Can a rational person see God as both all-powerful and benevolent despite horrendous suffering in disasters like the Asian tsunami? From the perspective of philosopher Alvin Plantinga the answers are emphatic: yes and yes.

A Protestant professor at the University of Notre Dame, Plantinga applies modern analytic philosophy to the age-old questions about God and the universe. While he’s little known outside his specialty, an assessment in Christianity Today magazine called him “not just the best Christian philosopher of his time … (but) the most important philosopher of any stripe.”

Even atheist opponents recognize his importance. William Rowe of Purdue University and Michael Tooley of the University of Colorado -- who is co-authoring a book with Plantinga -- each consider him among the top two or three defenders of traditional belief in God.

A tongue-in-cheek lexicon edited by skeptic Daniel Dennett also handed Plantinga a couple of backhanded compliments, defining “planting” as “to use 20th century fertilizer to encourage new shoots from 11th century ideas which everyone thought had gone to seed.” Meanwhile to “alvinize” something is “to stimulate protracted discussion by making a bizarre claim.”

Plantinga’s best work is clear but hardly popular fare; it’s filled with modal logic and letter formulas that summarize the steps in his rigorous arguments.

It may seem odd, but modern philosophy ponders how we know things like this: that other people exist with thoughts and feelings like our own; that material objects we observe are real; that the world existed more than five minutes ago; that the future will resemble the past or that we can rely upon our minds.

Plantinga argues that common sense and science know that such things are true -- and that they employ personal sympathy, memory, perception and intuition in the process. Applying complex formulas, Plantinga asserts that belief in God is equally reasonable.

It’s heavy stuff, but the philosopher tries to lighten the mood as much as he can.

He imagines Henry Kissinger swimming across the Atlantic in one text, a possible world where Raquel Welch is mousy and others where there never was a Raquel Welch. The actress, he notes, “enjoys very little greatness in those worlds in which she does not exist.”

Plantinga’s Roman Catholic campus, which decades ago hired no Protestant philosophers, provides congenial surroundings for his work. Notre Dame boasts the nation’s largest philosophy faculty, and scholars surveyed by PhilosophicalGourmet.com rate it first in the English-speaking world for graduate study in the philosophy of religion. Plantinga long led its graduate center in that field.

Chatting about faith’s perennial puzzles, the bearded philosopher turns out to be a cheerful, plainspoken and seemingly ordinary Midwesterner. At age 72, he still takes an hour most days for a workout to keep his wiry 6-foot-2 frame in shape for his chief avocation, rock climbing.

Back in 1951, Plantinga was a Harvard University scholarship student surrounded by scoffers when one evening he experienced a “persuasion and conviction that the Lord was really there and was all I had thought.”

Shortly thereafter, he transferred to Michigan’s faith-affirming Calvin College, affiliated with his lifelong denomination, the Christian Reformed Church. “As good a decision as I’ve ever made,” he says. He then did graduate work at Michigan and Yale and taught at Calvin before moving to Notre Dame in 1982.

In his student days "everybody was predicting and giving lots of learned reasons for Christianity just dying out.

“Christianity didn’t have any future in the academy,” he said, recalling what he himself felt at the time. “It seemed the thing to think.”

But now, “in philosophy, at least, Christianity is doing vastly better than it did 40 or 50 years ago and that’s probably true in academia in general.” One index: In 1978, Plantinga and five colleagues founded the Society of Christian Philosophers. Today it’s an 1,100-member subgroup of the American Philosophical Association that publishes a respected quarterly.

Plantinga modestly avoids mentioning his own influence in nurturing younger Christian thinkers.

He notes that Christianity faces two intellectual competitors today. Postmodern thought claims “there basically isn’t any truth at all,” while atheistic naturalism says there is such a thing as truth, but only empirical science delivers it.

Plantinga sees “superficial conflict but deep concord between Christian belief and science” and “superficial concord but deep conflict” between science and atheism.

He argues that if evolution was godless and operated only to enhance reproductive fitness, there’s no particular reason to think the results of humanity’s thinking processes are reliable. But with God, he says, our minds are geared to discover truth, including scientific truth.

Plantinga addressed science and God last fall at Beijing and Cambridge universities, and continues the theme in Scotland’s Gifford Lectures beginning April 12, a rare second invitation to that prestigious forum.

“As far as I can see there aren’t any scientific results that are incompatible with miracles,” he asserts. Nor has any thinker, ancient or modern, provided reasons why intelligent persons can’t believe in them, he says.

Scientific laws state “the way in which God ordinarily treats the stuff he’s made. That doesn’t mean he always has to treat it the same way,” Plantinga says.

Especially in an era of quantum mechanics, science “doesn’t preclude someone’s rising from the dead or turning water into wine,” he continues. “These things are very unlikely, but of course we already knew that.” In fact, highly improbable events happen all the time, he says.

But if miracles in general are possible, how do we substantiate a specific miracle like Jesus’ resurrection?

According to Plantinga, the initial probability of any such claim is low, though it would obviously rise if Christians are right that Jesus “is the incarnate second person of the Trinity.”

