following the argument. Instead, he claims only that the argument demonstrates the rational acceptability of theism: accepting the possibility of a maximally great being is not contrary to reason, and if one does accept it, the existence of a maximally great being follows by valid argument. This modest framing — distinguishing proof from rational acceptability, and confessing honestly that the latter is all natural theology can achieve — is more honest than most presentations of the ontological argument, and it anticipates Plantinga's later and more extensive epistemological work on the proper basicality of theistic belief in Warranted Christian Belief (2000).
Clarity and intellectual honesty throughout. For a work of rigorous analytic philosophy, God, Freedom, and Evil is remarkably accessible — not because it has simplified its argument below what the subject requires, but because Plantinga has found concrete illustrations (the aardvark, Maurice's oatmeal, Curley Smith's bribe) that make abstract logical distinctions vivid without distorting them. More importantly, the book is exceptionally honest: Plantinga tells his readers clearly what his arguments do and do not establish, acknowledges the limits of the possible-worlds framework, and distinguishes the philosophical problem of evil from the pastoral problem with a forthrightness that weaker apologists often fudge. He explicitly states that neither the Free Will Defense nor any theodicy will be of much help to someone in the grip of genuine suffering — a concession that pastors and counselors will find important and that many apologetics texts never make.
Weaknesses and Limitations
Libertarian free will is assumed, not defended. The entire argument of Part I depends on the assumption that human beings are free in the libertarian sense — that genuine freedom requires the absence of sufficient causal determination, including divine causal determination. This assumption is contested not only by the entire Calvinist and Reformed theological tradition but also by a substantial body of philosophical literature (compatibilism) that Plantinga dismisses in a single footnote. The footnote's brief rejection of compatibilism — that the view is "utterly implausible" — is inadequate for a book that places so much weight on the incompatibility of freedom and causal determination. Readers from the Reformed tradition will find that the Free Will Defense, as stated, is unavailable to them without abandoning core commitments about divine sovereignty; and even readers sympathetic to libertarian free will would benefit from a fuller engagement with compatibilist alternatives. The assumption also interacts poorly with Plantinga's treatment of natural evil, where he invokes the possibly free activity of nonhuman spirits — which raises immediate questions about why God cannot causally override the free choices of Satan in a way He cannot override human choices. The book does not address this asymmetry.
The treatment of natural evil through demonic agency is barely defended. Plantinga's response to natural evil — earthquakes, disease, the suffering of animals — is that it is "possible" that such evil results from the free activity of nonhuman rational beings, in accordance with Augustine's suggestion. He acknowledges this is only a possibility, not a claim he is asserting as true, and that the mere possibility is sufficient for the defense's purpose. This is logically correct within the framework of the defense; but the brevity and the resort to Satan and his cohorts without any exegetical, theological, or empirical engagement will frustrate many readers. The suggestion that natural evil might be caused by fallen angels is a serious theological claim with a long patristic pedigree — in Origen, in Augustine, in various strands of the Christian tradition — but Plantinga offers it here as a bare logical possibility without the theological or philosophical development that would make it persuasive. Readers who accept the Free Will Defense for moral evil but find the demonic-agency account of natural evil implausible will be left without a satisfying response to the full range of the problem.
The theodicy tradition is almost entirely absent. Despite the book's engagement with the problem of evil, the constructive tradition of theodicy — from Leibniz's Theodicy through John Hick's soul-making theodicy, Richard Swinburne's developing natural theology, and the vast patristic engagement with suffering from Irenaeus through Origen and Augustine — is barely mentioned. Plantinga's explicit goal is the more modest one of establishing consistency rather than providing theodicy; but the effect of the book's structure is to leave readers with the impression that the Free Will Defense is the only serious theological resource available for the problem of evil, when in fact it represents one approach within a much richer tradition. Hick's Evil and the God of Love in particular — which argues that a world without evil and struggle could not produce genuinely virtuous persons, and that the soul-making value of a world with evil outweighs the world of painless mediocrity that theodicy-critics implicitly prefer — represents a tradition of constructive theodicy that the book's format prevents it from engaging. A reviewer noting the book's limits should point readers toward Hick, Swinburne's Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998), and Marilyn McCord Adams's work on horrendous evils as necessary supplements.
