Person

Alvin Plantinga

American analytic philosopher (b. 1932), the single most influential Christian philosopher of religion in the 20th and 21st centuries. Architect of Reformed Epistemology, reformulator of the Modal Ontological Argument in S5 modal logic, author of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), defender of the Free Will Defense against the logical Problem of Evil, and author of the Warrant trilogy. Co-founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers (1978), Templeton Prize laureate (2017).

Intro

Alvin Plantinga is the American philosopher most responsible for the late-20th-century revival of philosophical theism inside academic philosophy. Trained at Calvin College and Yale (PhD 1958), he spent his career at Wayne State, Calvin College, and the University of Notre Dame, and built a body of work covering modal logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. He argued that belief in God can be rationally held without first being proved from other beliefs, gave the free will defense that dissolved the logical problem of evil as professional philosophers had posed it, recovered the ontological argument in modern modal form, and offered the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism that turns naturalism's own appeal to evolution against it.

Beyond his published arguments, Plantinga helped change the climate of academic philosophy. When he started, theism was treated as a settled mistake in most analytic departments; by the time he retired, it was a respectable position with a robust scholarly literature, much of it traceable to his work and to the Society of Christian Philosophers he co-founded.

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In full

Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932, Ann Arbor, Michigan) is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and the William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy Emeritus at Calvin College. Working within the analytic tradition and the Dutch Reformed theological inheritance of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, Plantinga developed a research program that addressed four central questions in philosophy of religion: the rationality of religious belief (Reformed Epistemology and the warrant trilogy), the coherence of theism (modal metaphysics, free will, divine attributes), the existence of God (the modal ontological argument and the EAAN's negative case against the only serious competitor worldview), and the relationship between Christianity and science (Where the Conflict Really Lies, 2011). His work catalyzed the post-1968 renaissance of philosophy of religion as a major sub-field of analytic philosophy and provided a model for orthodox Christian engagement with first-rate secular philosophical work.

Biographical sketch

• 1932, Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Cornelius A. Plantinga (a philosophy and psychology professor of Dutch immigrant background) and Lettie Bossenbroek
• 1949-1950, Briefly at Jamestown College (North Dakota), then Harvard for one year
• 1950-1954, Transferred to Calvin College; came under the influence of philosopher William Harry Jellema, whose teaching shaped his Reformed-philosophical instincts
• 1954-1955, MA, University of Michigan
• 1955-1958, PhD, Yale University (1958), dissertation supervised in the analytic tradition
• 1958-1963, Assistant professor, Wayne State University, alongside future major analytic philosophers including Edmund Gettier
• 1963-1982, Calvin College philosophy department; the long Calvin years produced God and Other Minds (1967) and The Nature of Necessity (1974)
• 1978, Co-founded the Society of Christian Philosophers with Robert Audi, William P. Alston, George Mavrodes, and others
• 1982-2010, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame; the Notre Dame years produced the Warrant trilogy (1993-2000) and Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011)
• 2010, Retired from Notre Dame; returned to Calvin College as the William Harry Jellema Chair (emeritus shortly after)
• 2017, Awarded the Templeton Prize for outstanding contributions to affirming life's spiritual dimension

Major contributions

Plantinga's published work spans roughly six decades and touches almost every major debate in philosophy of religion. The most influential lines of argument:

1. Reformed Epistemology, belief in God can be properly basic
2. The Free Will Defense dissolving the logical Problem of Evil
3. The reformulated Modal Ontological Argument in S5
4. The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, EAAN
5. The warrant trilogy, a complete epistemological framework for Christian belief
6. The science-and-religion treatment, arguing the deep conflict is naturalism vs science, not theism vs science

Reformed Epistemology

Plantinga's signature epistemological program. Classical foundationalism held that a belief is rational only if it is either (a) self-evident, (b) evident to the senses, or (c) incorrigible, OR derived by good arguments from beliefs in those categories. Belief in God, classical foundationalism concluded, must therefore be supported by argument (the "natural theology" project) or else be irrational.

