Sure, but what we can’t say is if it was within God’s power to create these worlds. We can point to any evil and say, ‘the world would be better if that hadn’t happened’, and that would be true; but if there is such a thing as a best possible world, and that world has some degree of evil in it (as you grant), then we could do the same thing in that best possible world, but it wouldn’t be true that God could make it so that this-and-that evil thing hadn’t happened. So if it’s possible that we live in the best possible world, it’s possible that it’s not within God’s power to improve on it.
Yes, of course; the reason for the free will defense is to understand how it could be the case that this best of all possible worlds still has evil within it. Again, if you don’t think you have a reason to believe in a tri-omni God (and I don’t think there are any), then the problem of evil doesn’t pose itself.
In both God A and God B, ‘omnipotence’ can validly mean ‘having all possible powers’. ‘Making God A do something evil’ just isn’t a possible power, because of omnibenevolence. That’s not really different from the example with the stone.
You’re still in the same world after scratching your itch, and that scratching is just part of the best possible world. The question would be, could one create a better world in which the itch had never existed? You certainly couldn’t, but the intuition seems to say that God, in their omnipotence, could. But Plantinga’s argument questions this intuition.
Perhaps this is a good time to run through the argument again. (I’ll closely follow the exposition here, which I found particularly clear.) The task is to show the following two propositions consistent:
(1) God is omniscient (possesses maximal knowledge), omnipotent (possesses all possible powers), and omnibenevolent (possesses maximal goodness)
(2) There is evil in the world.
Now, if the two are consistent, then the fact that we observe evil is in keeping with the possibility that such a tri-omni God exists; but if such a God exists, we necessarily live in the best possible world, as this is the only world such a God would instantiate. So the existence of evil is, under this stipulation, not inconsistent with living in the best possible world; ergo, then, it must be the case that there is no possible world from which any given evil of the best possible world has been removed.
How do we show that (1) and (2) are consistent? Plantinga’s observation is that “one way to show that a proposition p is consistent with a proposition q is to produce a third proposition r whose conjunction with p is consistent and entails q.” Further, he notes that “r need not be true or known to be true; it need not be so much as plausible. All that is required of it is that it be consistent with p, and in conjunction with the latter entail q.”
What is that proposition r? One candidate is the following:
(3) God is omnipotent and it was not within his power to create a world containing moral good but no moral evil.
(Note again that this merely needs to be possible!) Together with the fact that God wants to instantiate a world containing moral good, this directly entails that in whatever world God instantiates, there will be evil, despite their tri-omni nature. So why should we think that (3) is possible? Plantinga argues for that from two further premises: (A) an agent acting freely is incompatible with being causally determined in their actions (incompatibilism), and (B) morally good acts are such that agents have a morally significant free choice. (Here, as noted above already, “an action is morally significant, for a given person at a given time, if it would be wrong for him to perform the action then but right to refrain, or vice versa”.) With these taken together, it is not within God’s power to bring it about that there are creatures who only perform morally good acts, without ever doing anything morally bad.
An added wrinkle here is the one @Mijin (IIUC) raised: God couldn’t constrain beings to only perform morally good acts, but couldn’t he bring about circumstances and creatures such that (as God knows, thanks to omniscience) they will only perform morally good acts, given those circumstances? (Let’s call this ‘perfect conditions’.) And the answer is possibly, but ‘possibility’ is to weak to counter the argument, since we only need (3) to be possible—so if is merely possibly the case that God could bring about perfect conditions, it’s also possibly the case that they couldn’t, which preserves the possibility of (3). So anybody aiming to challenge the argument along these lines would have to argue that it is necessarily the case that God could bring about perfect conditions, which is a much more demanding task.
So this then seems to give us a solid case for the possibility of (3). Although again, there is no need to accept (3) as being actually the case! All that matters is that if (3) is possible, then (1) and (2) are consistent, and there is no logical problem with the existence of evil in a world created by a tri-omni God. So it’s possible, even given the evil we see in the world, that there is a tri-omni God (to the extent the notion makes any sense at all, of course, which I don’t think it really does—but that’s beside the point). Therefore, it is possible, despite the evil we see in the world, that this is the best possible world (the best world it is within God’s power to instantiate), since that is the kind of world they would in fact instantiate. Therefore, it is also possible that any (morally significant) change would either make the world worse overall, or simply not yield a world it is possible for God to instantiate. Moreover, anybody who believes in a tri-omni God should believe these things to be true, and would not be inconsistent in their belief.
I’m hoping the above clarifies things somewhat. First of all, God may know the counterfactuals of all human action—what they do under which conditions (this is Molina’s ‘middle knowledge’). (Why middle knowledge? Because it is ‘in between’ God’s knowledge of all possibilities, and God’s knowledge of what is actual.) So all possible courses of history are part of God’s knowledge, and they know which way history actually takes. I see no difficulty with that history including any divine acts as God sees fit.
So how do you think that impacts the argument as given above? It has no commitments to any particular way God ‘experiences’ the world (if that is the right word) that I can see.
That doesn’t follow. If God created Adam and Eve in paradise, and Eve chooses to kick Adam in the nuts, that doesn’t mean God had to first create ‘kicking in the nuts’; they may have created the conditions necessary for doing so, but those conditions aren’t in and of themselves evil unless they are actually used in an evil act.
Again, that just doesn’t follow. I’m completely incapable of playing the bagpipes, but I still know what they are. And furthermore, it’s not as if God laid out evil options; the world isn’t an RPG game with some form of moral branching. If you create a screwdriver, you don’t thereby commit an evil act just because somebody could use it to stab someone. Evil is in the doing.
None of this hangs together by any logic I can figure out. Why should the fact that my creation contains something imply I must also contain that thing? I made a fire yesterday, does that mean there must be something burning inside me? Also, good isn’t defined in contrast to evil—actions with moral value are those where one can choose good over evil (and does so). But those actions are good on their own terms.