The external evidence, assessed by Oxford’s Richard Swinburne and others, includes the apostles’ Easter testimonies and the dramatic spread of their belief. Plantinga finds this convincing: “Maybe it’s not knockdown, drag-out 100 percent conclusive evidence, but it’s pretty strong evidence.”

Plantinga adds a factor emphasized by Aquinas and Calvin -- internal knowledge from the Holy Spirit that convinces an individual such things are really true.

For decades, Plantinga has argued it is reasonable to believe in the monotheistic God affirmed by Christians, Jews and Muslims. He focuses on his own Christian faith in the career-capping work “Warranted Christian Belief” (Oxford).

In Plantingese, “warrant” refers to the things we can really know, as opposed to a “lucky guess” -- like thinking against all probability that a hapless Detroit Tigers club will win the pennant, and then they actually do. He also distinguishes between belief in God and following an unwarranted idea (something we’d have no good reason to believe), answering what he calls atheism’s Great Pumpkin Objection.

Ultimately, Plantinga sees a couple dozen good arguments for God’s existence, but admits nobody has airtight proof. That doesn’t faze him a bit.

“There are plenty of other things we rationally accept without argument,” he said.

Plantinga has beaten down many older cases made in favor of atheism, which leaves the perennial problem of evil: How can God be all-powerful and all-loving if he allows suffering?

Plantinga says this also poses a problem for atheism, under which it is hard to see how there can really be such a thing as evil if the cosmos lacks a moral structure, besides which everyone believes evil and good are real.

The philosopher also contends that, logically, a good God could have created a world without suffering only by denying the benefit of free will to humans and supernatural demons.

Tooley thinks Plantinga has won that part of the argument, but still finds a benevolent God unlikely when we contemplate the actual extent of suffering, for example in the tsunami. Plantinga considers this atheism’s strongest argument -- and understands the incredible horrors wrought by such disasters and manmade evils like totalitarian regimes -- but still thinks his logical arguments for God prevail.

In particular, he believes Christianity’s unique message about the crucified Son of God can calm these anxieties.

“You may not know why God permits a given evil, and you’re not going to find out in most cases. But you do know this: He’s in it with us. He’s willing to put up with suffering, too. … He himself pays a price. Maybe a price greater than any of us pays. Maybe a price we can’t even grasp.”

“I read the Bible this time of year, about the Passion story and Christ willing to come down and suffer and die, and I find it overwhelmingly attractive and powerfully affecting and it just seems to be right.”

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That’s why the official U.S. Catholic Bible gives Goliath the shorter stature. Consider Psalm 145, an acrostic where each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This chapter was always a head-scratcher because the verse for one letter is missing in the standard Hebrew text. But a phrase with that letter turned up in a Dead Sea scroll and is tacked onto 145:13 in most recent translations. "God is faithful in his words and gracious in all his deeds…"

Further rewordings are expected and some of them could shift meaning. In all Bibles, Deuteronomy 8:6 speaks of "fearing" or "revering" God, but a Dead Sea scroll says "loving" instead. Should scholars consider this change? To those for whom each word of the Bible was inspired by God, even such small alterations are significant

Still, as Cross puts it, "There is no 11th commandment." The rewording prompted by the scrolls does not challenge basic beliefs but a fellow researcher, Eugene Ulrich, professor of Hebrew at the University of Notre Dame and chief editor of the Dead Sea biblical materials, sees far more sweeping implications for the Old Testament (the Christian term for what Jews call the Tanakh).

Seated at a customized computer surrounded by galley proofs, infrared photographs and marking pens in six coded colors, the red-bearded, 61-year-old scholar surveys his 23 years of labor. "I feel like the person who put the last stone atop the pyramids," he says. "I’m as weary as can be, but I’m glad I did it." Ulrich was polishing the last volume on biblical texts for the official scholarly series from Oxford University Press, which will be a landmark in this painstaking and highly technical project.

The overall effort hit the headlines in 1991 when two independent groups, frustrated with the slow pace of the official scholarly team, rushed unauthorized editions of the texts into print so all scholars could begin assessing them. Ulrich’s own assessment? He repeatedly encountered scrolls that "did, and didn’t, look like what we call the Bible." His conclusion: In ancient times, two or more contrasting editions of many biblical books existed side by side and were all regarded as Scripture. In other words, back then the Old Testament was far different from what we think of today.

He concludes that there were multiple editions for at least these books: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Samuel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Psalms and Song of Solomon. Ulrich spells out his theory in "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible." An example of the problems he and others ponder: In two of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Psalm 33 directly follows Psalm 31, skipping number 32. Did the scribes who wrote those manuscripts believe 32 was not God’s Word? And the opposite situation: Various scrolls include 15 psalms that are not found in standard Bibles. Sample: "Blessed be he who has made the earth by his power, who has established the world in his wisdom…" Was this Scripture that was later lost, or did Dead Sea scribes merely collect devotional poetry and mix it with biblical psalms?

