A few years ago I started the official site for Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. I had contacted him about doing a site after reading Warranted Christian Belief (read it all for free here). There were papers and other things floating around the web that weren’t really consolidated into one place. He was interested in the idea of culling together everything, so with the help of the illustrating skills of one Mr. Sean Cannon, alvinplantinga.org was launched.
Unfortunately, Dr. Plantinga and I were and are very busy people so the site didn’t develop much, and the domain expired and is now in registration limbo. I have been emailing another Plantinga fan about having him resurrect the site, or some variant of it. He purchased alvinplantinga.net and will be taking over maintenance of the site once it gets going. Whether or not it will be an official site remains to be seen; Dr. P retired last month so I don’t know how interested he will be in this sort of thing.
Warranted is the only book of his that I’ve read, but having only a primitive understand of epistemology I can say that it still affected me greatly — and even though it’s very readable there were some parts that just fell out my ear. I never thought that the “religious faith = irrational” argument was really much more than a strawman, but the idea that religious faith can be rationally consistent with what we epistemically know already and not coming to it ex nihilo was an interesting idea. And like any good philosophy book it has affected my fiction writing, although I wouldn’t be able to point out exactly where (chalk it up to just “general knowledge expansion” and leave it at that).
Below is a quote from the book, like Economics In One Lesson, that sums up the entire “lesson”:
Christian belief is produced by a cognitive process (the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit” [in Aquinas’ words] or the “internal testimony of the Holy Spirit” [in Calvin’s words] functioning properly in an appropriate epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth.
2 Comments
I had never heard of Prof. Plantinga before starting “the Reason for God” by Tim Keller, even living in South Bend. However, after what I have read in that book and here, I’m definitely interested to see what he has to say.
I would definitely recommend reading Warranted Christian Belief. It’s lengthy but very readable if you put some concentration into it. The things he says there are things that I and a lot of other Christians think but aren’t able to really articulate about the nature of our belief.