alvin plantinga knowledge and christian belief

This sort of free will, however, entailed the danger that we would use it to go our own way in defiance of both God and our own best interests.įor God to grant human beings free will was to grant us the awful dignity of making real choices with real consequences. To make us capable of such fellowship, God had to give us the freedom to choose, since love cannot be either automatic or coerced. God created human beings with this end in view. Plantinga’s response is complicated-the shortest published version ( God, Freedom, and Evil, Eerdmans, 1974) ran to more than 60 pages-but it essentially was this: God desired to love and be loved by other beings. Therefore, says the argument, theism is incoherent, and one can thus dispense with it. In the so-called Free Will Defense, Plantinga answered the logical problem of evil, an apparently lethal argument that boldly claims theists cannot simultaneously affirm three propositions: that God is good, that God is all-powerful, and that evil exists.

Because of the excellence of his labors, the Christian view of things simply has to be taken seriously by any questioner with the integrity to appreciate sound philosophy. Plantinga has dealt with these two crucial issues on behalf of orthodox Christian faith.

On the problem of evil, Plantinga’s vaunted “Free Will Defense” (to which we’ll return in a moment) responded to the most trenchant form of this problem with a success rarely found in philosophy: for almost 20 years now, the discussion of the problem has shifted to other grounds because of the widespread acknowledgment of Plantinga’s argument. Second, he has made fundamental contributions to these two questions. Plantinga deserves this accolade for three reasons.įirst, he has taken up the two most important questions of our day: the problem of evil (arguably the most important philosophical question of any era) and the problem of knowledge (undoubtedly the key philosophical question of our era).

No, Plantinga is the most important philosopher of any stripe. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame is not just the best Christian philosopher of his time. Stackhouse Jr., in an article from the 11 June 2001 issue of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today noted his influence:Īlvin Plantinga is arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century.The Dutch-American Calvinist raised in the Midwest and now the John A.

He wrote a very influential book in 1974, called God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans / New York: Harper & Row), which is now widely regarded as the best (and indeed, a decisive) refutation of the atheist use of the classic Problem of Evil in order to disprove God’s existence, or His character as all-good and all-powerful, or to claim that Christian belief involves an inherent contradiction therein.

Alvin plantinga knowledge and christian belief