ABSTRACT
The probabilistic problem of evil reflects one strategy for showing how evil can be conceived as evidence. Plantinga has clearly shown that the atheistic critic is misguided if he thinks he can produce an argument of coercive force that will compel all reasonable people to agree that theism is improbable with respect to evil and thus that one would not be rational in embracing it. The theist and atheist can reason together about the bearing of evil on the existence of God—as well as the bearing of a great many other things, for that matter—without accusing each other of being irrational or being in violation of some intellectual duties. The critic cites some alleged fact about evil as the evidence that supports the conclusion that it is more rational, given the evidence, to believe that God does not exist. Several formulations of this kind of argument may be detected in the growing literature on the evidential argument.
