Meet Alvin Plantinga

It is distressing to me that so few theologians know of Alvin Plantinga. The man is without a doubt the most important person alive in Christian PHILOSOPHY today, and arguably one of the most important thinkers in philosophy period. Plantinga really got the ball rolling on modern analytic Christian philosophy with his book GOD AND OTHER MINDS, where he compared the teleological argument for the existence of God to similar arguments that philosophers have tried to use to justify our belief in other minds. The so-called "problem of other minds" refers to the fact that I only really know that I am conscious, since I have no direct access to your consciousness. Plantinga argued (very persuasively to my mind) that the process by which we come to believe that other people have conscious experience is very much like the process by which theists come to believe in God. If beliefs about other minds are justified, argued Plantinga, then so is belief in God.

Most atheist philosophers will admit that even if GOD AND OTHER MINDS isn't convincing (and to an atheist, I would suppose it isn't, but it certainly is for me), that the process Plantinga used, the way he did philosophy, should set the tone for anyone really interested in the field. Plantinga's influence goes well beyond religious philosophy. When modern analytic philosophy took a turn towards the metaphysical, and towards modal logic, Plantinga helped lay the groundwork for epistemology in the modern era. It was Plantinga who set out the parameters for the epistemology of modal logic, which is vital to understand what modern philosophers even DO, in his book THE NATURE OF NECESSITY. It was also there that he modernized the ontological argument, putting it on as firm a footing as it had ever been. His ability to take positions that had long been thought of as outdated or irrelevant and update them using modern turns in logic, and perhaps more importantly to show how they revealed important issues in modern logic and metaphysics, was simply groundbreaking. Simply put, Alvin Plantinga is one of the biggest names in American philosophy.

So how can theologians, who often wax philosophical, know little or nothing about the man? It is insane. Anyone who even ponders the question "why believe in God?" should know who he is. His work culminated in a trilogy of books known as the WARRANT series. The last book of that series is one of the best works of apologetics possibly ever! Plantinga demonstrated, for my money demonstrated for all time, that concepts like justification and rationality, any picture of what it means to KNOW anything, supervenes on a particular picture of human nature, on philosophical anthropology. In that sense the turn that had dominated philosophy since Descartes, where epistemology was done before metaphysics, was ended by Plantinga. Philosophical anthropology is a branch of metaphysics, of ontology, and what a person IS, is a question that can never be answered in a certain, beyond-all-doubt way. Since religious believers and atheists have different pictures of human nature, each supervening on at least some unfalsifiable assumptions, what knowledge amounts to, or what is or isn't rational, isn't something that can be settled simply through evidence and argumentation. Plantinga's rather Christian philosophical anthropology is what grounds out his convincing argument that belief in God can be, for some people, rational.

Beyond that Alvin Plantinga did important work in pneumatology, which is connected to his work in philosophical anthropology and epistemology. Any modern pneumatological musings should include at least some examination of his work on the matter. Why isn't he studied more? I dunno, it is beyond me. But I commend his work to you. He is one of the greatest minds that Christianity has ever produced. Sad that most Christians don't know his name.