Freedom and the Free Will Defense It is my purpose to explore some of the problems conceming the relation between divine creation and creaturely freedom by criticizing various versions of the Free Will Defense (FWD

properties that may or may not be instantiated, while a possible world is a set of abstract states of affairs (or propositions) that may or tnay not obtain (or be true). More precisely, a possible person is a maximal compossible set of properties each of which could be possessed by a single person. The set is compossible in that it admits of the logical possibility of coinstantiation by a single concrete individual, and it is maximal because for every property that could be possessed by a person either this property or its complement is included in the set. A possible world, on the other hand, is a maximal compossible set of states of affairs or properties. I will use "universe" to refer to a maximal spatiotemporal aggregate—the totality of what exists and happens in space and/or time—and "cosmos" to refer to the maximal aggregate of actually existent entities. Of special interest for our purpose is a possible significantly free person, that is a possible person containing the property of being free in respect to some action having moral significance. For such a person there is at least one morally significant action A and set of circumstances C such that this person includes the disjunctive property of either-freely-doingA-or-freely-refraining-from-doing-A-in-C. Since a possible person is maximal, it also includes the property of doing A or the property of not doing A. For every possible free person containing the property of freely-doing-A-in-C there is a numerically distinct possible person that includes all of the same properties save for its including freely-refraining-firom-doing-A-in-C instead. Let us call such a pair of possible free persons an "incompatible pair." Whenever you freely perform an action you instantiate one member of such a pair to the exclusion of the other. In what follows we shall consider only significantly free possible persons and, for short, will call them "possible persons." With these terminological and ontological points out of the way, we can begin to approach Plantinga's argument for CL, the counter-Leibniz proposition. The argument attempts to show that for any incompatible pair God will be contingently unable to actualize one person in the pair. Let our specimen incompatible pair be P and P', who include all of the same properties save for P's including freely-doing-A-in-C and P"s instead including freely-refraining-from-doing-A-in-C. Our sophisticated 400 Social Theory and Practice Leibnizian will hold that each is such that God can actualize or instantiate it, though he cannot, of course, coinstantiate them. Plantinga, the Libertarian, disagrees, because he thinks it is logically inconsistent that God actualizes or instantiates either of them. The reason is that God's actualizing or instantiating of P, for example, consists in his causing there to exist a person having all of the properties included in P, and thereby God causes or determines this person freely to do A in C; but the incompatibilist premise tells us this is logically inconsistent. For the Libertarian it must be the agent itself that is the agent-cause of a free act, not some condition extemal to the agent, though such conditions might limit the range of possibilities from which the agent can choose and "incline" it in a certain direction, requiring greater effort of will for it to pursue an opposite course of action. If God cannot actualize a possible person simply by supematurally willing that it will be actualized, how does he do it? It is here that Plantinga has an incredibly ingenious and controversial story to tell. Again we must begin with some terminology. What God does to actualize what I will call a "diminished possible person" and then leave it up to the created person what it will freely do. Each possible person contains a diminished possible person that is its largest proper sub-set of properties that is such that for any action A it neither includes or entails freely doing A nor includes or entails freely refraining from doing A, in which a property F includes or entails another property G just in case it is logically impossible that F be instantiated and G not be. We will also refer to such a sub-set as a "freedomneutral" set of properties. Each property included in a set of properties could be freedom-neutral and yet the set as a whole not be, for the set could contain either-freely-doing-A-orfreelyrefraining-from-doing-A and doing A. Any incompatible pair will contain as proper sub-sets the same diminished person or set of freedom-neutral properties. Thus, P's diminished person, DP, is numerically one and the same as P"s. God performs the same creative act when he endeavors to actualize P as he does when he endeavors to actualize P', namely, he supematurally wills that the diminished person DP be instantiated or actualized. Intuitively, we can think of this as God's creatively determining every feature of Freedom and the Free Will Defense 401 the universe up until the time at which the created person, the instantiator of DP, freely does A or freely refrains from doing A. The question is what would result if God were to instantiate DP. Would the instantiator of this diminished person or set of freedom-neutral properties freely do A or freely refrain? Plainly, it must do one or the other, since it has the disjunctive property of either-freely-doing-A-or-freely-refraining-from-doing-A. Thus, it is either true that F. If DP were instantiated, the instantiator would freely do A.