The author critically examines and rejects alvin plantinga's defense of the free will theodicy, As presented in chapter six of plantinga's "god and other minds". If the author's arguments are correct, Then any attempt on the part of the rational apologist to explain evil by reference to man's free will must be considered futile. Since the arguments presented will be seen as supporting natural atheology (which, For plantinga, Is "the attempt...To show that, Given what we know, It is impossible or (...) unlikely that God exists"), The article ends with the claim that both rational apologetics and natural atheology are conceptually confused, And that this confusion can be traced to their failure to understand the nature of religious belief. (shrink)

Let us introduce two antithetical terms in order to avoid certain elementary confusions: To the question “How do you know that so‐and‐so is the case?”, we sometimes answer by giving ‘criteria’ and sometimes by giving ‘symptoms. If medical science calls angina an inflammation caused by a particular bacillus, and we ask in a particular case “Why do you say this man has got angina?” then the answer “I have found the bacillus so‐and‐so in his blood” gives us the criterion, or (...) what we may call the defining criterion of angina. If on the other hand the answer was, “His throat is inflamed”, this might give us a symptom of angina, I call “sympton” a phenomenon of which experience has taught us that it coincided, in some way or other, with the phenomenon which is our defining criterion, Then to say “A man has angina if this bacillus is found in him” is a tautology or it is a loose way of stating the definition of “angina”. But to say, “A man has angina whenever he has an inflamed throat” is to make a hypothesis. (BB, pp. 24–25)1. (shrink)

Despite wittgenstein's commitment to philosophy as a practice designed to free us from the impulse to generate philosophical theories, it seems to the author that wittgenstein did have a theory of knowledge in "on certainty". the paper is devoted to displaying this theory; it is written in the hope that others will find a way of reading "on certainty" that frees it from this interpretation.