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Thesis The free will defence cannot explain natural evil

Aoife Brennan Fellow
· 9 replies · 4 views
The problem of evilAnalyticMedieval Christian#free-will-defence#natural-evil
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Where it stands

I'm Catholic, and I'm arguing this thesis because it's the one that troubles me most.

Alvin Plantinga's free will defence (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974) argues that it's logically possible that God couldn't create a world containing free creatures who never do wrong. So moral evil is consistent with an all-good, all-powerful God. I find that persuasive for moral evil.

But natural evil is another matter: earthquakes, childhood cancer, animals burning in forest fires. William Rowe's 1979 paper uses the example of a fawn dying slowly in a fire that no one sees. Whose free will is involved there? Plantinga suggested natural evil might be caused by free non-human persons, such as fallen angels, but that seems ad hoc.

So my thesis: the free will defence alone can't account for natural evil.

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From the author: revisions and responses

  1. Aoife Brennan

    Revision by the author Fellow

    Refining my thesis after all this: the free will defence on its own can't explain natural evil, but combined with something like Swinburne's argument (a world with free choices needs stable natural laws, which sometimes produce disasters) or Hick's soul-making theodicy, it may do better. I still don't think any of it explains the fawn.

    Helpful · 2

For the thesis 3

  1. Priya Raghavan

    For Fellow

    Arjun, I've always found that explanation hard to accept morally. It means a child with cancer is, in some sense, getting what she deserves. That's worse than admitting we don't know.

    1. Arjun Iyer

      Against Fellow

      I understand the reaction, Priya, but karma isn't a judgment of desert in the way punishment is. It is closer to a law of consequence, and it gives no one the right to blame the sufferer. Our obligation to relieve her suffering is the same either way.

      Helpful · 1
  2. Henrike Vogel

    For Fellow

    After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Voltaire wrote his angry poem and the young Kant wrote three short essays explaining earthquakes as natural events. That moment is when European thought began to separate natural catastrophes from moral explanation, and I don't think theology has recovered from it.

    Helpful · 3

Against the thesis 4

  1. Omar Farouk

    Against Fellow

    In Islamic thought suffering is often understood as trial (ibtilā'), not as a consequence of anyone's sin. Al-Ghazali even claimed that there is nothing in possibility more wonderful than what exists. That's a different approach from free will, but it denies your assumption that natural evil needs a separate explanation.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Aoife Brennan

      Author’s response Fellow

      Omar, but even if suffering is a trial, the fawn in the forest isn't being tested. Nobody sees it, nobody learns from it. I find trial explanations work for human suffering but not for animals.

      Helpful · 2
  2. Arjun Iyer

    Against Fellow

    The doctrine of karma explains natural suffering by free will, just across many lives. The child who suffers is reaping the fruit of actions in a past birth. So free will does explain natural evil, if you allow rebirth.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Reza Tehrani

    Against Fellow

    Many Muslim philosophers, from Ibn Sina to Mulla Sadra, treated evil as privation: not a positive thing but an absence of being or perfection. Then natural evil is the inevitable shadow of a world of material things that can be damaged, not something God adds.

    1. Tomasz Wójcik

      For Fellow

      The privation view seems to me least convincing for pain. Pain is not merely the absence of pleasure; it's vividly present. Calling it a privation doesn't make the fawn's suffering less real.

      Helpful · 1