Epistemology as Theology

An Evaluation of Alvin Plantinga's Religious Epistemology

James Beilby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351939317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Alvin Plantinga is arguably one of the most influential philosophers of our time. Much of his career has been devoted to explaining and defending the intellectual acceptability of Christian belief. Recently he has developed a comprehensive, rigorous, and distinctively Christian religious epistemology. This book presents the development of Plantinga's religious epistemology before considering Plantinga's mature religious epistemology in detail. Locating Plantinga's most recent work in the context of his theological assumptions, his previous work on religious epistemology, and in the context of the current debate over how knowledge should be characterized, Beilby blends theological and philosophical discussion to offer a unique perspective on Plantinga's influential proposal.

Part I
The Development of Plantinga's Religious Epistemology

Chapter 1
The Background to Plantinga's Religious Epistemology

Introduction

Before launching a discussion of Plantinga's religious epistemology, it is appropriate (and necessary) to place Plantinga's work in context. In this case sketching the relevant context will involve much more than analyzing Plantinga's philosophical commitments, for, as we shall see, not only does his philosophical work address theological questions, it is affected at a deep conceptual level by his theological commitments. Consequently, it is also necessary to look at Plantinga's personal and ecclesiological background in order to gain some understanding of his religious and theological commitments. To this end, in this chapter I will focus on three issues: (1) Plantinga's personal and professional development, (2) his major writings, and (3) themes which have endured in his work throughout the years. I will close this chapter with a brief appraisal of Plantinga's influence in the academic world. The task for this chapter, therefore, in barest terms, is to get to know Alvin Plantinga both personally and professionally, both as eminent analytic philosopher of religion and as committed believer in God.

Alvin Plantinga: A Brief Personal and Professional Biography

Alvin Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan to Cornelius and Lettie Plantinga. Both sets of Plantinga's grandparents were reared in Calvinist churches originating in the so-called Afscheiding or succession of 1834 in which many congregations seceded from the Dutch state church and created the Gereformeerde Kerken, dedicated to the practice of historic Calvinism.¹ Despite significant persecution, the Seceders held fast to their ideals-especially the idea that religion was not just 'a private matter' or 'something done on Sundays' but was the central reality of all life. They were also committed to the idea of Christian education, holding that there was no such thing as education that is simultaneously reasonably full-orbed and religiously neutral.

Plantinga's grandparents brought their emphasis on education, particularly higher education, and their conviction that religious beliefs are the central reality of life from the Netherlands when they emigrated to the United States. The value placed on education, and specifically religious education, was demonstrated by Plantinga's grandfather, Andrew Plantinga. After seeing that his son Cornelius (Alvin's father) was not interested in following in his footsteps as a farmer in Sheldon, Iowa, but was instead more interested in books, Andrew (Alvin's grandfather) made the decision to move the entire family to Holland, Michigan so Cornelius could attend a Calvinist Christian High School. After graduating, Cornelius attended Calvin College, studied under William Harry Jellema, decided to become a philosopher, and eventually went on to do graduate work at the University of Michigan and Duke University.

After graduating with a Ph.D. in philosophy (plus an M.A. in psychology and a degree in education thrown in for good measure) Cornelius was offered a position at Huron College, a small Presbyterian college in South Dakota. There Alvin grew up with his brothers, Leon, Terell, and Cornelius, Jr. At fourteen, after his father introduced him to Plato, Alvin decided that he wanted to become a philosopher. To this end, in January of 1950, and with his entire family along for the ride (as Cornelius had just been offered a position in the psychology department), Alvin Plantinga enrolled at Calvin College.

During his first semester at Calvin (in the Spring of 1950 ), on a whim Plantinga applied for and was awarded a 'nice fat scholarship' to attend Harvard. He later characterized his time at Harvard as 'enormously impressive and very much to my liking.'² While attending Harvard two important and formative events occurred. First, Plantinga encountered serious and ardent non-Christians for the first time. He recounts being struck by the 'enormous diversity of opinions about [religious] matters, some of them held by highly intelligent and accomplished people who had little but contempt for what I believed.'³ This diversity caused him to evaluate and question his own beliefs, but as he did so he began to wonder whether the objections to traditional Christian belief had the substance they appeared to have on the surface. He viewed the objection that 'it is impossible for "modern man" to believe in God given what we know now' (à la Bultrnann) with particular disdain. Consequently, his time at Harvard began his continuing interest in answering objections to the Christian faith.