Plantinga's response, developed across God and Other Minds (1967), Faith and Rationality (1983, co-edited with Nicholas Wolterstorff), and the warrant trilogy:

• Classical foundationalism is self-refuting, the criterion itself does not meet the criterion. There is no self-evident, incorrigible, or sensory proof that ONLY self-evident, incorrigible, or sensory beliefs count as basic.
• Belief in other minds is the analogy, in God and Other Minds Plantinga argues that belief in other minds is held without proof on roughly the same epistemic basis as belief in God. If belief in other minds is rational, so is belief in God.
• Belief in God can be properly basic, formed directly in response to experience (Calvin's sensus divinitatis) rather than inferred from prior beliefs. Properly basic does not mean groundless; it means non-inferential.
• Defeaters can still be raised, properly basic belief is defeasible. The problem of evil, religious pluralism, and Freudian / Marxian "projection" objections all function as proposed defeaters, and the apologist's task includes answering them.

See Reformed Epistemology for the full hub.

Modal Ontological Argument

Plantinga's reformulation of Anselm's ontological argument using the formal apparatus of S5 modal logic (the strongest standard system, where if something is possibly necessary then it is necessary). The argument as Plantinga states it in The Nature of Necessity (1974) and God, Freedom, and Evil (1974):

1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists (a being with maximal excellence in every possible world, including necessary existence, omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection).
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world (by the S5 axiom that what is possibly necessary is necessary).
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

Plantinga is famously modest about the argument's apologetic force, granting that the parity-reversal objection (a "possibly non-existent maximally great being" runs through equally) means premise 1 is the contested premise. His own assessment: the argument shows that belief in God is rationally acceptable, not that the skeptic can be compelled.

See Modal Ontological Argument and Anselm.

EAAN, the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

Plantinga's most distinctive negative argument. First sketched in Warrant and Proper Function (1993), developed in Warranted Christian Belief (2000), and given book-length treatment in Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011) and Knowledge of God (2008, with Michael Tooley). The structure:

• Naturalism (N) holds that there is nothing supernatural; evolution (E) holds that human cognitive faculties came about through unguided Darwinian processes
• Conjoin N and E. What is the probability that human cognitive faculties are reliable, given N and E? Call this P(R | N & E)
• Plantinga argues that P(R | N & E) is either low or inscrutable. Natural selection selects for adaptive behavior, not for true belief. A pre-historic hominid that flees a tiger because he wants to play tag with it and wrongly thinks fleeing is how to play tag survives just as well as the hominid that flees because he correctly believes the tiger is dangerous. Survival under-determines truth.
• Therefore the naturalist who holds N & E has a defeater for R. But R is presupposed by every other belief one holds, including N & E themselves.
• Therefore N & E is self-defeating. The believer in N & E has an undefeated defeater for N & E.

The conclusion is not that naturalism is false but that one cannot rationally hold naturalism conjoined with evolution. The theist, by contrast, has a non-defective reason to trust her faculties (God designed them for truth). C. S. Lewis sketches a literary precursor in Miracles ch. 3, "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism", which Plantinga acknowledges. See Argument from the Reliability of Reason and C.S. Lewis.

Free Will Defense

Plantinga's response to the logical problem of evil. The atheist (J. L. Mackie, H. J. McCloskey, Antony Flew in the 1950s and 60s) had argued that the propositions "God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good" and "evil exists" are logically incompatible; therefore theism is incoherent.

Plantinga's response in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) and The Nature of Necessity (1974):

• The atheist must show that the conjunction of "God exists" and "evil exists" entails a contradiction
• It does not, if there is any possibly true proposition that, conjoined with "God exists", entails "evil exists"
• Plantinga proposes such a proposition: it is possible that every creaturely essence suffers from "transworld depravity" (in every world where God instantiates that essence as a free creature, the creature goes wrong at least once). If transworld depravity is even possibly true, God could not actualize a world containing free creatures and no evil.
• Therefore "God exists" and "evil exists" are logically compatible

This is a defense (showing compatibility), not a theodicy (explaining the actual reason for evil). It is widely credited with dissolving the logical problem of evil as a serious philosophical project. Mackie acknowledged the defense was technically successful; the debate shifted to the evidential problem of evil (William Rowe, Paul Draper), where Plantinga's contribution interacts with skeptical theism and other defenses.

