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Can God Be Free?

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Taking Liebniz's proposition that God had created the best possible world, Rowe discusses the question whether God could have created a better world than the one we have and the implications of the answer to this question. The main point of the book is that if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, he would have to create the best possible world, a world that is better than this. It was thus a necessity that he does so and not a contingency. Hence, if he could but did not it implied that he was either not all powerful or all-good. If he did, and this was indeed the best possible world, then God cannot be said to have created it out of his own free will for he had no choice, being the perfect moral being, he had to create this world rather than one that was inferior or not to create any world at all. To better understand this well argued book that also confronts the main opposing arguments against his views, the reader might like to know a little more about the idea of our own free will because many of the arguments relate also to the notion of free will as applied to us. A good source would be Robert Kane's "A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will", Oxford University Press, 2006.