Must God Create the Best Available Creatures?

Abstract

Alvin Plantinga rightly challenged J. L. Mackie’s assumption that an omnipotent God can directly create just any possible world. However, Mackie also assumed that God, given the option, must create a person who would freely choose rightly rather than one who would freely choose wrongly. Instead of challenging this assumption, Plantinga suggests that every possible free creature would have sinned had God created them, an idea I consider highly improbable. More importantly, under Mackie’s assumption, for almost all conceivable arrangements of the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, this assumption renders libertarian free will impossible for nearly every possible creature.