Plantinga's version of the FWA

FWA is based on the plausible claim that an all-perfect God could be willing to allow some evil if necessary to achieve a greater moral good; after all, a morally perfect God would want to create, if not the morally best of possible universes, one that is morally worthwhile. Thus, if it could be true that God cannot secure some more important moral value without allowing some evil, then God could be justified in allowing such evil, which is hence logically consistent with God's moral perfection. Accordingly, the occurrence of evil per se is not problematic for classical theism; what would be problematic for classical theism is the occurrence of evil that could not be justifiably allowed by an all-perfect God (i.e. evil that is not justified at any possible world as necessary to secure a greater moral good).

FWA reconciles the existence of evil with a morally perfect God by pointing to the good things that free beings in the world do that outweigh the evil. As Alvin Plantinga puts it:

Although the clause that free beings perform more good than evil actions appears in parentheses as if an afterthought, the occurrence of that clause, parenthetical or not, suggests that Plantinga does not think, in contrast to the more common version of FWA, that the very existence of free beings is, by itself, a greater moral good that would justify God in allowing evil. Indeed, the sentences following the italicized sentence seem principally concerned with what free beings do, and suggest that the judgment that free beings do more good than evil is critical to the argument. While Plantinga might believe, along with proponents of the more common version of FWA, that the existence of free beings by itself is a morally valuable feature of the world, it is evident that this value by itself is not enough to address the problems of evil. A world in which free beings do nothing but evil things does not appear to be sufficient, on Plantinga's view, to solve the evidentiary problem of evil; on Plantinga's view, it must be true that these free beings do more good than evil. Only if free beings are doing more good than evil in this world can God's existence be reconciled with the evil in this world.Footnote ⁵

At the outset, there is an ambiguity that must be addressed and resolved. First, one could construe Plantinga's thesis (construed as theodicy) as saying no more than that all the evil in our world can be reconciled with an all-loving morally perfect God if there is, at least, one free being, among the many existing free beings, who does more good than evil. Second, one could construe Plantinga's thesis as making the stronger claim that all the evil in our world can be reconciled with an all-loving morally perfect God if, taking into account all the free beings who exist, have existed, and will exist, they wind up doing more good than evil.

The first construction must be rejected for two reasons. First, it is trivially satisfied by the existence of Jesus, who was fully human and without sin; indeed, the three divine persons of the triune God satisfy this condition in their mutually loving interaction. There are two problems here. To begin, the existence of the three divine beings who freely do more good than evil is enough to show that this is not a greater good that can be secured only by creating people who do evil. Moreover, the existence of Jesus alone would justify evil in worlds much worse than ours in which everyone else continuously did evil – and that simply cannot be right from the standpoint of moral intuitions. From that standpoint, if God knows that such a world will be actualized if He creates the world, He should, on my view, clearly refrain from creating that world. Whether the evil is the result of free choice or not, that simply results in a world of never-ending suffering as everyone will ultimately find themselves in hell – and it is hard to make sense of the idea that a loving God would bring about a state of affairs like that. It seems clear that Plantinga's thesis has to be construed as claiming that taking the deeds of all free beings together, free beings do more good than evil in the world, and it is this fact about us that explains why an all-loving God would bring about this world, knowing there would be so much suffering. On balance, the idea is that the good in the world will outweigh the evil in the world.

There is a second ambiguity here that must be addressed and eliminated centring on the question of whether we should consider the good and evil done by free beings in this world and in the afterlife. I think the answer to this question has to be ‘No’ for the following reason. The problem of evil concerns what is done in this life and would seem to require an answer that justifies the evil done in this life with some greater moral good that accrues from what is done in this life. If free beings are doing more good than evil in this life, then that is a reason to think that even a morally perfect God would allow so much evil because it is counterbalanced by the good done in this world. Once that is established, it seems to be a good reason to create the world with its rewards and punishments in the hereinafter – and that, after all, is what is needed. For my part, as someone who was an agnostic for much of my life, taking into account the good and evil that might be done in the afterlife would have struck me when I was an agnostic as utterly irrelevant, and continues to seem that way to me even as a serious Christian. What happens in the afterlife is not at all relevant with respect to justifying the suffering done here – even if universalism turned out to be true. God could, after all, set up the world quite differently to achieve a universalist outcome.

