Alvin Plantinga

Background

Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932) is an American analytic philosopher, long associated with Calvin College and the University of Notre Dame, and the founding figure of Reformed epistemology. No scholar holds positions in more of this wiki's debates: his free-will defense is widely credited with settling the logical problem of evil, his maximal-greatness argument is "the most influential MOA" in the current literature (SEP 'Ontological Arguments' §8), and his warrant epistemology reframes whether theistic belief needs evidence at all.

His program has a defensive wing (defenses rather than theodicies; proper basicality rather than inference) and an offensive one: the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, on which "if both naturalism and evolution are true, then it's unlikely we would have reliable cognitive faculties" (SEP 'Religion and Science' §1.3).

Positions held in this wiki

• The Logical Problem of Evil — the flagship. Starting from Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence" (1955), Plantinga argued for the compatibility of God and evil, holding that residual anguish calls not for argument but for "pastoral care" (Plantinga 1974a, 63–4, at SEP 'Problem of Evil' §1.3).
• The Evidential Problem of Evil — pressed the original criticism of Rowe's inference and the total-evidence point: the atheologian "would be obliged to consider all the sorts of reasons natural theologians have invoked in favor of theistic belief" (Plantinga 1979, 3, at SEP §6.1).
• The Ontological Argument — the S5 argument from maximal greatness of The Nature of Necessity (1974).
• Divine Hiddenness — the Aquinas/Calvin model: nonbelief traced to a "cognitive-affective disorder" healed by the Spirit (SEP 'Epistemology of Religion' §7).
• Religious Pluralism — exclusivists may be "epistemically favored"; if beliefs of that type are true, believers "are probably in a better epistemic position" than dissenters (Plantinga 1997, 296, at SEP 'Religious Diversity' §3).
• Methodological Naturalism — Scope and Limits and The Origin of Life — the EAAN and guided-mutation compatibilism of Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011).

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: all of Plantinga's monographs are copyright-locked; the views above are reconstructed from SEP entries. The appearedtoblogly collection contains no Plantinga primary texts, but his Principle of Dwindling Probabilities (Plantinga 2000, 268–80) is quoted and criticized at length in the in-corpus McGrew & McGrew paper (McGrew & McGrew 2016).

Principal critics

• J. L. Mackie — the incompatibility argument the free-will defense answers.
• Michael Tooley — SEP author; charges that Plantinga engaged only the weakest, most abstract versions of the argument from evil (SEP §1.3).
• William L. Rowe — evidential-argument interlocutor.
• J. L. Schellenberg — hiddenness pressure on the sensus-divinitatis account of nonbelief.
• Timothy & Lydia McGrew — in-corpus critics of the Principle of Dwindling Probabilities.

See also

• William Lane Craig, Richard Swinburne — evidentialist co-belligerents; Plantinga's warrant program diverges by denying that Christian belief needs their arguments.
• William P. Alston — the doxastic-practice twin of Plantinga's particularism.
• Peter van Inwagen — heir of the defense-not-theodicy strategy.