Deane-Peter Baker, ed. Alvin Plantinga. New York: Cambridge University Press 2007. Pp. 233. US$85.00 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-521-85531-0); US$24.99 (paper ISBN-13: 978-0-521-67143-9). This volume consists of an introduction, eight new essays discussing Plantinga's work, and the text of Plantinga's previously unpublished notes, 'Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments'. 1. Graham Oppy's 'Natural Theology' offers a work-by-work survey of Plantinga's discussions of natural theology and natural a-theology from 1967 to 2000, tracing the development of Plantinga's views of both what natural theology is and how successful it is. This essay concentrates on the detail rather than trying to argue an overall thesis, though Oppy does not hide his own views. 2. Richard M. Gale's 'Evil and Alvin Plantinga' works through (i) Plantinga's famous free-will defense against the logical problem of evil, and (ii) his defense of theistic skepticism against the evidential problem of evil. In '(i)' Gale argues that while counterfactuals of creaturely freedom may be true, they do not relieve God of his causal responsibility for the free actions of human agents. Gale's main argument against '(ii)' is that 'it seems to require that we become complete moral skeptics' (67). This doesn't follow; from the fact that something happened we can infer that God wanted (in some sense) it to happen, but it doesn't follow from the fact that something is threatening to happen that God wants it to happen. So Gale is wrong to allege that 'the result of this moral skepticism is paralysis of the will, since we can have no reason for acting' (67). It should also be noted that Gale does not address Plantinga's recent attempt at theodicy in his essay 'Supralapsarianism, or "O Felix Culpa" ' in Inwagen's 2004 Christian Faith and The Problem of Evil. 3. John Divers' 'The Modal Metaphysics of Alvin Plantinga' identifies Plantinga as a major contributor to the contemporary 'research programme . . . in the metaphysics of modality' (74), and then summarizes his contribution in terms of twelve theses. Collectively these reveal that 'he is the consummate realist and antiempiricist modal metaphysician' (86). Divers briefly raises three lines of criticism. First, Plantinga does little to interact with that version of antirealism that is agnostic about the need even to posit modal reality to explain our modalizing. (In addition, Plantinga does not defend the utility of modal locutions against those that think them dispensable.) Secondly, it is unclear how and to what extent Plantinga's 'modal theorizing' is an 'explanatory advance' in our understanding of modality (86-7). Thirdly, the notion of a power set seems to generate a major inconsistency for Plantinga's modal metaphysics, at least if the latter is committed to there being a maximal consistent set of some kind. 4. In 'Natural Theology and Naturalist Atheology: Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism', Ernest Sosa discusses Plantinga's 6 famous argument that if one believes that one is the product of random evolutionary forces then one should not trust one's cognitive faculties since one has no reason to trust them: the random evolutionary forces are unlikely to have made them reliable. But that means that one should also not trust the deliverance of one's cognitive faculties that evolutionary naturalism itself is true, hence such a position is self-defeating. Sosa suggests two possible replies for the naturalist: first, 'perhaps we could not have been in existence, all of us, deprived of our successful cognitive faculties,' (103) and, second, since 'believing that our faculties are unreliable is self-defeating, as is even suspending judgment on that question,' (105) 'on the question whether your faculties are reliable, you have no rational choice but to assent, therefore, and so you would be within your rights to draw the further conclusion that if your origins are evolutionary, then such origins cannot make your faculties unreliable' (105, italics added). But if, as Plantinga suggests, the 'probability that our faculties are reliable is low or inscrutable (on the proposition that they are the product of undirected evolutionary forces)' (105), does that not mean that we should reject the antecedent, that our origins are evolutionary? No, responds Sosa, 'from those considerations it cannot even be inferred that it is unlikely that our origins are evolutionary, for inscrutability would permit no such inference' (105, italics original). As Sosa himself says, 'a fully adequate response' to Plantinga's argument 'remains to be formulated' (103), but Sosa has certainly gestured in an interesting direction. 