Plantinga's Free Will Defense

Alvin Plantiga promotes a popular free will defense against the logical problem of evil which basic point is as follows:

God cannot do anything logically impossible. It is logically impossible to give a human free will without the option of the free agent choosing evil. The moral value of free will is a greater good than not allowing free will.

In Plantinga's argument, he is not necessarily trying to vindicate God's specific actions, only showing that it is logically sound that evil exists, and God exists as a morally perfect, omnipotent and omniscient being. With this argument Plantinga shows that evil and God can logically coexist.

Objections:

While this helps us understand how evil does not necessitate the non-existence of God, what this argument does not explain (or necessarily try to explain) is the existence of natural evil. Moral evils are evils caused by human agents: Murder, rape, etc. natural evils are sufferings and evils caused by no human or animal agent's free choice: earthquakes, disease, natural disasters, etc. This argument is helpful in seeing why God and evil can coexist in regards to moral evil it does not explicitly help us for natural evils. We will have to move on to other defenses and theodicies to see those.

Inscrutability

This defense and attempted total refutation of the problem of evil (total refutation meaning that it makes the whole problem of evil irrelevant, if true.) goes as follows: Just because something looks morally wrong to us, we can’t confidently say it is actually morally wrong from a bigger, all-knowing perspective. Because of our human cognitive limitations, we truly can't know if something is actually morally wrong to allow, no matter how bad it looks.

On an intuitive level, sometimes this defense feels unsatisfactory, simply saying "we can't know" is ultimately, in my opinion true, but seems like a cop-out answer against true suffering.

Greater Good Theodicy

This theodicy is very broad and is often used in conjunction with other theodicies in various different ways. This is not an exhaustive summary of this very complex theodicy as that would require going in depth on several other theodicies that are used along side the greater good theodicy.

The greater good theodicy is based upon the logic that God can allow evil because He uses evil and suffering to bring out a "greater good". Common examples that are given can go along these lines: A person requires a major surgery to save their life, they will go through 3 hours of intense pain and suffering, but afterwards they will live. One would not call this type of suffering "evil" since a greater good - i.e. the person surviving came out of it. It then follows that if this is why God allows suffering in the world - one could not call Him "evil".

Greg Welty in his solid article in the Gospel Coalition proposes a threefold argument for the greater good theodicy:

1. God aims at great goods (either for mankind, or for himself, or both).
2. God often intends these great goods to come about by way of various evils.
3. God leaves created persons in the dark (in the dark about which goods are indeed his reasons for the evils, or about how the goods depend on the evils).

The Biblical examples could include Joseph, getting sold into slavery, where he faced objective sufferings that God used to bring about the Mediterranean region's salvation in famine. You could also use examples of Jesus and Job, to name a few.

Objections:

There have been hundreds of responses and arguments against this theodicy which we will not get into here. One of the most popular popular-level objections would be the "holocaust test" which goes as follows: What greater good came from the holocaust? 6 million innocent jewish civilians murdered and countless other lives taken, what greater good has been brought out from this? It is important to note that in this article we will not get in depth into the "nitty-gritty" of how things like suffering and good are defined and measured since this is aimed at the popular level. It is clear that on an intuitive level, for most people, there has not been a so called "greater-good" that has come out of the atrocities of the holocaust.

Soul-Building/ Character Development Theodicy

This theodicy was championed by Irenaeus and is a generally popular theodicy which goes along these lines:

God chose to create us in a world that contains natural disasters, suffering, and wrongdoing in order to help us grow in character, so that we become better people, more godlike in character, through development over time. (Ekstrom)

You can most likely see examples of this popular response to the world's evils: Communities banding together after a hurricane to provide relief to their neighbors, cancer patients bonding together after being given the same diagnosis, humans grieving together after a loss. This powerful theodicy has a lot to say about personal character, interpersonal relationships, and spiritual health. This theodicy can frame evil as good for building spiritual character and growing closer to God, growing closer to others, and building personal virtue, which are all seen as greater goods that would justify God allowing evils in the world.

Objections:

This theodicy provides an initially attractive answer, but faces several challenges. For example, the Soul-Crushing Anti-Theodicy shows that exposure to evil and trauma frequently leads to psychological devastation rather than character growth. This theodicy rests on the fact that suffering generally produces positive moral development, but this is not always the case in the real world.

