This is a response to Richard M. Gale's review of my book God, the Best, and Evil, Clarendon Press 2008. The review was published on-line in May 2009, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Gale and I have engaged in correspondence arising from an earlier version of these remarks, which I sent to him in the form of a letter. I thank him for useful insights. 1. 'God' I argued that we should not regard omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, or bringing the universe into existence as built in to the meaning of the word 'God,' and that we should not attempt to define 'God' in terms of logically necessary and sufficient conditions for its application. Instead, I said that for a great many purposes we will successfully explain what we are talking about when using 'God' by saying that God is the rational agent who brought the universe into existence and who is, either nontemporally or at all times, very powerful, very knowledgeable, and very good. My idea was that many hearers would want to say 'Yes, that description uniquely picks out the being we have in mind, and lists features which are central to our understanding of God, even though there is a lot more that we would want to add, e.g., that God is omnipotent, triune, etc.' Given that there is disagreement about just what more should be added, such a minimalist explanation has its advantages. I did not subsequently renege on the foregoing semantic account. I did, however, point out that the explanation also has some disadvantages. In the last paragraph of Section 1.3 I dealt with these disadvantages by stipulating that from then on in my book the assertion that God exists, understood in the foregoing way, was to be regarded as accompanied by a latent statement to the effect that God is omnipotent, omniscient, etc. (For it is the proposition that God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, etc, that is the focus of the book.) I did not first state my intention to use the word 'God' in one way and two pages later announce a contrary intention. Nevertheless, if a reader as astute as Gale found my exposition confusing then I wish that I had expressed myself more clearly. 2. Definitions of 'omnipotent' and 'omniscient' Gale declares that my account of omnipotence and omniscience in terms of God's intrinsic causal capacities and cognitive powers allows for a God who can do and know very little because he is not given suitable opportunities to exercise these capacities. To see that this is not so, consider how there could be limitations on God's opportunities which did not involve limitations on his intrinsic causal capacities and cognitive powers. Molinists and open theists hold that God cannot causally determine free choices and actions. Open theists infer that God's bringing free creatures into existence suffices to yield limitations on his opportunities to act. Although theological determinists and Molinists typically think that God never in fact has limited opportunities to act, I argued in my book that they should agree that there are possible worlds in which God finds himself in this position. Since God, the Best, and Evil assumes that if God exists (and is omnipotent, omniscient etc) then either theological determinism or Molinism or open theism is true, it is plain that, contrary to Gale's assertion, in formulating my definitions of omnipotence and 2 omniscience I have not made the task of giving a theodicy too easy. I have not left it open to theodicists to 'say about any extant evil that God has the causal and cognitive powers to have prevented it but, unfortunately, did not have the opportunity to do so.' For example, nothing that I have said provides, or purports to provide, any reason to suppose that there are cases in which God does not have the opportunity to prevent some natural evil, or some instanc 3 5. Open theism and contingent limitations on divine foreknowledge The main issue concerns whether 'omniscient' should be defined as entailing (infallible) foreknowledge of every truth which logically can be (infallibly) foreknown. Section 1.9 of the book argued that it should not. I pointed out that even though the proposition 'It is logically possible that God foreknows that Jones does A at t' is true, it might be true that both Jones does A at t and God cannot foreknow that Jones does A at t. Such a situation arises in cases in which Jones's doing A is causally undetermined. Some philosophers describe such cases by saying that even though the proposition 'It is logically possible that God foreknows that Jones does A at t' is true, as a matter of contingent fact God's not foreknowing that Jones does A at t was always accidentally necessary. Insofar as this last point is what Gale had in mind when he said, in his review, 'To be sure it is logically possible that God foreknows that Jones does A at t7; but, if God were to know this in the actual world a contradiction would follow,' I have no reason to disagree with him, since it is compatible with what I said in Section 1.9 of the book. How should we understand the argument with which the review ends? Plainly (4) is incompatible with (5) -according to the background assumption that free will and determinism are incompatible – so it is not surprising that Gale can infer the explicitly self-contradictory (7). His final sentence, the one after (8), amounts to one way of expressing the incompatibility of (4) with (5). But how is all this supposed to add up to an objection to the way I stated and argued for my objection to Hasker. Should we regard Gale's argument (4) – (8), and the sentence which follows (8), as aiming to show that God knows that Jones is free with respect to doing or refraining from doing action A freely at time t, and the assumption that free will and determinism are incompatible, together entail God does not infallibly foreknow whether Jones will do A at t? The trouble was that everyone except Molinists agrees with this conclusion. So perhaps, instead, Gale's argument is an attempt to show that x is omniscient should be understood as involving, in every circumstance C in which x finds himself, infallible foreknowledge of the truth of all true propositions P such that x is in C is logically compatible with x infallibly foreknows the truth of P – where the specifically salient examples are ones in which x is God, circumstances C involve a created agent's being about to perform a free action, and P is a proposition specifying what the agent will do. Still, Gale would need to argue that the conclusion somehow conflicts with the account of omniscience I proposed in the book. He has not done so. My overall conclusion is that although Gale repeatedly claims that God, the Best, and Evil is defective, his book review has not identified any defects, apart from the fact in a couple of places I should have written more clearly.