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Why then does God put up with all the evil wrought by generations of human beings through the ages? God does so, Plantinga argues, because on the whole it is for the best—or, at least, for the better. God deems the cost of evil to be worth the benefit of loving and enjoying the love of these human beings. So, the Free Will Defense concludes, theists can simultaneously affirm that God is good, that God is all-powerful, and that evil yet exists.

It is important to remember that the original charge of inconsistency is an absolute one: there is no way for the theist consistently to hold belief in God's power, goodness, and the existence of evil. All Plantinga had to do in response was to show at least one way to hold all three together—regardless of whether each detail of the defense is true or even plausible. The consensus among philosophers of religion (and consensus doesn't emerge easily among this crowd) is that Plantinga has done this successfully.

Indeed, the argument for the last decade or so has shifted to so-called probabilistic arguments: that it is highly improbable that there is a God who is good and all-powerful, given the existence and extent of evil. Plantinga has joined in this discussion alongside many other doughty Christian thinkers. It remains to be underscored that this is where the battle is now joined, since Plantinga removed from the skeptic's arsenal the knockout punch of the sheerly logical objection.

Put a little more technically, there are two questions we could ask about Christian belief. There is first the de facto question: Is it true? But the much more common skeptical question among intellectuals in our day is the de jure question: Whether or not it happens (by some amazingly improbable coincidence) to be true, does Christian belief merit our assent? This is the question Plantinga tackles.

He answers first the form of the question put by Immanuel Kant and by his latter-day followers such as John Hick and Gordon Kaufman: Can anyone properly say anything with confidence about God, the Great Unknown? The expected answer is no.

But Plantinga shows that this position is self-refuting (if you say, "No one can say anything confidently about God," you are confidently saying something about God) and is not particularly persuasive on any other ground.

Then Plantinga shifts to the form of the question put by most modern critics: Can Christian belief be proven on the basis of what reason and experience tell us is true? Plantinga and colleagues such as William Alston and Nicholas Wolterstorff have been attacking the hubris of such a demand for more than two decades, showing that very little of what we take for granted (for example, memory beliefs, sense perceptions, and the belief that there are other minds in the universe, not just my own) can meet this stringent test. Indeed, the demand that beliefs must be shown to follow deductively from indubitable ideas is itself not capable of proof on this basis—and is thus self-refuting.

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June 11 2001, Vol. 45, No. 8