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through divine action. For the sake of argument, though, if there was a claim that the Goddesses were just as good and powerful as the Earth’s God we’d be left in the same position. After all, the same inconsistencies plague both sets of statements. To keep things interesting, we’re going to continue to assume that the Goddesses of Hyrule are considered to be wholly good and powerful along the same lines as God is on Earth.

There are some responses to be made against this argument, however. One is to qualify our third statement and try to give God and the Goddesses of Hyrule the benefit of the doubt. Our revised third statement would be that a wholly good being would eliminate evil unless there was a superior moral reason not to. Or, in other words, unless a greater good would come of the evil being allowed to exist. On the surface, this qualified statement would attempt to reconcile our original two ideas so that the coexistence of God and evil would be logically consistent. The traditional argument to counter this modified statement, however, is that if God was as all-powerful as is claimed then God could accomplish that greater good without the need to employ evil whatsoever. This brings us back to the two ideas of evil and God, Ganondorf and the Goddesses, as being logically inconsistent with one another.

Alvin Plantinga, rather than attempt to prove that God and evil can coexist, gives us the response that mostly solves the logical problem of evil by showing that the existence of evil does not necessarily exclude the possibility of God.76 In other words, Alvin shows that God and evil are not logically inconsistent, although not necessarily consistent either.

Essentially, the argument goes along these lines. Out of all the possible worlds that God could create, it stands to reason that God would create the best possible one rather than creating a shoddy one (and, being all-knowing, God would be capable of knowing which would be the best possible). Thus, in creating this world God created the best possible world and, likewise, in creating Hyrule, the Goddesses would have created the best possible world. Since evil exists in both worlds and God and the Goddesses are in both cases considered all-good, it seems there must be a reason why that evil exists, since they created the best of all possible worlds with evil in them.

The reason given is known as the free will defense: the best of all possible worlds includes the existence of human beings with the free will to choose between good and evil. Once given complete free will by God, evil must be allowed to exist as human beings must be allowed to choose it—otherwise complete free will could not exist.77 For Hyrule we know that the Triforce was placed into the best possible world created by the Goddesses in addition to the creation of free will. Much like free will, if the Triforce was designed to grant any possible wish, no matter how good or bad, then evil must be allowed to exist, or else the power of the Triforce would be limited.

In the end, evil and God are no longer shown as inconsistent with one another because true free will cannot occur in a world where God or the Goddesses would limit the choices available to that world’s occupants. Plantinga’s free will defense has succeeded in showing that, from a logical perspective, evil and God are no longer inconsistent but could almost be said to be consistent. Logically, the problem has been addressed—but logic is only one part of the problem.

The Evidential Problem of Evil

The evidential problem of evil picks up where the logical ended. We know that God and evil, and the Goddesses and Ganondorf are not logically inconsistent with each other. However, doesn’t the existence of evil and Ganondorf give us a pretty good reason to doubt the existence of God or the Goddesses, or at the very least to doubt that they are entities we would consider ‘good’? The evidential problem of evil is aptly named because it puts forward that the existence of evil is evidence that we can reasonably doubt the existence