Bruce Reichenbach

Bruce R. Reichenbach (b. 1943) is an American philosopher of religion who taught for decades at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Trained in analytic philosophy, he has written extensively on natural theology, theodicy, and the relation between Christian theology and contemporary thought. His monograph The Cosmological Argument: A Reassessment (1972) is a sustained defense of a non-kalam, contingency-based cosmological argument, engaging critics such as J. L. Mackie, Paul Edwards, and Wallace Matson. Subsequent work, including Evil and a Good God (1982), develops a free-will theodicy that integrates considerations about natural law, soul-making, and the requirements of a moral order, distinguishing his position from those of Plantinga and Hick while drawing on both. Reichenbach has also written on resurrection and personal identity (Is Man the Phoenix?), divine action and natural law, and karma and rebirth in comparative religious thought. His textbook Introduction to Critical Thinking and contributions to widely used philosophy-of-religion volumes—including the co-authored Reason for the Hope Within and Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings—have made his work pedagogically influential. Critics have questioned whether his version of the principle of sufficient reason can avoid the standard Humean and Kantian objections, and whether free-will theodicies adequately address evidential formulations of the problem of evil advanced by William Rowe and Paul Draper.