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 predetermined that free will would be exercised sinlessly. Thus, it is held, the free-will defence cannot be used as a partial account of why God should have allowed evil to exist. I investigate this objection using Kripke’s apparatus for treating modalities and natural kinds to explore the nature of the incompatibilism required by the free-will defence. I show why the objection fails even if the standard arguments for compatibilism are acceptable. This is because the modality involved in the incompatibilism needed by the free-will defence differs from the modality involved in the compatibilism that is supported by standard compatibilist arguments. Finally, an argument is sketched for a variety of incompatibilism of the kind needed by the free-will defence. The topic of free will along with the attendant problem of compatibilism looms large in the philosophy of religion, as it does in metaphysics in general. Yet there are special features of the compatibilist question that must be properly understood to obtain a clear view of the issues when addressing the problem of evil and the free-will defence. These special features arise because there are closely related, but logically distinct, notions of compatibility, and the notion of compatibility that is especially pertinent with regard to the free-will defence is largely ignored in the general literature on the free-will question. As we shall see, standard philosophical arguments that have some force regarding one form of compatibilism may have little bearing on another. Consequently, certain considerations concerning compatibilism that are standardly discussed outside the philosophy of religion cannot simply be imported into discussions of the problem of evil. For example, one motivation for developing a compatibilist position is to address a sceptical worry that if science were to show that determinism is true, that might require us to give up the claim that we have free will and moral Religious Studies 40, 437–456 f 2004 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0034412504007231 Printed in the United Kingdom