Plantinga and Natural Evil

I have been reviewing Alvin Plantinga’s article The Free Will Defense. I must say it is an amazing philosophical work, but when I reviewed his response to the existence of natural evils, I could not agree with his argument on the whole. Plantinga uses an argument presented by St. Augustine that attributes natural evil to actions of non-human creatures. These non-human creatures are obviously evil spirits, but more specifically, the Devil and his angels. Plantinga uses his argument of free will to support St. Augustine’s argument. He doses this by demonstrating that the free actions of non human beings influence natural occurrences, and these “natural occurrences” are aimed at causing men misery. I think that this argument is valid if we can readily show that these evil spirits have control over nature and other phenomena. If we were to approach this argument using scripture, is has very little support. One may be tempted to use the Book of Job as justification that Satan can in fact control nature. However, if we read in chapter 1 and 2 we find that Satan was unable to curse Job with any natural evils unless God allowed it. Thus, it would seem that Satan has no complete or colossal power over nature, especially in the quantity that we experience, without the permission given from God.

If God were to give Satan such permission without a morally sufficient reason for doing so, then God would obviously appear as malevolent. Furthermore, from a theological point of view, the idea that Satan would want to have power over nature seems somewhat unavailing to his principle purpose. Satan is charged with causing men to sin, so to assume that Satan has power over the elements so that men can sin seems inconsistent with him being the source of sin. Sin has to do with humans not obeying God’s commandments, or following the immoral teachings of the adversary.

From a philosophical view we seem to run into a similar problem. The problem of evil exists because of a contradiction between “God is omnipotent and omni-benevolent” and “evil exist”.
Plantinga’s argument supporting Free Will is amazing, and I feel that it satisfies moral evils and the previous contradiction. However, his argument that Satan is the cause of natural evils because of Satan’s free will seems to provide a response, but how successful is it?
Plantinga’s argument is a theodicy; he is assuming that Satan is free to exercise dominion over the natural world. This seems fallacious because of the following reasons:

1. If Satan is a spiritual being (not consisting of anything physical), then he has no influence or effect on physical objects.
2. Satan is spiritual.
3. Therefore he has not influence over physical worlds.

If the previous is true, then the idea that Satan causes natural evils is false. This is because Satan is a being commonly accepted as a spirit living on this earth, yet in a separate dimension. Now to avoid arguing time and space held dimensions, we shall say that this dimensions in which Satan lives, is purely a spiritual dimension (This is assuming that Satan is not omnipotent, for if he were omnipotent then he would logically have control over the natural world). A spiritual dimension would consist of maxims that are only acted upon spiritually. This is to say that Satan is free to act and do as a sentient being only according to things that are spiritually related. The physical world consist of elements, atoms, and actions that are not necessarily spiritual, thus, it would seem that Satan would not have any control over the natural world.
It dose, however, provide some very interesting insight about the possibility of men, who are spiritual and physical creatures (from a theology view) could be influenced by a evil spirit that is acting freely according to spiritual (non physical) things. Thus, we see that Plantingas’s support of St. Augustine’s argument is not one hundred percent conclusive.