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Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense is a logical argument developed by the American analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and published in its final version in his 1977 book God, Freedom, and Evil. [1] Plantinga's argument is a defense against the logical problem of evil as formulated by the philosopher J. L. Mackie beginning in 1955.
The problem of evil is generally formulated in two forms: the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil. The logical form of the argument tries to show a logical impossibility in the coexistence of a god and evil, [2] [9] while the evidential form tries to show that given the evil in the world, it is improbable that there is an ...
Religious responses to the problem of evil are concerned with reconciling the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God. [1] [2] The problem of evil is acute for monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism whose religion is based on such a God.
The absence of good (Latin: privatio boni), also known as the privation theory of evil, [1] is a theological and philosophical doctrine that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial, so that thinking of it as an entity is misleading. Instead, evil is rather the absence, or lack ("privation"), of good.
Numerous variations of theodicy have been proposed which all maintain that, while evil exists, God is either not responsible for creating evil, or he is not guilty for creating evil. Typically, the Irenaean theodicy asserts that the world is the best of all possible worlds because it allows humans to fully develop.
He wrote that "evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil.'" [14] Both moral and natural evil occurs, Augustine argued, owing to an evil use of free will, [4] which could be traced back to Adam and Eve's original sin, [7] which to him was inexplicable given the understanding that Adam and Eve were "created ...
The problem of free will has been identified in ancient Greek philosophical literature. The notion of compatibilist free will has been attributed to both Aristotle (4th century BCE) and Epictetus (1st century CE): "it was the fact that nothing hindered us from doing or choosing something that made us have control over them".
Christoplatonism is a term used to refer to a dualism opined by Plato, which holds spirit is good but matter is evil, [20] which influenced some Christian churches, though the Bible's teaching directly contradicts this philosophy and thus it receives constant criticism from many teachers in the Christian Church today.