Engagement with the Broader Scholarly Conversation
God, Freedom, and Evil entered a field in which J. L. Mackie, Antony Flew, and their colleagues in the Oxford analytic tradition had mounted what they regarded as a decisive case against the rationality of theistic belief. Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence" (1955) and Flew's contributions to the New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955) represented the philosophical mainstream at the time of the book's original publication. Plantinga's response was not the first from the analytic tradition — Alvin Plantinga's own God and Other Minds (1967) had already begun the project — but God, Freedom, and Evil stated the key arguments with a completeness and clarity that made them impossible to ignore. Mackie's subsequent response in The Miracle of Theism (1982) is the most important engagement with Plantinga's arguments from the opposing side, and readers wanting the full debate should read both works together.
Within the tradition of Christian philosophical theology, the most important works to read alongside God, Freedom, and Evil are John Hick's Evil and the God of Love (1966, revised 1977) for the theodicy that Plantinga's defense specifically does not attempt; Plantinga's own Warranted Christian Belief (2000) for the epistemological framework that ultimately underlies his defense of theistic rationality; and the collection The Evidential Argument from Evil edited by Daniel Howard-Snyder (1996), which documents the debate between Plantinga's successors and the evidential atheologians (particularly William Rowe) who pressed the argument into new territory after this book. For the ontological argument specifically, the anthology that Plantinga himself edited (The Ontological Argument, Doubleday, 1965) and Charles Hartshorne's The Logic of Perfection (1962) provide the pre-history; Robert Maydole's more recent modal reformulations extend the line of argument into contemporary discussion. God, Freedom, and Evil stands as the watershed text of the contemporary philosophical theism revival — the work that, more than any other, established that analytic philosophy and Christian faith were not merely compatible but that Christian philosophers could engage the most rigorous secular arguments on equal terms.
Conclusion and Recommendation
God, Freedom, and Evil is one of the most important works in twentieth-century philosophy of religion, and it remains required reading for anyone who wants to engage seriously with the intellectual challenges to theistic belief. Its Free Will Defense is the single most influential philosophical response to the problem of evil in the modern period; its modal ontological argument established a line of inquiry that continues to occupy professional philosophers; and its clarity, intellectual honesty, and methodological rigor set a standard that the field has not often matched since. Its limitations — the undefended assumption of libertarian free will, the brief treatment of natural evil, the absence of engagement with the constructive theodicy tradition — are real but proportional to a book of its scope and goals: this is a slim popular introduction to arguments developed fully in The Nature of Necessity, not a comprehensive treatment of the problem of evil or the philosophy of religion. Read as what it is — a rigorous, accessible, and honest introduction to some of the best analytic philosophy of religion produced in the twentieth century — it deserves the widest possible readership across every Christian tradition.
Recommended for: Pastors and theological students who want to understand the philosophical problem of evil and the philosophical tradition of response to it; anyone who has encountered the logical argument from evil (in Mackie, Flew, or popular atheism) and wants a philosophically serious response; seminary students in philosophical theology, apologetics, or systematic theology; advanced undergraduates in philosophy of religion; any serious reader whose faith has been troubled by the question of why God permits evil and who is ready to think carefully rather than be reassured superficially; Reformed and Calvinist readers who need to understand Plantinga's argument even where they must also reckon with its tensions with their own tradition's account of divine sovereignty.
Not recommended for: Readers seeking pastoral comfort in the face of personal suffering — the book explicitly addresses a different problem; those without tolerance for formal logical argument, which begins within the first few pages and does not relent; readers seeking a comprehensive engagement with the theodicy tradition rather than a targeted logical defense; those wanting a specifically exegetical or biblically grounded response to the problem of evil (for this, see D. A. Carson's How Long, O Lord? or N. T. Wright's Evil and the Justice of God).
Overall Assessment: ☑ Highly Recommended | ☐ Recommended | ☐ Recommended with Reservations | ☐ Not Recommended
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