Are Plantinga’s theodicy and defense incompatible?

• Published in: International journal for philosophy of religion Vol. 96; no. 2; pp. 147 - 156
• Main Author: da Silva, Gesiel Borges
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-10-2024; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Christianity; Defense; Education; Free will; God; Good & evil; Non-Western Philosophy; Original Article; Philosophy; Philosophy of Religion; Religious Studies; Suffering; Theodicy; Christian belief; Alvin plantinga; theodicy; Free will defense; The problem of evil
• ISSN: 0020-7047; 1572-8684
• DOI: 10.1007/s11153-024-09919-z

Plantinga’s free will defense is sometimes regarded as a successful response to the logical problem of evil. Still, a recent objection concludes Plantinga’s defense and theodicy are incompatible. According to this objection, in Plantinga’s defense, Jesus’ having a creaturely essence entails that Jesus suffers from transworld depravity and sins in the actual world, but this result conflicts with Plantinga’s theodicy and with Christian theism, where Jesus is sinless. In this paper, I argue that this objection is unsound, because creaturely essences suffer from transworld depravity only contingently, so it is not necessarily true that their instantiations go wrong in the actual world. Hence, Plantinga’s defense and theodicy are not incompatible, so both answers to the problem of evil can be endorsed in conjunction.