See Free Will Defense and Problem of Evil.

The warrant trilogy

Plantinga's mature epistemological framework, three volumes published by Oxford University Press:

• Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), a critical survey of competing accounts of warrant (the property that, together with true belief, makes knowledge): coherentism, reliabilism, Chisholmian internalism, etc. Each is found wanting.
• Warrant and Proper Function (1993), Plantinga's positive account: a true belief has warrant when it is produced by cognitive faculties (a) functioning properly, (b) in an appropriate epistemic environment, (c) according to a design plan, (d) aimed at truth. This is a "proper-functionalist" account; design-talk is unavoidable.
• Warranted Christian Belief (2000), the application volume. If Christianity is true, then God designed human cognitive faculties (including the sensus divinitatis and the internal witness of the Holy Spirit), and Christian belief produced by those faculties under their design plan has warrant in the same way ordinary perceptual belief does. The "de jure" question (is Christian belief rational?) cannot be settled independently of the "de facto" question (is Christianity true?). If Christianity is true, Christian belief is very probably warranted; if false, very probably not.

The trilogy is the most ambitious Christian philosophical project of its generation and remains a primary reference point in contemporary religious epistemology.

Society of Christian Philosophers and the analytic-Christian renaissance

In 1978 Plantinga, William P. Alston, Robert Audi, George Mavrodes, and others founded the Society of Christian Philosophers, a professional society within the American Philosophical Association for philosophers committed both to first-rate philosophical work and to the Christian tradition. The Society's journal Faith and Philosophy (founded 1984) became the leading venue for analytic philosophy of religion.

Plantinga's 1983 inaugural address as the Society's president, "Advice to Christian Philosophers", urged Christian philosophers to pursue their own research programs from within the resources of the Christian tradition, rather than restricting themselves to topics and methods set by the secular mainstream. The address is widely credited with helping launch a generation of explicitly Christian work in analytic philosophy.

By the early 21st century the philosophy of religion was one of the most vigorous subfields of analytic philosophy. Quentin Smith, an atheist philosopher of religion, conceded in 2001 that "God is not 'dead' in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments." The shift owed more to Plantinga than to any other single figure.

Key publications

• God and Other Minds (1967), the parity argument: belief in God on par with belief in other minds
• The Nature of Necessity (1974), modal metaphysics, transworld depravity, the modal ontological argument
• God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), popular-level free will defense and ontological argument
• Does God Have a Nature? (1980), critique of nominalism about divine attributes
• Faith and Rationality (1983, co-edited with Nicholas Wolterstorff), foundational Reformed-epistemology essays
• Warrant: The Current Debate (1993)
• Warrant and Proper Function (1993)
• Warranted Christian Belief (2000)
• Knowledge of God (2008, co-authored with atheist Michael Tooley), point-counterpoint exchange
• Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (2011), argues there is superficial conflict and deep concord between Christianity and science, and superficial concord and deep conflict between naturalism and science
• Knowledge and Christian Belief (2015), condensed lay-accessible version of Warranted Christian Belief

Major secondary literature

• Deane-Peter Baker (ed.), Alvin Plantinga (Cambridge, 2007), the Contemporary Philosophy in Focus volume
• James Sennett, Modality, Probability, and Rationality: A Critical Examination of Alvin Plantinga's Philosophy (1992)
• Trent Dougherty and Jerry Walls (eds.), Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God: The Plantinga Project (Oxford, 2018)
• James Beilby and Paul Eddy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Theism (2012)

Plantinga across the codex

Plantinga is load-bearing in more of the codex than any other modern philosopher, which is itself a measure of his reach. The main threads:

Arguments he originated or reformulated

• Modal Ontological Argument, the S5 reformulation of Anselm from The Nature of Necessity (1974)
• Argument from the Reliability of Reason, the EAAN
• Free Will Defense and Problem of Evil, the response that closed the logical problem of evil
• Modal Argument from Mind and Substance Dualism, modal conceivability arguments refined into modal-property terms
• Stealing from God Argument, where the EAAN supplies the rigorous philosophical version alongside Lewis's Miracles

