Knowledge and Christian Belief

Alvin Plantinga

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2015 Alvin Plantinga

All rights reserved

Published 2015 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Plantinga, Alvin.

Knowledge and Christian belief / Alvin Plantinga.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-8028-7204-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Faith and reason—Christianity. 2. Apologetics.

3. Christianity—Philosophy. I. Title.

BT50.P535 2015

230.01—dc23

2014044388

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Preface

1. Can We Speak and Think about God?

2. What Is the Question?

3. Warranted Belief in God

4. The Extended A/C Model

5. Faith

6. Sealed Upon Our Hearts

7. Objections

8. Defeaters? Historical Biblical Criticism

9. Defeaters? Pluralism

10. Defeaters? Evil

Index

Preface

My book Warranted Christian Belief1 came out more than a dozen years ago. I still endorse nearly everything I wrote there; but some have told me the book is too long and in places too technical. I’m afraid I have to agree, and I would like to put things right. The result of my trying to put things right is the present book, Knowledge and Christian Belief. It is a shorter and (I hope) more user-friendly version of WCB. There are some changes of emphasis and a few changes of other sorts; but for the most part I follow the contours of WCB, adding a bit here and there, and of course subtracting a great deal of the detail. I’ve deleted the more difficult portions, but otherwise have used the words of WCB as much as possible. My hope is that the result will present the same ideas as the original, but in a briefer and more accessible fashion.

The chief topic to which the book is addressed is the question of the rationality, or sensibleness, or justification, of Christian belief. Of course this has been an important question for a good long time, going all the way back to the beginnings of Christianity, and becoming considerably more insistent since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This question has become even more important recently, with the so-called New Atheists bursting upon the scene. The central members of this outfit are the dreaded Four Horsemen—not the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, nor the legendary four horsemen of Notre Dame, but the four horsemen of Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and (the late) Christopher Hitchens. Their aim, it seems, is to run roughshod over religious belief.

Although the New Atheists are certainly inferior, philosophically speaking, to the old atheists (e.g., Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, and J. L. Mackie), they do seem to make a good deal more noise. One might say they are more style than substance, except that there isn’t much by way of style either; their preferred style seems to be less that of serious scholarly work than of pamphleteering and furious denunciation. They blame everything ...