God and other Minds

Abstract

In my judgment Professor Plantinga's book' is the most important contribution to the philosophy of religion that has appeared in several decades. The book has three main parts: I. Natural Theology-a consideration of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments; II. Natural Atheology-a consideration of the problem of evil, verificationism, and other attacks against theism; III. God and Other Minds-a consideration of the problem of our knowledge of other minds and the bearing of this problem on the question of the reasonableness of theistic belief. The central question of the book is whether belief in the existence of the theistic God is rational. Plantinga considers in Part I the arguments by which natural theology endeavors to establish that theistic belief is rationally justified. He concludes that these arguments are unsuccessful and, therefore, fail to provide rational grounds for theistic belief. In Part II Plantinga investigates the major arguments employed to show that we have good reasons for believing that God does not exist. His conclusion is that these arguments, like the arguments of natural theology, are unsuccessful. Plantinga's conclusions about natural theology and atheology are not novel. Other philosophers have reached the same conclusions. But few, in my judgment, have argued for these conclusions with anything like the thoroughness, clarity, and skill that Plantinga brings to the subject. The novelty in Plantinga's study of the rationality of theistic belief is unfolded in Part III. Instead of concluding that agnosticism is the rational view to adopt concerning the existence of the theistic