Tomberlin and McGuinness on Plantinga's free will defense

✍ Scribed by Del Ratzsch

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1981
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 443 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7047
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00137174

✦ Synopsis

In a recent article, a J.E. Tomberlin and F. McGuinness present a fairly wide-ranging discussion of the argument from evil and aspects of what they take to be Alvin Plantinga's free will defense, 2 and make clear that they are satisfied that they have shown the argument from evil to be fairly conclusive. However, in addition to missing most of the key insights in Plantinga's free will defense they have also put forward a number of fairly serious confusions. In what follows, I will briefly discuss some of the most serious of these, arguing that Tomberlin and McGuinness have employed a defective method, have presented a number of invalid arguments, and have employed some rather suspicious and unsupported premises.

Much of the article in question is devoted to discussion of the following proposition:

(19) There is some A-property F such that r (God causally brings it about that (F is instantiated)). 3

where A-properties are 'properties of the form "freely....'s" where the blank is filled by a name or description of an action'. We will assume for present purposes that we have some notion of what is meant by properties having fi~rms of the sort that require quotation marks. The major thrust of the article is summed up near the end in the following way:

...we have argued that ( ) is true....if ( ) is true, the free will defense fails. 4

It will be my contention that (19) has not been established, and that (19) does not have the asserted consequence in any case.

Tomberlin and McGuinness note that (19) involves causation, and then state two distinct analyses of causation as follows: s (22)p causes q iff q is true in ever5' physically possible world in which p is true.