Alvin Plantinga

Epistemic Probability and Evil

The amount and variety of evil in our world has often baffled and perplexed believers in God. Evil can occasion deeper problems: faced with the shocking concreteness of a particularly appalling example of it in his own life or the life of someone close to him, a believer may find himself tempted to take towards God an attitude he himself deplores; such evil can incline him to mistrust God, to be angry with him, to adopt towards him an attitude of suspicion and distrust, or bitterness and rebellion. This is a pastoral, or religious, or existential problem of evil.

THE PROSPECTS FOR NATURAL THEOLOGY

What is natural theology, and what is it for? As to what it is, for present purposes we may take it, very simply, to be the attempt to provide proofs or arguments for the existence of God. More exactly, it is the project of producing proofs or arguments for theism, the view (roughly speaking) that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly good person who has created the world. Clearly there are many things one might hope to accomplish by offering such arguments. You might be a believer in God yourself and might try to convince someone else to join you in this belief. Or you might be a wavering or troubled believer in God, and be trying to convince yourself. Or you might have no initial views on the subject and propose to come to a position on the matter by way of considering the evidence for and against. Or you might think theism useful in philosophy, in that it offers suggestions for answers to a wide range of otherwise intractable questions, and look for some arguments; you might then look for some arguments for theism, as part of your effort to deal with those questions.

PROBABILITY AND DEFEATERS

: Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober raise several objections to my evolutionary argument against naturalism; I reply to four of them.

Theism and Mathematics

Abstract The author investigates the connection between God and mathematics, and argues (1) that the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” makes much better sense from the perspective of theism than from that of naturalism, (2) that the accessibility (to us human beings) of advanced mathematics is much more likely given theism than given naturalism, (3) that the existence of sets, numbers, functions and the like fits in much better with theism than with naturalism, and (4) that the alleged epistemological obstacles to knowledge of mathematics offered by the abstract character of numbers, sets, etc., disappear from the point of view of theism.

Warranted Christian Belief: The Aquinas/Calvin Model

Early in the book Warranted Christian Belief I propose a model according to which belief in God can have the three varieties of positive epistemic status: justification, rationality (in both its external and internal guises), and warrant. But what about specifically Christian belief, belief, not just in God, but in Trinity, incarnation, Christ’s resurrection, atonement, forgiveness of sins, salvation, regeneration, eternal life? How can we think of the full panoply of Christian belief as enjoying justification, rationality in both its internal and external varieties, and warrant? How can we possibly think of these beliefs — some of which, as David Hume loved to point out, go entirely contrary to ordinary human experience — as reasonable or rational, let alone warranted, let alone having warrant sufficient for knowledge? The materials for an answer lie close at hand. Actually, the materials have lain close at hand for several centuries — certainly since the publication of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections and John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.1 As a matter of fact, they have lain close at hand for much longer than that: much of what Calvin says can be usefully seen as a development of remarks of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura. Indeed, these materials go much further back yet, all the way back to the New Testament, in particular the gospel of John and the epistles of Paul.

Necessary and Essential Existence

For suppose (3) is true and let Wbe any possible world. In Wthereare (by (3)) no nonexistent objects; i.e., if W had been actual, the proposition there are no nonexistent objects would have been true. So in W there are no nonexistent objects that have at least one property. Hence in Wthereare no nonexistent objects that have the property of nonexistence. But of course in Wthere are also no existent objects that have nonexistence. Hence in W there are no objects at all that have nonexistence; had W been actual, there would have been no objects