In what follows, I argue that it is highly questionable that free beings are currently doing more good than evil in this world. On a plausible understanding of what the foundational Christian ethical principles require of us as a minimum standard of not doing wrong, the claim that free beings in this world are currently doing more good than evil seems pretty clearly false because of the very high standard that Christian ethics establishes. Of course, I am assuming that whether or not free beings do more evil than good must be evaluated from the standpoint of Christian morality. Certainly, a Christian must do so, as a Christian must believe that our moral commitments are the objectively correct ones. It would not make sense to determine whether free beings do more good than evil according to a less demanding secular view if that view is not accepted as correct.

Christian theodicists are not, of course, the only theodicists. In addition, there are Jewish and Muslim theodicies, and I assume that Judaism and Islam have their own distinctive conception of the correct ethical principles; Jewish and Muslim theodicists, unlike Christian theodicists, would have to determine whether free beings do more good than evil in this life from the standpoint of their own distinctive ethical commitments, but this analysis (like that which follows) must be made with those commitments in mind. I am, however, concerned with whether Plantinga's view can work as a Christian theodicy, and do not address the question of whether free beings do more good than evil under the ethical principles of other theistic religions. Thus, the reader should look for an argument that is grounded in exclusively Christian ethical commitments.

Accordingly, I attempt to show that, from the standpoint of (again, one plausible, but contested conception of) Christian ethics, free beings in this world seem currently to be doing more evil than good. If this conception of Christian ethics and my interpretation of Plantinga's version of FWA are correct, then the latter fails as a theodicy that would work for Christians.

Some initial difficulties in addressing the issue

Although I will argue that it is implausible to think that free beings in this world do more good than evil, once we have identified the appropriate ethical standard, it is worth noting some difficulties involved in resolving this issue. This claim might seem a simple one to get a handle on, but it is not. There are a number of difficulties that might seem at the very outset to pose insuperable difficulties.

Christian ethics: the two great commandments

As it turns out, choosing the appropriate ethical theory is easy, and, as we will see, alleviates the other difficulties discussed above. Plantinga is a Christian; and his version of the FWA, construed as a theodicy, purports to give a distinctively Christian answer to the question of why an all-perfect God would allow so much evil. Accordingly, the appropriate ethical theory for addressing the issue of whether free beings in this world do more good than evil is the one that is correct from the standpoint of Christianity – namely, the ethical principles identified in scripture as being foundational to Christianity.

At this point, it would be helpful to assess a line of reasoning that might strike the reader as both plausible and avoiding the difficulties described above. It might be tempting to see bad choices as sporadic disruptions in a world in which people are otherwise behaving well. On this line of reasoning, people frequently do bad things – e.g. in 2005, there were 16,692 murders in the United States,Footnote ⁶ and a total of 1,390,695 violent crimes – but, even taking into account all the other physical and mental wrongs – like theft, lying, lusting, making bad judgments, etc. – bad acts are the exception and not the rule. Most people in the US and other parts of the world live quiet decent lives pursuing projects that give their lives meaning and making a living without hurting other people. They go to schools, perhaps universities, settle down, have careers, get married, have and love their children, and go to church on Sundays. They work hard and save their money, but find ways to have fun: socializing with friends, going to restaurants, movies, and shows – and sometimes just cocooning at home with family. On this not implausible picture, the norm is the person described above quietly leading a good life, occasionally committing bad acts.

The problem with the above reasoning, as stated, is that it counts as bad only acts that violate obligations to refrain from certain acts: killing, violent acts, stealing, lying, lusting, and making bad judgments all violate negative obligations that require us to refrain from certain acts. This line of reasoning is plausible only if it is true, as far too many people believe, that the only moral obligations we have are negative in the sense that they require us only to refrain from committing certain acts – and do not provide positive moral obligations that require that we sometimes perform affirmative acts, usually involving significant sacrifices, to help others in need. On this view, helping the poor is morally optional and praiseworthy as being beyond the call of duty – no matter how much wealth one has at one's disposal. Indeed, as a conceptual matter, that is why helping others is thought to be ‘charitable’ – the term being construed as entailing, by definition, that the act is not obligatory.

