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The free will defence is widely regarded as the most successful philosophical response to the logical problem of evil. Developed primarily by the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932), the free will defence does not attempt to explain why God permits evil (that would be a theodicy). Instead, it has the more modest aim of showing that the existence of God and the existence of evil are logically compatible — that there is no formal contradiction in affirming both. Plantinga’s defence, presented in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) and The Nature of Necessity (1974), employs the technical apparatus of modal logic and possible worlds semantics to achieve this goal.
Recall Mackie’s inconsistent triad: (1) God is omnipotent, (2) God is wholly good, (3) evil exists. Mackie argued that these three propositions are logically inconsistent. Plantinga’s strategy is to show that they are not inconsistent by identifying a proposition that is possibly true and that, if true, would render all three propositions compatible.
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