"If Ulrich is on the right track, we’ve got some major thinking to do," acknowledges John H. Walton, a staunchly conservative professor at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute. The problem as he sees it: "If it could be demonstrated we have two biblical traditions arising independently of one another, instead of one being a revision or corruption of the other, then which one are you going to call God’s Word?" Personally, Walton thinks Ulrich’s conclusions are premature and professes himself untroubled by any findings to date. The scrolls, which include portions of all books except Esther and Nememiah, were written between 200 B.C. and 70 A.D. In that same period, rabbis began establishing the standard Masoretic Text, the basis for all Old Testaments since the early Middle Ages.

Should the Bibles used in churches, synagogues and homes be thoroughly revised to reflect all the variations? Not necessarily, says Ulrich, a lay Roman Catholic. But at least serious students should be reading a Bible with multiple options. And he insists that future Bible translations should be less wedded to the Masoretic Text and rely more on the alternate renditions. Scholars have just begun work on an ‘’eclectic Bible’’ to show these textual variations, which will take years to complete. But Ulrich, with co-editors Martin Abegg Jr. and Peter Flint, has taken the first step with "The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible." The book presents new English translations of the Dead Sea biblical manuscripts (the scholarly Oxford volumes have the original Hebrew) with user-friendly explanations of how they differ from standard Bibles.

The book is billed as "the oldest known Bible." The reason: The scrolls are a millennium older than the surviving Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts that provide the basis for all modern Old Testaments, which date from around A.D. 1000.p. Specialists know that this puzzle of different Old Testaments, raised anew by the scrolls, is not really new. Before the scrolls were discovered, scholars were aware of three main editions: the Samaritan, which included only the first five books; the early form of the Masoretic Hebrew; and the Septuagint, a Greek translation from a different Hebrew version.p. (Catholic and Orthodox Bibles follow the Septuagint in including seven extra books that Jews and Protestants do not recognize as part of the Bible.)

Various scrolls provide evidence of all three traditions, plus a fourth group of texts unique to the Dead Sea community. In understanding the whole complex situation, it’s important to remember that in ancient times there was no single bound "Bible" but separate scrolls for each biblical book, and that Judaism did not fix the final list of biblical books till the period after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written. Lawrence Schiffman of New York University, co-editor of Oxford’s "Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls," thinks that for Judaism, Ulrich’s theorizing is "irrelevant." 

No other Bible besides the Masoretic Text has any authority. He says flatly: "There’s nothing in the scrolls that could possibly have any interest" in terms of revising the biblical canon. Schiffman is an Orthodox layman, but says his attitude is shared by more liberal Jews. He sees the variant editions as an issue only in Christianity, where scholars try to reconstruct the best text from whatever source. In addition, he’s convinced the Bible Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries knew was Masoretic, substantially the same as ours.

If the Masoretic version is the one and only true Old Testament, then the Dead Sea Scrolls are extremely good news for Bible believers, Jewish or Christian. The Masoretic manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are astonishingly similar to the standard Hebrew texts 1,000 years later, proving that Jewish scribes were accurate in preserving and transmitting the Masoretic Scriptures.

Who originally wrote the scrolls, and who preserved them? Those issues are raised by a leading conservative Protestant scholar, Walter Kaiser, president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. Though experts are unable to agree, it appears the Dead Sea community was a marginal group, he says. "So we can’t figure out from what perspective they were writing. That has to be factored in. Should cultic groups set the norm?" He warns that relying on non-Masoretic manuscripts could be "like going to the Branch Davidians" of Waco.

A related issue is "who decides what is authoritative?" He figures the ancient rabbis, "those closer to the scene, obviously had a better shot" in determining the best text. He also contends that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are simply too fragmentary to support Ulrich’s sweeping conclusions about conflicting Old Testaments. Kaiser recalls the late Harry Orlinsky, the only Jewish translator on the Revised Standard Version, who used the scrolls to make 13 last-minute changes before that translation was issued in 1952. But he later told Kaiser and other students that 10 of those changes were too hasty and the Masoretic wording would have been preferable.

Similar caution comes from Ulrich’s Notre Dame colleague James VanderKam, co-editor of the scrolls encyclopedia. "To say that one or another version is more original is very difficult," he thinks. "We have very early evidence for all of them." He says the Masoretic Bible "is the one we’ve always had, and that’s unlikely to change."

In analyzing the various editions, "at the meaning level, most of the variants are not important," says VanderKam. "I don’t know that any issues of faith are involved". The implications of Ulrich’s view fall heaviest upon evangelicals and fundamentalists who believe, as the creed at Kaiser’s seminary defines it, that the biblical books "as originally written were inspired of God, hence free from error.

If so, which version of Jeremiah or Psalms was original? The technique of deciding that, known as textual criticism, has long been recognized and practiced by conservatives, notes Moody’s professor Walton, though until now most energy has been applied to manuscript variations in the New Testament. Kaiser readily grants that some implications of the scrolls’ variations could become unsettling but insists, "Truth should never upset anyone. If we think God is a God of truth, real evidence ought never be shunned."

Will all of this ever be settled? Assessments of the ancient texts develop slowly. But now that the Dead Sea biblical manuscripts are becoming fully available, specialists expect that within a decade there could be broader consensus on what they mean and how they should be applied.