Additionally, one of the major challenges is the distribution and scope of suffering. If character development is the goal of allowing evils into the world, then one should expect a generally equal distribution of suffering across populations to give people a fair chance at growth. Instead, we see evils and sufferings unequally distributed across demographics: rich and poor, west and east, white and black, etc. This theodicy also does not adequately account for suffering that serves no character building purpose: animal suffering, infant suffering, excessive suffering, etc.

Finally, critics argue that there are alternative possibilities to character development that don't require suffering. If character building was the goal, God could've created the world where we could build our characters and develop in moral goodness without suffering, especially not excessive sufferings, holocausts, genocides, etc. This theodicy in and of itself does not provide us with a fully sufficient theodicy for answering every single instance of God allowing perceived evils in the world.

Need for Natural Laws Theodicy

This important theodicy which attempts to provide answers for natural evils go as follows:

God creates and maintains the best possible world through simple, uniform, and predictable natural laws, and that such a world necessarily produces some natural evil as an unavoidable side effect.

This theodicy posits that God governs the universe through general natural laws rather than particular interventions. God uses general volitions instead of particular volitions, which is views as superior as it reflects God's wisdom through simplicity and uniformity. This theodicy also argues that a world governed by natural laws is superior to one where outcomes are random and unpredictable. Predictable laws of nature enable us to develop technologies that improve life, anticipate consequences, learn how the world works. Without consistent natural laws we wouldn't have scientific learning, and we would lack the knowledge necessary for moral responsibility. For example, witnessing the effects of fire teaches us about combustion and thermal injury, enabling us to use fire safely and understand how to help burn victims. This knowledge cannot be implanted directly by God without undermining human responsibility for acquiring it, nor can it be made available miraculously without making God's existence inescapably obvious and thereby compromising genuine free choice.

Consistent physical laws ensure that human choices have predictable consequences, making moral responsibility possible. Without natural regularity, free actions would lose their moral significance because their outcomes would be arbitrary. If God intervened every time a natural disaster were to happen, the definition of "law" would lose all meaning. For example, if God were to intervene every time a cell were to mutate into a cancer cell, biology itself would be inconsistent we would not be able to rationally study it.

Your next question might be: Why create laws that necessitate natural disasters? The short answer would be: it is logically inconsistent for God to maintain consistent natural laws, while also intervening every time they would cause harm. The same weather patterns that cause tornadoes provide the precipitation necessary for livestock. Hurricanes redistribute the planets heat energy and regulates the global climate. These disasters are functions of the necessary laws that govern nature. It follows that a relatively small degree of suffering from natural disasters is a greater good to maintain ecological stability, and human rational understanding in the long term.

Objections:

"the occasional occurrence of miraculous intervention, including events that clearly appeared contrary to natural laws, would not render effective human action impossible, since humans would see that such miraculous occurrences were extremely rare." (Tooley). Humans have the rational capacity to understand that obvious divine interventions are rare and therefore we would be able to advance in the same way.

Secondly, and relatedly, consider a world where the laws of physics, rather than being laws that admit of no exceptions, are instead probabilistic laws. Effective human action would still be possible in such a world, provided that the relevant probabilities were sufficiently high. But if so, then effective human action would be no less possible in a world with non-statistical laws where there were occasional miraculous interventions. (Tooley)

Additionally, we can go through specific examples in history of natural disasters and evils that could have been prevented, for example, a mental nudge could've enabled hitler to change his ways, or a small nudge of circumstances could've allowed one of the many failed attempts to assassinate hitler to succeed.

Finally, "Fifthly, many evils depend upon precisely what laws the world contains. An omnipotent being could, for example, easily create a world with the same laws of physics as our world, but with slightly different laws linking neurophysiological states with qualities of experiences, so that extremely intense pains either did not arise, or could be turned off by the sufferer when they served no purpose. Or additional physical laws of a rather specialized sort could be introduced that would either cause very harmful viruses to self-destruct, or prevent a virus such as the avian flu virus from evolving into an air-born form that has the capacity to kill hundreds of million people." (Tooley)