Although the view that we have no positive moral obligations is unfortunately common – even sometimes among Christians unfamiliar with Scripture – it is pretty clearly false from a Christian standpoint. Indeed, even the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, if taken to exhaust our moral obligations, provide such a code. According to these Commandments (KJV: Exodus, 20):

It is worth noting that all but two of the commandments state negative obligations, and the ones that state positive obligations, with the exception of the commandment to worship God as conceived by Christianity, are comparatively minor. In particular, Commandment 5 obliges us to honour our parents, which presumably entails that we do more than just refrain from acts that would dishonour them, but perform positive acts that express our love and respect for them. Perhaps most notably, there is no obligation whatsoever stated here to alleviate suffering from disease, poverty, ostracism, ridicule, or wrongful acts of violence – although Commandment 2 seems to imply a obligation to show mercy to others who believe.

Even if we assume that most people are complying with their negative obligations and honouring their mothers and fathers, there are a couple of problems for Plantinga's claim that we are doing more good than evil – and this is not only a problem for the commandments listed above, but the two great ‘commandments’ Jesus says are the foundations for the moral law. First, there are only two billion Christians in the world, out of a population of more than six billion people; on the traditional view, only two of six billion people are honouring their obligation to worship God as conceived by Christianity. If failure to worship the true God constitutes an evil, then there is more evil being done by free beings, relative to Commandment 1, than good – much more, assuming with many Christians that people of other faiths are not worshipping the triune God of Christianity. And this is a continuous evil, as God must be uppermost in our minds all the time as, according to traditional Christian views, we should seek in all we do, first and foremost, to glorify God and do God's will.

Second, as a conceptual matter, not violating an obligation only entails that one is not committing a wrong; it does not entail that one is doing good. Satisfying an obligation merits neither praise nor esteem; obligations set the minimum standard of behaviour one is expected to meet. This is why blame, censure, and punishment are proper responses when people fail to meet their obligations and cannot excuse or justify such failures; praise is not a proper response when people meet their obligations, other things being equal. One does not do something good when one refrains from murder, theft, rape, property crime, dishonesty, lust, or making bad judgments about other people; one simply meets one's minimum obligations. So even if the above line of reasoning were correct in claiming that bad acts are the exception and not the rule, it would not follow that all the other acts were good. Indeed, the quiet decent lives, according to the argument above, were described in terms of acts that do not involve doing morally good things. Pursuing careers, educations, and active social lives, as well as going to restaurants, shows and concerts, are surely morally permissible, but none of these constitutes morally good acts.

To do good requires more – and a quick look at a few facts about the distribution of material benefits and burdens suggests that, albeit does not prove that, although it is surely true that much good is being done, much less good is currently being done to justify the claim, presupposed by Plantinga's version of the FWA, that free beings are doing more good than evil. A billion people in the world live on less than $1 per day in absolute – or life-threatening – poverty.Footnote ⁷ Three billion people live on less than $2 per day; 1.1 billion people lack consistent access to clean drinking water; 1 billion, out of approximately 2.2 billion children worldwide, live in poverty. Of these, 25,000 to 30,000 children die every day for reasons related to poverty; 15 million children die of malnutrition every year; 2.2 million children die each year because they are not properly immunized; 15 million children are orphaned due to HIV/AIDS; and millions of children suffer irreversible brain damage from protein deficiency. It seems reasonable to conclude that there is a great deal of good that is not being done here – even if there are many people, like Mother Teresa, who have devoted their lives to alleviating suffering.