Fields his work anchors

• Epistemology and Foundationalism, proper function and warrant as the exemplar of warrant-based externalism; the self-refutation complaint against the classical foundationalist criterion traces to "Reason and Belief in God"
• Modal Logic and Necessary vs Contingent Being, the possible-worlds framework underlying the modal arguments
• Presuppositionalism and Empiricism, where Reformed Epistemology stands as the warrant-theoretic alternative to evidentialism
• Rationalism, modal rationalism and the tension the EAAN identifies between the a priori and evolutionary reliability
• Theories of Truth and Critical Thinking Christian Framework

Debates he sits inside

• Molinism, Libertarian Free Will, Foreknowledge vs Causation, Predestination, and Free Will and Determinism. He is not strictly a Molinist, but The Nature of Necessity brought counterfactuals of creaturely freedom back into analytic philosophy through transworld depravity
• Materialism and Hard Determinism, where Warrant and Proper Function and the EAAN give the self-defeat objection its rigorous form
• Scientism and Intelligent Design, where Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011) argues the deep conflict is between science and naturalism rather than science and theism
• Anthropic Principle, where he replies that a multiverse is itself something a designing mind could create
• Christology, where Warranted Christian Belief extends the warrant framework to specifically Christian doctrine

Influence and legacy

Plantinga's influence on contemporary Christian philosophy and apologetics is hard to overstate. Direct lines of inheritance:

• William Lane Craig, working in the same analytic philosophical tradition; Craig's Kalam program develops the same project of doing first-rate academic philosophy from explicitly Christian commitments
• J.P. Moreland, Reformed-epistemology-friendly approach to consciousness, dualism, and Christian philosophy
• Michael Murray, Notre Dame student and collaborator; Plantinga's influence on philosophy of religion at Notre Dame and Biola
• Kevin Diller, Theology's Epistemological Dilemma (2014), integrates Plantinga and Barth
• Nicholas Wolterstorff, long-time collaborator and co-editor of Faith and Rationality
• William P. Alston, religious-experience parallel to Plantinga's epistemological program
• Eleonore Stump, Augustinian-Thomist work on suffering and divine action, in dialogue with Plantinga's framework

The deeper legacy is methodological: Plantinga modeled what it looks like to do philosophy at the highest professional level while holding orthodox Christian commitments, integrating Reformed theology (the sensus divinitatis, total depravity's epistemic implications, Calvinist confidence in God's providential design of human faculties) with cutting-edge analytic tools (modal logic, formal epistemology, possible-worlds semantics). After Plantinga, "Christian philosopher" is no longer an embarrassed compromise but a recognized research identity within secular academic philosophy. The Meta-Ontological Argument for Theism is one recent example of Plantinga's modal-ontological tradition continuing in 21st-century convergence-shaped form.

See also

• Reformed Epistemology, Plantinga's signature epistemological program
• Modal Ontological Argument, Plantinga's S5 reformulation of Anselm
• Argument from the Reliability of Reason, the EAAN with C. S. Lewis's precursor
• Fitness Beats Truth Argument, the contemporary empirical-mathematical complement to EAAN (Hoffman + Prakash 2014); where Plantinga reasoned philosophically that natural selection cannot guarantee truth-tracking, Hoffman proves it formally and simulates the extinction
• Donald Hoffman, the cognitive scientist whose FBT theorem and evolutionary simulations supply the empirical backbone of the above
• Free Will Defense, Plantinga's response to the logical problem of evil
• Problem of Evil, the broader debate Plantinga reframed
• Meta-Ontological Argument for Theism, 21st-century convergence in the Plantinga modal tradition
• Calvinism, the Reformed theological backdrop of Plantinga's sensus divinitatis
• Anselm, the medieval source of the ontological argument
• Augustine, the patristic source of Reformed anthropology
• C.S. Lewis, Miracles ch. 3 as literary precursor to the EAAN
• William Lane Craig, the most influential apologetic inheritor of the analytic-Christian-philosophy turn
• J.P. Moreland, parallel Christian-analytic project on consciousness and dualism