ABSTRACT
Proponents of the probabilistic argument maintain that evil makes the existence of God improbable or unlikely. The substitute claim can be made that, among the logically possible worlds that were within God's power to create, he could have created one containing a more favorable balance of good and evil. Another alteration would be to cast this claim in terms of natural evil rather than moral evil, since many thinkers now grant that God could not do anything about the amount of moral evil brought about by free human beings. Discussion of the prospects for a viable probabilistic argument from evil did not end with Plantinga's critique of Cornman and Lehrer. Several atheistic critics have developed their own statements of the argument. In the contemporary debates over God and evil, a certain pattern of response has emerged in regard to both the logical and the probabilistic arguments: challenge from the critic followed by defensive maneuvers by the theist.