It is utterly implausible to think that such suffering is not being alleviated because we lack the ability.Footnote ⁸ The Gross Domestic Product of the US in 2005 was over $12.36 trillion. Average per capita income among US citizens in that year was over $40,000. In 2005, individual charitable donations amounted to approximately 1.6 per cent of GDP.Footnote ⁹ US government foreign aid expenditures for 2004 amounted to 0.2 per cent of the $2.3 trillion federal budget – that is, two-tenths of 1 per cent!Footnote ¹⁰ We in the US could easily do much more, but we are largely concerned with achieving an increasingly higher standard of living – driving bigger cars, engaging in more conspicuous consumption, and other activities that actually have the effect of exacerbating the suffering in the world because of the pollution they cause.

Factor in the wealth of all the world's affluent nations, and the continuing existence of all this suffering becomes even harder to understand. The GDP of the European Union in 2007 was over $15 trillion, while the GDP in the US for that year was over $13 trillion.Footnote ¹¹ The GDP for all of Africa in 2006 was just over $2.5 trillion.Footnote ¹² The poorest 40 per cent of the world's people have 5 per cent of the world's wealth; the richest 20 per cent have 75 per cent of the world's wealth. It should be clear that the affluent world ignores, on a continuing basis, the numerous opportunities to do good here.

Still, relying on the argument that attempts to quantify how many people are being affected by bad choices per second, one might think that it is still the case that free beings are doing more good than evil – not because they are doing so much good but because they are doing so little evil; however, that reasoning is fallacious. To defend that claim, one must say something about the amount of good being done and the amount of bad. Even if we assume that the amount of bad being done is aberrational (an assumption that strikes me as implausible in our increasingly fear- and hunger-ridden world), the amount of bad will still exceed the good if people are doing little to no good deeds. To point to those instances in which people go to work and get through the day without killing, stealing, raping, assaulting others, committing tortuous acts, and without telling more than a few lies tells us nothing about how much good is being done.

But there is more trouble here for this line of argument. From the standpoint of Christian ethics, it can be plausibly argued that failure to help alleviate suffering is not just failure to perform a good act; it is commission of a wrong. In the New Testament, Jesus teaches that all of morality rests on two fundamental principles:

Now this much about these verses is uncontroversial. First, these are ‘commandments’ that ground the ‘law’ and hence state moral obligations. Second, these commandments constitute, so to speak, Christianity's first or foundational principles for all other moral laws or principles, and are the ultimate ground for all of our moral judgments. There might be Christians who see these as somehow metaphorical for some more Kantian-like first principle, but these Christians will clearly fall outside the mainstream traditional view – and, for what it is worth, probably do not include Plantinga himself.

Of course, this does not tell us much about the content of these verses. Obviously, these verses must be interpreted to be understood, and biblical interpretation is a notoriously difficult and contentious matter. I cannot claim, as I have noted above, that the interpretation on which my argument is grounded is universally accepted; there are surely dissenters. However, this much I think I can affirm with confidence: no-one can plausibly deny the prima facie plausibility and potential viability of the interpretation I present and defend (all-too-briefly) below.

So let us begin with my interpretation of the first of these foundational laws to see what it might tell us about whether Plantinga's version of the FWA succeeds as a theodicy. The first requires that we love God with our all hearts, souls, and minds. Since we do not have direct volitional control over whom we feel the joyous emotional state usually picked out by ‘love’, it is probably best to construe ‘love’ as requiring continual worship of God as manifested through our devoting our live to doing God's will, and subordinating our interests to those of God. Again, on the traditional exclusivist view, it seems that more evil is being done than good, since only one-third of the world's population claim to be Christians who worship the triune God.

The second of the two commandments above requires that we love our neighbours as we love ourselves. It seems counterintuitive to interpret ‘love’ as the joyous emotional state we feel for our partners, friends, and family because we do not have direct volitional control over this emotional state, and cannot simply will it for anyone, but we also do not feel this emotion for ourselves. If I ever feel for my image in a mirror what I feel for my two nieces when I see them, I am clearly in need of spiritual and psychological counselling. Surely, there are few more certain paths to hell than this kind of narcissism. On my view, this commandment is properly construed as requiring that we treat the interests of other people as important as our own – something we do have volitional control over.