5. Jonathan Kvanvig's 'Two Approaches to Epistemic Defeat' compares his (Kvanvig's) own 'front-door' approach to epistemic defeat, which is a 'propositionalist' account beginning 'with propositional relationships, only by implication describing what happens in the context of a noetic system,' with Plantinga's 'backdoor' approach, which is a 'doxasticist' account assuming 'a context of actual belief and an entire noetic system . . . describing defeat in terms of what sort of doxastic and noetic response would be appropriate to the addition of particular pieces of information' (108). Kvanvig argues that Plantinga's backdoor approach to epistemic defeat cannot be successful, because it can accommodate the notion of defeater-defeaters only by abandoning the backdoor approach for a front-door approach. (By way of contrast, Kvanvig offers a concise front-door account of defeaterdefeaters on p. 115 that requires no such compromise, being purely propositionalist in character.) Kvanvig illuminates the central problem by invoking the Quine-Duhem thesis about testing scientific hypotheses, and finishes by noting that Plantinga's celebrated 'naturalism defeated' argument against evolutionary naturalism seems to 'fit well with a propositionalist approach in spite of his official doxasticist dogma' (122). 6. In 'Plantinga's Model of warranted Christian Belief' James Beilby gives a careful exposition of Plantinga's apologetic program and religious epistemology from Warranted Christian Belief, and then presents three criticisms of Plantinga's methodology: (i) Plantinga 'seemingly completely ignores the role of the religious community in his description of the formation of faith' (140); (ii) Plantinga's 'construal of natural theology is unnecessarily strin7 gent in that he doesn't seem to have a place for good arguments that are unlikely to convince the skeptic' (143); and (iii) Plantinga's 'unwillingness to argue for the truth of the Extended (Aquinas/Calvin) Model saddles him with an argumentative methodology that applies too widely, to too many religious traditions' (146), and 'it is far from clear whether there are any people whose faith looks like that described in Plantinga's model' (146, italics original). Beilby concludes with four criticisms of Plantinga's extended Aquinas/Calvin model of how religious belief is warranted: (a) '(c)ontrary to Plantinga's models, I suggest that the religious beliefs of the typical Christian are more likely based on a complex mixture of personal, social, and evidential factors in addition to pneumatological factors such as the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit' (148); (b) 'even if a part of humanity's native noetic equipment, say the sensus divinitatis, produced a belief that met Plantinga's criterion for warrant, it isn't obvious that beliefs produced by the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, a cognitive process not a part of humanity's original equipment, would also be warranted' (151, italics original); (c) 'there are instances of belief in God that are not explained by the model, or are explained only awkwardly' (153). Beilby explores four possible responses to this criticism, and plumps for the 'noetic effects of sin on the believer' (155). Beilby's final plea is that Plantinga make more of the role of human free will in his account of the formation of faith in the believer: Calvin himself would not have liked the idea - in the Reformed tradition faith is entirely the product of God, not the recipient. 7. Many philosophers claim that 'awareness of religious diversity either eliminates warrant (for Christian beliefs) or requires the Christian to offer non-question-begging evidence for his or her Christian beliefs' (167). Plantinga has argued quite emphatically that this is not the case. In assessing Plantinga's response to the challenge of religious pluralism, Kelly James Clark ('Pluralism and Proper Function') concisely and accurately presents Plantinga's theory of warrant and his defense of Christian exclusivism, essentially siding with Plantinga on both of these issues. But Clark emphasizes that even if we grant that Plantinga's view of warrant is correct, 'there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to these matters' (168). That is, awareness of religious diversity may be compatible with warranted Christian belief, but this is not always the case. 8. Plantinga has argued against materialism about human persons, inferring that 'I am not identical with my body' from the fact that I would survive 'the rapid replacement of various parts of my body' (191-2). Peter van Inwagen ('Plantinga's Replacement Argument') responds that, in the scenario Plantinga envisions, my body would indeed be destroyed, but there is no reason to think that I continue to exist. Plantinga must be able to argue that during the relevant interval, 'a single episode of conscious awareness occurs' (197), and this Plantinga has not done. Daniel J. Hill University of Liverpool 8 Greg Welty Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary