The Free Will Defense: Is Freedom Worth the Cost?

Why does God allow evil? Here's the most famous answer in the whole history of this debate: what if evil is simply the price tag attached to genuine freedom? What if you can't have real free will without the real possibility of choosing wrong? If that's true, would it actually explain why there's evil in the world—and would it be a good enough reason?

Setting the Stage

Quick recap. The logical problem of evil says:

1. If God exists, He could prevent evil (all-powerful, all-knowing).
2. If God exists, He would prevent evil (all-good).
3. So, if God exists, evil doesn't exist.
4. Evil exists.
5. So, God doesn't exist.

A couple of posts back, in the "Not-Good God" episode, we saw good reason to doubt premise 2 outright—God's goodness might work analogically rather than the way human goodness works, meaning we can't simply assume He'd act like a good human would in His position. That already sinks the logical argument. But it's worth asking, out of curiosity: even if God didn't have to justify Himself, might He have good reasons for allowing evil anyway? Today's candidate is the most famous one in the literature: the Free Will Defense, developed most rigorously by Alvin Plantinga, particularly in his 1974 book God, Freedom, and Evil.

The Argument

1. We have free will (assumed for the argument).
2. Evil is a necessary consequence of free will (or of the things free will makes possible).
3. Therefore, free will is worth the evil that comes with it.

Is Free Will Really Worth It?

Start with premise 3, the most intuitive part of the argument. Imagine a mad scientist sneaks into every house on earth one night and installs a "brain blocker" that forces you to make good choices—you'll only ever choose the salad over the fries, the productive evening over the wasted one. Would that be good? Would we hand that scientist a medal? Almost nobody's gut reaction is yes. We prize freedom highly enough that we'd rather risk making ourselves miserable than have someone else's "better" choices imposed on us.

It gets stronger when you narrow in on moral free will. Think about Big Hero 6: the robot Baymax gets reprogrammed at one point to become capable of violence, and we feel it's not really "his fault," since he was just following his new programming. But here's the uncomfortable follow-up: was it any more "his" choice back when he was programmed to be gentle? If he's just executing code either way, what made his gentleness admirable in the first place? Scale that up: imagine every act of heroism you've ever admired was just sophisticated programming. Was it heroic if the person literally had no other option? It starts to look like heroism and villainy require the same underlying thing: the genuine possibility of choosing otherwise. Take away the possibility of villainy, and "hero" stops meaning anything.

Objection 1: Why Not Block the Bad Outcomes?

Why didn't God let us go through the motions of considering evil, but physically prevent the evil act from actually happening—a cosmic circuit breaker that trips the moment you try to act on a bad impulse?

Two responses. First, without real consequences, there's no feedback, and without feedback, there's no growth—like telling a misbehaving child "I'm going to punish you" and never following through. Second, this would just be a subtler violation of free will. If your choice can never actually be carried out, was it ever really yours to make?

Objection 2: Why Not Just Make People Who'd Always Choose Right?

This is the harder one. Imagine a bare-bones possible universe containing exactly one piece of forbidden fruit and one hungry woman, Eve, created already knowing what eating is, that the fruit is forbidden, and that she won't starve if she abstains. The universe exists just long enough for her one free choice. Since it's genuinely free, there are exactly two possible worlds: one where she eats, one where she doesn't. God, omniscient, knows both in full detail. It seems He could simply create the one where she abstains.

Add a second agent, Adam, and there are four combinations—three containing at least one wrong choice, but still exactly one sinless world. Add a third agent, and you get eight possible worlds, seven with some wrongdoing, but again exactly one sinless one. For any number n of binary choices, there are 2ⁿ possible worlds, and the sinless count stays fixed at one while the sinful count grows exponentially. Overwhelming for us to track, but nothing for an omniscient being. So it seems God could always select, from all available possible worlds, the one where every free agent always chooses rightly—meaning He didn't need any evil at all to have free creatures.

Two replies exist, and I don't think either fully works. The Open Theist reply says: if it's already settled what a person would choose in a circumstance, that undermines the choice being free—so there's no fact about what a free agent would do until they actually do it. The comeback: the choice is still determined by the agent herself, which is exactly what free will means.

The Molinist reply says: it's not actually metaphysically possible for a world to exist where every free agent always chooses rightly—some "obviously possible" sinless worlds aren't really possible, for reasons about underlying truths (CCFs) God doesn't get to author. The comeback: this looks like special pleading—why would a sinless combination be impossible, when nothing about it seems logically contradictory?

I don't think either response is fully successful. My own view is that God probably does allow certain evils for the sake of preserving genuine free will, but I don't think He was forced into allowing the specific evils we see just to get free will off the ground. There's more going on—additional reasons layered on top—which is why this series keeps going.

It's worth being precise about what this objection does and doesn't show. It doesn't prove God never allows evil for the sake of free will—if I make the small evil choice to steal a cupcake, God might genuinely value my having free will even in that moment. What the objection shows is narrower: God didn't need to actualize the cupcake-stealing world just to have free creatures in general. So there's still a further question: why did He actualize this particular world, cupcake theft and all, rather than a different one?

Objection 3: This Doesn't Explain All Evil

Even setting the above debate aside, the Free Will Defense faces a more basic shortfall: it doesn't cover every kind of evil we observe.

Evil suffered by someone other than the chooser. A drunk driver causes an accident. In one sense you might say the driver "deserved" the consequences. But often it's not the driver who gets hurt—it's the innocent person he hits. Our free choices constantly spill over onto other people, and "my free will was worth it" is cold comfort to whoever bore the cost of my freedom rather than its benefit. The Free Will Defense explains evil that's committed; it doesn't obviously explain evil that's suffered by someone who wasn't doing the choosing.

Natural evil. Cancer, earthquakes, animal suffering rarely trace back to anyone's free choice at all. The Free Will Defense, as stated, has essentially nothing to say about this whole category.

The most common patch is the fallen world theory: some original free choice (traditionally the Fall, or Original Sin) corrupted the natural order itself, so natural disasters and innocent suffering are downstream consequences of that first evil choice rather than a brand-new, unexplained category. But even this has a gap: was it necessary that one bad choice corrupt the entire natural world going forward, for everyone else, forever? God could have made each of us live in our own private universe of philosophical zombies—beings that look and act human but have no inner experience—so our evil choices stay genuinely free without anyone actually suffering from them. Or He could have built a natural world that simply doesn't get corrupted by human sin, so a bad choice stays contained to the chooser instead of rippling out into hurricanes and childhood leukemia. Neither seems logically impossible, which means the connection the fallen world theory needs isn't as tight as it first appears.

To be clear, none of this suggests there's no reason for these evils. As a Christian, I believe God works all things toward the good of those who love Him, even if I can't identify each individual reason. I think free will accounts for a real piece of the picture. I just don't think it's the whole picture—which is exactly why we need to keep looking at other candidate reasons in this series.