Alvin Plantinga
The free-will defence offers a solution to the problem of moral evil. Moral evil is evil resulting from the free choices of rational agents, it is evil that we choose to inflict upon each other. The free-will defence suggests that it is better to have a world in which free agents commit moral evils than it is to have a world with no free agents at all. God could not have created free agents without risking them sinning. Free agents, though, are valuable. God therefore chose to risk sin in order to have free agents. Moral evil is the price that we pay for freedom.
The free-will defence can be extended to account for those evils that are normally classed as natural evils: earthquakes, disease, etc. These evils, it can be argued, though they are not caused by human moral errors, nevertheless do result from free choices. Demons cause so-called natural disasters, and so even so-called natural evils fall within the scope of the free-will defence.
One of those to have defended the free-will defence is Alvin Plantinga, who puts it like this:
"A world containing creatures who are sometimes 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 cannot cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if he does so, then they are not 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 cannot leave these creatures free to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. God did in fact create significantly free creatures; but some of them went wrong in the exercise of their freedom: this is the source of moral evil. The fact that these 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 excising the possibility of moral good."
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