Theopedia

Alvin Plantinga

Overview

Alvin Plantinga (born 1932) is an American analytic philosopher known for his work in philosophy of religion and epistemology, the study of how belief can be justified or warranted. A 1980 profile in Time magazine called him “America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God.”1 He developed “Reformed epistemology,” an argument that belief in God can be rationally warranted without first being proved from other evidence, and a philosophical critique of the classical doctrine that God is simple, without composition of parts.

Life and Ministry

Plantinga graduated from Calvin College in 1954, earned an M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1955, and completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale University in 1958.2 He taught philosophy at his alma mater, Calvin College, from 1963 to 1982, then moved to the University of Notre Dame as the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy.2 Over his career he delivered more than 200 guest lectures at universities and conferences across North America, Europe, and Australia.2

Theological Contribution

Plantinga’s central contribution is what he calls “Reformed epistemology”: the claim that belief in God can be properly basic, held rationally without being derived as the conclusion of an argument from other evidence, in the same way beliefs like “I had breakfast this morning” are held without needing independent proof.3 Steven J. Duby identifies this as one of the major modern challenges to natural theology, the project of arguing for God’s existence from reason and evidence alone: where Duby’s own project works to rehabilitate natural theology from Scripture and the Reformed orthodox tradition, he treats Plantinga’s epistemology, alongside Barth’s and Bavinck’s objections, as a serious case that a natural-theology project has to answer rather than dismiss.3 Elsewhere in the same discussion, Duby draws directly on Plantinga’s own reading of Thomas Aquinas, noting that “Plantinga himself notes[ that] Thomas acknowledges in [Summa Contra Gentiles] 3.38 an ‘immediate’ natural knowledge of God.”4

Plantinga’s warrant epistemology has also been put to constructive use in Reformed argument for Scripture’s authority. Michael Kruger’s case that the New Testament canon is “self-authenticating” rests on the same properly-basic-belief framework, arguing that belief in Scripture’s divine origin, produced in a believer by the Holy Spirit’s testimony, does not need to rest on external evidential proof before it counts as warranted.5 Kruger cites Plantinga’s own extended treatment of this point in the “Testimonium” chapter of Warranted Christian Belief.5

A separate strand of Plantinga’s work challenges the classical doctrine of divine simplicity, the teaching that God’s attributes are not separate parts added to his being but are identical with his one undivided essence. Plantinga argued that simplicity, taken strictly, collapses God’s attributes into a single property and makes God himself a “mere abstract object”: “if God is identical with each of his properties, then each of his properties is identical with each of his properties, so that God has but one property.”6 This argument has been taken up by theologians such as Cornelius Plantinga in building a case against simplicity from within contemporary Trinitarian theology.6

Plantinga has also written a “free will defense” against the logical problem of evil, a modal version of the ontological argument for God’s existence, and an “evolutionary argument against naturalism” contending that evolutionary theory and philosophical naturalism, taken together, undercut confidence in the reliability of the very cognitive faculties naturalism depends on.1

Historical Significance

Later Reformed writers have had to engage Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology directly rather than set it aside: Duby treats it as one of the major challenges a defense of natural theology has to answer, while Kruger builds his own argument for the canon’s authority on Plantinga’s warrant framework, adopting his “properly basic” terminology.35 His critique of divine simplicity is engaged the same way in Goad’s dissertation-length study of Trinitarian theology, as an objection that a defense of simplicity has to answer rather than ignore.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. “Modernizing the Case for God,” Time, November 3, 1980. ↩ ↩2

  2. “Alvin Plantinga,” University of California, Santa Barbara, Fellowship of Scholars of Christian Faith biography page. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 2, “Preparation for the School of Grace,” 104. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Duby, God in Himself, 125. ↩

  5. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 2, “Tracing the Origins,” citing Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 374-421. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Keith Wesley Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars: A Comparison of Gregory of Nazianzus and Some Contemporary Models” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), chap. 6, “Simplicity, Being, and Persons: A Discrepancy of Definitions,” 240. ↩ ↩2 ↩3