If this is the correct interpretation, then living even the quiet decent life described above becomes morally problematic. When I spend $30 on two tickets to a movie and popcorn instead of giving it to a charity that can use that money to keep a child who is in absolute poverty alive for a month, I am clearly violating that principle. After all, my interest is in nothing more important than amusement; the child's is in her life. The person who quietly pursues her own professional advancement and amusement without breaching negative obligations but without devoting any help to others is living a life that, on the whole, does not satisfy the second of the two great foundational laws.

But the argument does not turn on my interpretation of the second commandment Jesus describes. However one interprets this law, it should be clear that, when I spend $30 on a shirt that I do not need instead using that sum to keep a child alive for a month, I am not loving that child as I love myself; the child's life is at stake and outweighs the interest in amusement which I have at stake. The money that affluent people spend on mere amusement that could be used to save lives is not just a missed opportunity to do good; it violates an obligation and constitutes an evil.

While there are surely alternative plausible interpretations of the second law, it is difficult to imagine that they could deny that we have a substantial obligation to help alleviate suffering. It might not require that we do so whenever we can do so without sacrificing something of comparable worth, as is famously argued by utilitarian Peter Singer; but it surely requires doing so when we can without sacrificing something of morally significant worth – and it is hard to imagine that, in most cases, a $30 shirt could count as having morally significant worth when balanced against the life of a child.

Indeed, that Jesus' concern for the poor is secondary only to his concern that we devote our lives to God should be obvious to anyone who has read the Gospels even quickly. Consider, for example, Matthew, 25.33–47:

While I am tempted to argue that our response to suffering is partly constitutive of a saving personal relationship with Jesus, this would require much more argument than can be given here. What should not require much interpretive argument regarding these verses read against the context of the second commandment: Helping the poor, suffering, prisoners, elderly, ostracized, disposed, and oppressed (to some extent that I cannot specify in detail here) is an obligation. Failure to meet this obligation is a wrong and hence an evil.

That affluent persons have positive obligations to help the absolutely poor (i.e. people in life-threatening poverty) is also easy to see from a secular perspective. Peter Singer persuasively argues that people have a duty to make some sacrifices to save the lives of others. I have taught his famous example of the drowning infant to at least 1,000 undergraduates in a public university, and fewer than 1 per cent of students believe that it would be permissible for me to let an infant drown in a shallow pond when all I need to do to save her life is simply tip her over on her back and call 911. Students react so vehemently to even the thought that I might let a child die in those circumstances that I sometimes have to remind them that it is a philosophical thought-experiment, contrived to refute the view that we have no positive obligations to help the poor, and that I would help an infant in such circumstances without hesitating. When I point out that the $30 they spend on a movie can sustain a child's life for a month they are committing the same wrong, they have a second emotionally charged reaction – about how selfish their own behaviour is. Although they usually know about these programmes, Singer's example and ensuing discussion help them to see the potential moral implications of their own behaviour that they had not noticed before.

There is an irony here. Singer attempts to infer from the common response to the infant example, largely based on his own utilitarianism, a strong principle that defines the obligation to help others. On his view, we have an obligation to help others whenever we can do so without sacrificing something of comparable significance; on this principle, one might be obliged to risk physical injury to save the life of another. But the example itself supports a weaker principle: we have an obligation to help others when we can do so without sacrificing something of any real significance. After all, one merely has to take a few seconds to call 911 and put the infant on her back to save her life – this does not involve the sort of sacrifice that would justify the inference that Singer's utilitarianism seems to license.

But if ‘love your neighbours as you love yourselves’ is properly construed, as I have suggested, as ‘treat the interests of others as important as your own’, then Christian ethics implies the stronger principle to which Singer's utilitarianism logically commits him – even if his example and analysis does not imply it. The reason is that, on my interpretation of the second commandment, the second commandment has this in common with utilitarianism: it will not allow us to treat our own interests as more important than those of others simply because they are our own. Perhaps such a demanding principle might be considered a reductio of my interpretation – although it seems strange for a Christian to object to an ethical principle on the ground that it is too demanding, given that so much of what Jesus asks of us seems so demanding.

