Evil and Omnipotence

I'm in the process of writing a research paper for a class that I'm taking called The Problem of Evil. The paper is on J. L. Mackie's argument from evil (the logical problem of evil), which basically states that the following is a logical contradiction:

1) God is omnipotent
2) God is wholly-good
3) Evil exists

Don't see the contradiction? Neither does Mackie! He states in an article that he wrote called "Evil and Omnipotence," (originally appeared in Mind in 1955) "the contradiction does not arise immediately; to show it we need some additional premises, or perhaps some quasi-logical rules connecting the terms 'good', 'evil', and 'omnipotent'. These additional principles are that good is opposed to evil, in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can, and that there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do" (201).

So his new argument looks like this:

1) God is omnipotent
2) There are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do
3) God is wholly good
4) A good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can
5) God can eliminate evil, and he wants to
6) Evil exists
7) Therefore, God doesn't exist

No limits to what an omnipotent thing can do? Can God make square circles, married bachelors, or logical contradictions true? There is a view that J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig call universal possibilism in their book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. Universal possibilism states that there are no necessary truths. A necessary truth is a truth that is true at all times and in all possible worlds (like bachelors are unmarried men, or the law of non-contradiction). So the question arises, is it true that there are no necessary truths? Sounds like nonsense to me. I like the way C. S. Lewis puts it:

"His [God's] Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can.'... It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."
– Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 18

To give Mackie credit, he does state later in the article, "...there are some limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. It may be replied that these limits are always presupposed, that omnipotence has never meant the power to do the logically impossible..." (203)

So what's the point? The point is that Mackie's original assertion (that God does not exist because evil exists) relies on additions to the original premises. The first group of premises were not contradictory. The second set are. However, we've already seen that there are limits to what an omnipotent being can do. I believe that we can also argue that a wholly good being will not necessarily always eliminate evil as far as it can. Therefore, since his "quasi-logical rules," or his additional premises do not hold water, his entire argument does not hold water.

For a full refutation of Mackie's argument from evil, see God, Freedom, and Evil by Alvin Plantinga. Paul Copan, the president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, has gone as far as to say that the consensus among philosophers has emerged that the logical problem of evil isn't really a problem after all.