Alex Byrne in Boston Review:
The world was very different when a distinguished philosopher could say, as St. Thomas Aquinas did, “the existence of God can be proved in five ways.” Contemporary Christian philosophers often content themselves with pulling up the drawbridge and manning the barricades, rather than crusading against the infidel. Alvin Plantinga, perhaps the most eminent living philosopher of religion, devotes the five hundred pages of his Warranted Christian Belief to fending off objections to either the truth or rationality of belief in traditional Christian doctrines. He does not argue for the existence of God, and still less for the truth of Christianity; rather, his main question is whether a reasonable person who finds herself with firm religious convictions should change her mind. Plantinga is not trying to persuade Dawkins and company to change their minds.
The traditional arguments for God’s existence are very much worth our attention, though, for at least three reasons: they are of great intrinsic interest; popular discussions of them often fail to pin down their defects; and one argument, the “design argument,” has had a new lease on life as the intellectual underpinning of the intelligent design movement.