But it is clear that, even we interpret the second commandment as expressing a weaker principle than utilitarian Singer believes correctly defines the contours of the obligation to help the poor, every time we make a frivolous purchase with discretionary income, we are violating an obligation and committing a grave wrong. I do not love my dying neighbour as I do myself when I can save her life with a small commitment of cash that I opt to spend on my own amusement. By that admittedly demanding standard, it is not unreasonable to think that we in the affluent world are fairly characterized as doing more bad than good from the standpoint of Christian ethics.

The problem arises here because the discretionary income being used to satisfy mere wants (and, in many cases, wants that would not even exist without the sophisticated methods of the advertising industry and are hence fairly characterized from a moral point of view as ‘frivolous’) could be used to save the lives of the millions of people who die from poverty. Under no plausible interpretation of ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ could a person who spends money to satisfy mere wants, knowing that it could save the lives of other people, be characterized as loving the latter persons as much as she loves herself. Sadly, too many of us in the developed world simply do not care enough for God's less fortunate children. Such neglect is morally wrong, and hence an evil that is done.

Perhaps one can hold out hope that these statistics do not tell the whole story and that it remains true that free beings do more good than evil, until one realizes what would have to be true according to our ethics for this claim to be true. If loving our neighbours as we love ourselves defines our obligations towards other people, then failure to meet that highly demanding standard is wrong. Every time we fail to help someone in need, when it would cost us less to expend the energy than the good that would accrue to the recipient (something I hypothesize we do more often than not), then we have done wrong and done something that counts as evil. I hypothesize, and this is an empirical claim that would need an empirical argument to support it adequately, that we rarely satisfy this standard and hence have done a great deal of evil – beyond the obvious evil that occurs when we commit genocide, murder, and other acts that oppress and stigmatize others.

To do good, we have to meet a much higher standard. If loving your neighbour as you love yourself sets the minimum standard, then to do good we must love our neighbours more than we love ourselves. That is, on my interpretation, we must treat the interests of others as more important than our own, a standard that would sometimes require us to sacrifice our own more important interests to satisfy the less important interests of other people. This is, of course, an empirical hypothesis, but I doubt that anyone can seriously think that free beings have done this more frequently than their failures to satisfy the ‘great commandments’.

And to the reader tempted to respond that such an ethical standard cannot be true, I would simply gesture in the direction of the many scriptural passages which, for example, inform us of the sacrifices Jesus wants us to make – many of which call upon us to give up our materially comfortable lives to gain our spiritual lives. Consider, for example, a verse in which Jesus explains how to achieve perfection – a perfection which clearly goes beyond merely satisfying the standards that define our obligations. To a rich man who keeps the Ten Commandments and wants to know what more he needs to do to be saved, Jesus replies, ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me’ (Matthew, 19.21). Similar verses teach Christians to strive for the higher good by giving up all their material possessions. No-one, of course, can achieve perfection, so it is doubtful that Jesus intends to explain our obligations to us here; the use of ‘perfection’ indicates that he is describing the ideal – i.e. what we must do to go beyond satisfying even the demanding obligations defined by the two great commandments.

These are, in one sense, demoralizing verses that seem to ask so much that we desperately want to believe that they cannot mean what they say. But, as far as I can tell, Jesus' statements about ethics and our positive obligations to help others clearly imply that the standard for doing good is so much more demanding than is conceived of by ordinary secular conceptions of what ethics minimally require that I can see no other plausible interpretation.

Although it seems intuitively obvious, given what most of us know about the world and its history, that this demanding standard for good has rarely been met,Footnote ¹³ and certainly not frequently enough to conclude that free beings do more good than evil (at least from the standpoint of Christianity), I think it is fair to say that, at the very least, I have shifted the burden of persuasion back to Plantinga, or to someone who would defend his argument. He would need to show either that I have mischaracterized our obligations from the standpoint of Christian ethics, or even provide a prima facie plausible gesture that we have exceeded them more often than we have failed to meet them – which is what is needed to show that free beings do more good than evil in this world.