Secondly, while at Harvard, Plantinga had an experience that 'resolved his doubts' and has profoundly affected his approach to belief in God ever since. One evening, on his way back to his dorm from dinner he had a profound religious experience:

Suddenly it was as if the heavens opened; I heard, so it seemed, music of overwhelming power and grandeur and sweetness; there was light of unimaginable splendor and beauty; it seemed I could see into heaven itself; and I suddenly saw or perhaps felt with great clarity and persuasion and conviction that the Lord was really there and was all that I thought.⁴

Compared to this experience, the significance of arguments for and against God's existence seemed 'merely academic, of little existential concern.'⁵ Since then, Plantinga records many other occasions on which 'I have felt the presence of God, sometimes very powerfully.'⁶

Plantinga might have completed his college years at Harvard had he not made a routine trip horne to visit his parents during the Spring of 1951. During his visit he sat in on the class of William Jellema, his father's former professor. Plantinga found Jellema's teaching, particularly the way he handled objections to Christianity, 'enormously impressive. ' The result of this experience was that despite the fruitfulness of his time at Harvard, Plantinga decided to return to Calvin. He recounts: 'That was as important a decision, and as good a decision, as I've ever made.'⁷

At Calvin College, a place Plantinga cites as 'the major intellectual influence in my life,'⁸ he studied philosophy under Jellema and Henry Stob. Under their tutelage, Plantinga received a heavy dose of the history of philosophy as well as a good deal of language study, for in those days at Calvin translations were deemed to be inadequate for the task of doing serious work in the history of philosophy. In addition to philosophy, Plantinga also majored in psychology and English literature. Most importantly, in all of his academic training at Calvin, the idea that there is no such thing as a 'serious, substantial and relatively complete intellectual endeavor that is religiously neutral' was continually emphasized.⁹

While at Calvin, Plantinga met and eventually married Kathleen De Boer, who was also of Dutch Christian Reformed immigrant lineage. Kathleen, being raised in Lynden, Washington, introduced Plantinga to the mountains and thus instigated his love affair with the mountains and with mountain and rock climbing in particular.

After graduating from Calvin in 1953, Plantinga enrolled in graduate work at the University of Michigan where he studied under William Alston, Richard Cartwright, and William Frankena. While at Michigan, Plantinga further fostered his enduring interest in the various objections to traditional theism: the problem of evil, the Freudian claim that belief in God is a product of wish-fulfillment, the positivistic claim that religious language is meaningless, and Bultmann's claim that traditional belief in God was 'outmoded' in the age of the 'electric light and the wireless.'¹⁰

While Plantinga found his time at Michigan 'pleasant and instructive.' In September of 1955 he entered a Ph.D. program at Yale. At Yale, Plantinga studied under Paul Weiss and Brand Blanshard and wrote his dissertation on the relationship between ethics and metaphysical naturalism.¹¹ His own comments suggest that while his graduate work at both Michigan and Yale was beneficial and stimulating in a variety of ways, it was not completely satisfactory. Part of the reason for Plantinga's dissatisfaction can be found in his desire—a desire founded and fostered at Calvin—to connect philosophy to one's big questions of life, to connect his philosophy to his religious and theological commitments. While neither Michigan nor Yale partook in the au courant positivistic mind set—in fact, Plantinga remembers that most people at Yale displayed a certain scorn for positivism¹²—neither school really dealt with the questions Plantinga deemed to be the most important. At Yale, if one raised a philosophical question, the standard response would involve cataloging the various possible perspectives: rationalist, idealist, empiricist, etc. But what Plantinga considered to be the more important question—'what is the truth about this matter?'—was often greeted with disdain and treated as unduly naive.¹³

In 1957, Plantinga began teaching in the Directed Studies Program at Yale. However, his teaching at Yale was short-lived, for in response to numerous and ardent solicitations by George Nakhnikian, Plantinga accepted a position in the philosophy department at Wayne State University. His time at Wayne State was incredibly fruitful, largely due to the interaction of the members of the philosophy department. Plantinga characterized the philosophy department at Wayne State as 'less of a philosophy department than a loosely organized but extremely intense discussion society.'¹⁴ (Plantinga recounts the attitude toward teaching as 'it might be important, but it certainly did tend to break up the day.'¹⁵) Plantinga and his new colleagues, George Nakhnikian, Edmund Gettier, Robert Sleigh, Hector Neri-Casteneda, Richard Cartwright, and Keith Lehrer, delved deeply into many important philosophical questions, such as Wittgenstein's private language argument and the relationship between modality and propositions. It is also interesting to note that Plantinga was involved in the conversations surrounding the publication of what is probably the most famous two page paper in contemporary epistemology, Edmund Gettier's 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?'¹⁶ While at Wayne State, Plantinga was introduced, through Cartwright and Sleigh (both of whom studied at Brown), to the work of Roderick Chisholm, a philosopher who greatly influenced the development of Plantinga's epistemology.¹⁷

Despite the incredibly fertile intellectual soil of Wayne State, and after rejecting numerous very attractive offers in order to stay there,¹⁸ in 1963 Plantinga accepted an offer to replace Harry Jellema at Calvin. The reasons behind such a move were not apparent to many of his colleagues and friends, but they are probably the same reasons that caused his grandfather to move from Iowa to Michigan, the same reasons Plantinga's father moved his family from North Dakota to Michigan, and the same reasons Plantinga decided to leave Harvard for Calvin College-namely, his commitment to the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed theology it practi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• PART I: THE DEVELOPMENT OF PLANTINGA'S RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY
• PART II: AN EVALUATION OF PLANTINGA'S RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY
• Bibliography
• Name and Subject Index