Evil and Free Will: Contemporary Free-Will Defense and Classical Theism

Natural Evil and the Free Will Defense

Recently Richard Swinburne has argued that the well-known Free Will Defense can provide an explanation of God's permitting moral evil (i.e., evil intentionally brought about by human agents) only if there is also natural evil (i.e., evil not intentionally brought about by human agents). 1 Ultimately his argument aims to show that there must be natural evil if we are to have the knowledge we nee...

Free will and the problem of evil

According to the free-will defence, the exercise of free will by creatures is of such value that God is willing to allow the existence of evil which comes from the misuse of free will. A well-known objection holds that the exercise of free will is compatible with determinism and thus, if God exists, God could have predetermined exactly how the will would be exercised; God could even have predet...

A study of Determinism and Free-will in Persian Proverbs

Proverbs as a part of colloquial literature are always nourished by religion, culture, traditions, and philosophical beliefs of a community, and thus they mirror the common beliefs of a people. The frequent repletion of a proverb pregnant with a specific thought makes that type of thought a behavioral pattern and affects the actions and behaviors of the people of a society. In the Iranian socie...

The Scope of Man's Free Will

Free Will and Moral Responsibility in Islamic Philosophy

According to a common view among Muslim philosophers, a moral agent has free will if and only if she is able to do an action when she wants to and is able to avoid it when she wants otherwise. Implicit in this view is the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). On the other hand, according to this view, free will is dependent on requirements such as conception, judgement, tendency, decisi...