There is surely a logically possible world in which free beings do more good than evil, and that is enough to rebut the logical problem of evil; however, it is not enough to provide a theodicy that enables us to justify the existence of evil and suffering in the actual world. It is true, of course, that once God creates free beings it is up to them to determine which logically possible world is the actual one; God simply does not have that much control over which world is actualized once He creates free beings. And if God cannot choose which possible world is actualized by free beings without compromising their free will, He surely knows which logically possible world will be actualized if He knows what choices we will make. If, as seems plausible, He knows that we actualize a world where free beings do more bad than good, then He is not justified, on Plantinga's version of the FWA, in creating this world. And if He does not know because He cannot predict the free choices of free beings, He can surely see the probabilities, and is not justified in creating the world because the probabilities that a world in which free beings do more good than evil are comparatively small. If my interpretation of the two great commandments (or even a somewhat weaker interpretation) is correct, then a successful theodicy must be sought elsewhere.

Although somewhat counterintuitive, the conclusion that free beings do more bad than good in this world should not surprise us. It is central to the Christian worldview that this is a thoroughly fallen world which many conservative Christians, like Plantinga, accept. All of us, even those who live in Christian faith, remain incorrigible, if repentant, sinners unable to conquer our fallenness despite our best efforts; this is, of course, why regular prayers for forgiveness are needed to sustain a proper relationship with God. Given the centrality of this view of humanity to a worldview endorsed by so many Christians, including Plantinga, I am tempted to think it is almost obvious that Plantinga's version of the FWA could not succeed. Fallen, incorrigible sinners, try as we might to reform and repent, will inevitably fail in our attempt to follow the path of Christ and do his will as expressed in the first and second laws – much less go beyond these two standards of what we are obliged to do in order to do something fairly characterized as not merely ‘not wrong’ but ‘morally good’. This, of course, does not mean that salvation is beyond our reach: on the traditional view, (1) salvation is a matter of grace; and (2) sin, after all, is forgiven if sincerely asked for by a genuinely repentant Christian. So the failure of perhaps even committed Christians to do more good than evil should not be thought of as inconsistent with their salvation; however, the doctrine of the Fall does suggest that the prospects for a FWA of the kind Plantinga defends are quite dim. The kind of move that Plantinga wants to make in his version of the FWA seems almost precluded by mainstream Christian theology.

Moreover, the analysis offered above of what Christian ethics requires helps to explain the sense in which we are so thoroughly fallen. Although taken for granted by people inculcated in the faith, the doctrine that we are incorrigibly fallen seems to make little sense to intuitions unconditioned by a history of Christian faith. It is sometimes explained in terms of our rejecting God in order to be God, which would surely be very bad if that were a universal human sentiment, but I think that this is an utterly uncharitable reading of a very natural desire that seems ethically reasonable: the relevant desire is not to be God, but rather to exercise autonomy over our lives. That desire simply cannot be what makes us incorrigibly fallen and deserving of hell because it is morally appropriate that we value autonomy. What this analysis suggests is that it is the fact that we are inherently self-interested and always find it exceedingly difficult to overcome our self-interestedness that makes us fallen.

It is true that we develop attachments to other people, but many of these are ultimately self-regarding to some extent; we choose friends who amuse us, fall in love with people who arouse in us sexual desire, and so on. Even when we exhibit genuinely altruistic concern for, say, children, it is the exception and not the rule. Christian ethics requires of us something that is exceptionally difficult, and something that the vast majority of us fail to exhibit for the vast majority of our time here – namely, agape in the form of a non-self-regarding universal altruistic concern for others. It is our inability to achieve this concern for all others that explains our fallenness and shows how deeply sin permeates our lives. That this analysis enables us to make sense of a doctrine which is otherwise terribly difficult to make intuitive sense of counts, I think, as a merit of the analysis.

At the very least, I think this much is fair to say: the arguments in this essay pose a serious, albeit somewhat demoralizing, challenge that requires an answer if Plantinga's version of the FWA is to remain even remotely viable as a possible theodicy that would explain why a morally perfect God allows so much evil in the form of suffering.Footnote ¹⁴