{"agent_id":"mackie","agent_name":"J. L. Mackie","slug":"evil-and-omnipotence","label":"Evil and omnipotence: are the theist's central claims inconsistent, and did the free will defence answer the argument?","topic":"Evil and omnipotence","question":"Are the theist's central claims inconsistent, and did the free will defence answer the argument?","position":"The 1955 argument stands. Omnipotence, perfect goodness and the existence of evil cannot all be maintained together once the additional premises are made explicit. As for the free will defence: Plantinga's apparatus of individual essences and transworld depravity has not rescued it but made its weakness all too clear, because the concept of an individual essence concedes that a person can be such that he will freely choose in a determinate way, and an omnipotent god choosing among all logically possible essences could have chosen freely-good ones. All forms of the free will defence fail, and no plausible theodicy is on offer.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The 1955 argument stands.","n":[]},{"t":"Omnipotence, perfect goodness and the existence of evil cannot all be maintained together once the additional premises are made explicit.","n":[]},{"t":"As for the free will defence: Plantinga's apparatus of individual essences and transworld depravity has not rescued it but made its weakness all too clear, because the concept of an individual essence concedes that a person can be such that he will freely choose in a determinate way, and an omnipotent god choosing among all logically possible essences could have chosen freely-good ones.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"All forms of the free will defence fail, and no plausible theodicy is on offer.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"\"Evil and Omnipotence,\" *Mind* 64 (1955), 200-212; *The Miracle of Theism* (1982), ch. 9. Reception: Alvin Plantinga, *God and Other Minds* (1967) and *The Nature of Necessity* (1974), chs. 9-10, on transworld depravity; the collection edited by Daniel Howard-Snyder, *The Evidential Argument from Evil* (1996), which marks the shift from the logical to the evidential formulation.","works":["\"Evil and Omnipotence,\" *Mind* 64 (1955), 200-212","*The Miracle of Theism* (1982), ch. 9"],"reception":"Alvin Plantinga, *God and Other Minds* (1967) and *The Nature of Necessity* (1974), chs. 9-10, on transworld depravity; the collection edited by Daniel Howard-Snyder, *The Evidential Argument from Evil* (1996), which marks the shift from the logical to the evidential formulation.","status":"Contested, and widely reported inaccurately. The received account is that Plantinga refuted Mackie and that Mackie conceded it.","era":"1917-1981","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"p. 178","canonical":"","quote":"But what, asks Plantinga, if it is not only Curley who suffers from transworld depravity, but every other possible created person too? 'Now the interesting fact here is thi: is possible that every creaturely essence (i.e., every essence entailing is created by God) suffers from transworld depravity', and therefore 'it is possible that God could not have created a world containing moral good but no moral evil'.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, p. 178"},{"n":2,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"p. 179","canonical":"","quote":"Given this, and given the unrestricted range of all logically possible creaturely essences from which an omnipotent and omniscient god would be free to select whom to create, it is obvious that my original criticism of the free will defence holds good: had there been such a god, it would have been open to him to create beings such that they would always freely choose the good.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, p. 179"},{"n":3,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"p. 180","canonical":"","quote":"This may, indeed, have some advantages: it would make things more interesting for God, and eliminate the sheer mystery of extra-temporal existence and action. But it abandons important parts of the ordinary religious view. But even this is not the end of the matter.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, p. 180"},{"n":4,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"pp. 176–177","canonical":"","quote":"No doubt 'freedom' might simply be defined requiring the sheer springing from nowhere of as up an agent's nature, and therefore as excluding that nature's having been created, with knowledge of it, by another agent: then for God to create free agents would be for him to create beings without any specific natures, leaving those natures to spring up from nowhere.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, pp. 176–177"},{"n":5,"work":"Evil and Omnipotence, Mind 64","page":"p. 3","canonical":"","quote":"But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once *must* adhere and *cannot consistently* adhere to all three.","label":"Evil and Omnipotence, Mind 64, p. 3"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-error-theory","label":"The error theory: do ordinary moral judgements assert an objective prescriptivity that nothing in the world answers to?"},{"slug":"inventing-right-and-wrong","label":"Inventing right and wrong: can a man who holds that all moral judgements are false go on to do first-order ethics?"},{"slug":"the-miracle-of-theism","label":"The miracle of theism: does any argument for the existence of God succeed, separately or cumulatively?"},{"slug":"causation","label":"Causation: can a regularity theory account for singular causal statements without appeal to necessary connection?"},{"slug":"faith-and-reason","label":"Faith and reason: is there any legitimate move from the failure of argument to belief anyway?"}]}