Alvin Plantinga's Stance on the Logical Problem of Evil

The contemporary atheists have maintained the belief in the existence of evil to inflict serious criticism on religious beliefs. They believe a contradiction to exist between the belief in the existence of evil and the belief in the existence of a God with an infinite power and supreme goodness, in that it is not possible to believe both in the existence of God and the existence of evil at the same time. Simply put, the logical problem of evil is as follows: God is omnipotent; God is omnibenevolent; yet evil exists. According to J.L. Mackie, this set of propositions is contradictory, thus, one must not believe in such a God, and this is how he concludes that God does not exist. In response to J.L. Mackie, Alvin Plantinga has put forward the idea of possible worlds. He then argues that God’s infinite power does not include some worlds, and that these are the worlds in which humans choose goodness over evil while having freewill. Through this argument, Plantinga seeks to demonstrate that not only there is no explicit contradiction between a theosopher’s beliefs and the existence of evil, there is also no implicit contradiction between them either.