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‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds’, so writes St Paul in his letter to the Romans (12:2). One way of understanding Alvin Plantinga’s distinguished philosophical career is as an outworking of St Paul’s imperative. This career was justly celebrated in a conference in May 2010, which resulted in the present volume of essays. The essays build upon Plantinga’s groundbreaking work in metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of religion, work that renewed the place of religion, generally, and Christianity, specifically, in the intellectual life. As part of this renewal, Plantinga provided a significant, at least to many if not most, convincing rebuttal to the logical problem of evil, on which it is simply contradictory to maintain that both God and evil exist. In response to this rebuttal, discussion of the problem of evil migrated to the evidential problem of evil, on which the existence of evil provides good evidence against the existence of God. Fittingly, then, the present volume of essays begins with Michael Bergmann advancing this discussion in his ‘Commonsense Skeptical Theism’, where he is concerned to show the consistency between commonsense epistemology, central to Plantinga’s epistemology, and sceptical theism, on which we have no good reason to infer from its seeming that there is no God-justifying reason for his allowing a particular evil to occur and there being no such reason. In a related essay, Richard Otte in his ‘Theory Comparison in Science and Religion’ argues against what he calls the Standard View in philosophy of religion, which comprises two assumptions, what he calls the Core Assumption and the Probabilistic Assumption. According to the Core Assumption, when we consider whether some evidence supports religious belief, we consider whether it supports a supposed core of religious beliefs, such as that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good God. According to the Probabilistic Assumption, the relevant probability when we do this assessment is objective, rather than subjective, probability, such that an individual’s personal probabilities based on their experience are irrelevant. Otte argues that just as these assumptions are not used in philosophy of science, so should they not be used in philosophy of religion, which would transform discussion of the evidential problem of evil. More generally, Otte’s conclusion connects with Raymond VanArragon’s interpretation of Plantinga’s later epistemology on which Plantinga-style Christian belief constitutes reflective knowledge, the kind of knowledge explored in Ernest Sosa’s ‘Descartes and Virtue Epistemology’, where he argues that Descartes should be understood as a virtue epistemologist.
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