Wednesday, April 06, 2005
(9:41 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Alvin Plantinga
has been called "not just the best Christian philosopher of his time ... (but) the most important philosopher of any stripe" by Christianity Today (via Political Theory). I am skeptical about the ability of CT to make that call, but I can think of worse things than a bunch of evangelicals running out to buy a copy of God and Other Minds. Here's a shocking part of his biography: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."Here's another fun part:
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.
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.I blame the "postmodern" remark on his training as an analytic philosopher. Overall, my impression of Plantinga -- which stems from having three roommates at Oxford who were taking a philosophy of religion tutorial and worked with him very closely -- is that his writings are all very strange, but of course very rigorous as well.
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.
Here is a fan site. The Philosophical Lexicon, which the linked article and the fan site quote to hilarious effect, is available online here.
