How does Plantinga's defense of free will align with omniscience

Question

I've been reading about Plantinga's defense of free will and I can see how omnipotence is aligned with the existence of evil. What evades me, is how he resolves the conflict between foreknowledge and free will. The article speaks about "weak actualization" and "letting the free choices of creatures complete the world" which to me sounds like a fancy way of saying that this part of the future is hidden from God's knowledge.

Can someone help me understand his reasoning?

Edit. At least I can accept the definition of omnipotence that says "absurd things ('free people that are incapable of doing evil') are still impossible". But his definition of omniscience doesn't feel right at all.

Answer 1

The basic thrust of Plantinga's argument is that God is not all-powerful (omnipotent); He cannot create a world where free will exists and not allow them to choose between evil or good. He doesn't specifically address the conflict between foreknowledge and free will, but it is implied that God lacks such foreknowledge (he is not omnipotent) because otherwise it could be argued that free will couldn't exist (in a universe in which there is only one possible future).

Plantinga's summary:

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil.

He concludes with:

The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.

This is patently wrong, however. Of course it counts against his omnipotence. Either God can do anything, or he can't. Omnipotence is not up for debate.

So he doesn't actually resolve the conflict. The Problem of Evil, I'm afraid, is still a problem.

Answer 2

It may help to think about this topic by eliminating the concept of time. What we want to ask is something like the following:

1. Can an omniscient, omnipotent being 'turn the knobs' on a universe simulator containing free-willed creatures, such that none ever commits moral evil?
2. If so, could he then just actualize such a universe?

It seems easy to think of a case where the answer to the first question is 'yes'. There is a term in probability called indefinite postponement, whereby a probabilistic process may never give a certain answer. While unlikely, you could flip a perfectly fair coin and never get heads. Couldn't it just be the case that the creatures never end up choosing wrongly? If the many-worlds interpretation is correct, there does indeed exist at least one world "without sin", to quote the Operative in Firefly.

But can we answer 'yes' to the second question? Here, we have to assume that the simulated universes are not real—that any evil in them is fictional and thus not bad—and that somehow, there is a way to reify such a universe. This smacks of "Last Thursdaysim", or the Omphalos hypothesis. Furthermore, there seems to be no guarantee that the now-reified universe will be immune to evil.

Wait a second, what about heaven? Couldn't we just "skip to the end", as one of my friends asks? Why not reify a simulated universe where no evil happened up and to the 'end', where 'end' can be described as a steady-state "everyone's singing praises to God"-type situation? There's a catch: it would be a moral evil for the creatures in heaven to think that they had a life before heaven, for that would be a lie: the reified thing was the end-state.

Plantinga answers 'no' to #1. More precisely, universes picked in #1 aren't guaranteed to be 'better' than universes where at least one evil action is committed. Perhaps in every world picked by #1, there are so many coincidences that normal science cannot be carried out.

In my view, God only runs into trouble if one of these is true:

1. God can violate the laws of logic. (e.g. create a square circle)
2. God can choose a different definition of 'good'.

If the answer to both of these questions is 'no', then it could be the case that all logically possible worlds with sinless [morally] free-willed creatures are less 'good', overall, than worlds with moral evil. Incidentally, I think this holds despite Plantinga's argument, but it is perhaps a reformulation: one can count 'good' on a per-creature basis, or on a per-possible-world basis.

Answer 3

The question is how does Plantinga resolve “the conflict between foreknowledge and free will” with his free will defense?

The OP accepts that omnipotence means being able to do anything that can be done. It does not include doing absurd things that are impossible such as creating free people that are incapable of doing evil. This agrees with how Plantinga describes omnipotence in God, Freedom and Evil (GFE, 18).

Regarding omniscience, “God knows about every evil state of affair" (GFE, 18). However this does not imply he knows, or should be expected to know by his omniscience, what a free agent will do or not do given that state of affairs. Plantinga also does not accept compatibilism of free will and determinism at least for the model he is creating. (GFE, 31-2) That means the state of affairs does not by itself determine what the free agent will do,

It is possible to define omniscience as knowing everything that can be known along the lines of open theism. Then omniscience would not include knowing what is not knowable just like omnipotence does not include doing what cannot be done.

It is important that these terms, omniscience and omnipotence, themselves not be contradictory otherwise by explosion one can derive all results not just the results that the proponents of the logical problem of evil want to derive.

This need not be Plantinga's personal view of God and evil. His goal is to create a consistent model to counter the logical problem of evil which claims that God's omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence and the existence of evil are contradictory. The goal of his model is to use free agents to show that these statements need not be contradictory.

Answer 4

It is actually quite simple if one explains it in the context of someone watching a re-run of a movie: you know that the character is going to go into the basement, because you've seen it before. This doesn't mean that you caused him to go into the basement, it simply means that you know what he's going to decide to do. This would be Omniscience.

A second view is the idea that God is omnidirigent, meaning He can find out whatever He wants to know, like a Computer programmer with access to a debug terminal.

A third view to consider is the theory that God knows the human character sufficiently well to know exactly how you will act in a given situation, making it possible for Him to predict your actions, rather than having seen them ahead of time.