Plantinga Alvin - Warranted Christian Belief

WARRANTED CHRISTIAN BELIEF

Alvin Plantinga

Oxford University Press

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Copyright 2000 by Alvin Plantinga

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plantinga, Alvin.
Warranted Christian belief / Alvin Plantinga.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 019-5131932 (pbk.)ISBN 019-5131924
1. Apologetics. 2. ChristianityPhilosophy. 3. Faith and reasonChristianity.
I. Title.
BT1102 .P57 1999
230.01dc21 98.054362

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To
WILLIAM P. ALSTON
Mentor, Model, Friend

This book is about the intellectual or rational acceptability of Christian belief. When I speak here of Christian belief, I mean what is common to the great creeds of the main branches of the Christian church, what unites Calvin and Aquinas, Luther and Augustine, Menno Simons and Karl Barth, Mother Teresa and St. Maximus the Confessor, Billy Graham and St. Gregory Palamasclassical Christian belief, as we might call it.

Classical Christian belief includes, in the first place, the belief that there is such a person as God. God is a person: that is, a being with intellect and will. A person has (or can have) knowledge and belief, but also affections, loves, and hates; a person, furthermore, also has or can have intentions, and can act so as to fulfill them. God has all of these qualities and has some (knowledge, power, and love, for example) to the maximal degree. God is thus all-knowing and all-powerful; he is also perfectly good and wholly loving. Still further, he has created the universe and constantly upholds and providentially guides it. This is the theistic component of Christian belief. But there is also the uniquely Christian component: that we human beings are somehow mired in rebellion and sin, that we consequently require deliverance and salvation, and that God has arranged for that deliverance through the sacrificial suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was both a man and also the second member of the Trinity, the uniquely divine son of God. I shall use the term Christian belief to designate these two components taken together. Of course, I realize that others may use that term more narrowly or more broadly. There is no need to argue about words here: the beliefs I mentioned are the ones I shall discuss, however exactly we propose to use the term Christian. I also recognize that there are partial approximations to Christian belief so understood, as well as borderline cases, beliefs such that it simply isnt clear whether they qualify as Christian belief. All of this is true, but as far as I can see, none of it compromises my project.

Accordingly, our question is this: is belief of this sort intellectually acceptable? In particular, is it intellectually acceptable for us, now? For educated and intelligent people living in the twenty-first century, with all that has happened over the last four or five hundred years? Some will concede that Christian belief was acceptable and even appropriate for our ancestors, people who knew little of other religions, who knew nothing of evolution and our animal ancestry, nothing of contemporary subatomic physics and the strange, eerie, disquieting world it postulates, nothing of those great masters of suspicion, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, nothing of the acids of modern historical biblical criticism. But for us enlightened contemporary intellectuals (so the claim continues) things are wholly different; for people who know about those things (people of our rather impressive intellectual attainments), there is something naive and foolish, or perhaps bullheaded and irresponsible, or even vaguely pathological in holding onto such belief.

But cant we be a little more precise about the objection? What, exactly, is the problem? The answer, I think, is that there are alleged to be two main problems. Western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment has displayed at least two distinct styles of objection. First, there have been de facto objections: objections to the truth of Christian belief. Perhaps the most important de facto objection would be the argument from suffering and evil. This objection goes all the way back to Democritus in the ancient world but is also the most prominent contemporary de facto objection (see ). It has often been stated philosophically, but has also received powerful literary expression (for example, in Dostoevskis The Brothers Karamazov). The objection goes as follows: according to Christian belief, we human beings have been created by an all-powerful, all-knowing God who loves us enough to send his son, the second person of the divine Trinity, to suffer and die on our account; but given the devastating amount and variety of human suffering and evil in our sad world, this simply cant be true.

The argument from evil may be the most important de facto objection, but it isnt the only one. There are also the claims that crucial Christian doctrinesTrinity, Incarnation, or Atonement, for exampleare incoherent or necessarily false. Many have argued that the Christian doctrine of three divine persons with one nature cannot be coherently stated; many have claimed that it is not logically possible that a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, should also be the second person of the divine Trinity, and many have thought it impossible that one persons sufferingeven if that person is divineshould atone for someone elses sins. Indeed, there are claims that the advance of science has somehow shown that there really isnt any supernatural realm at allno God who has created us and governs our world, let alone a Trinity of divine persons, one of whom became a human being, died, and rose from the dead, thereby redeeming human beings from sin and suffering.

De facto objections, therefore, are many, and they enjoy a long and distinguished history in Western thought. Even more prevalent, however, have been de jure objections. These are arguments or claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view. There is, for example, the Freudian claim that belief in God is really a result of wish fulfillment; there is the evidentialist claim that there isnt sufficient evidence for Christian belief; and there is the pluralist claim that there is something arbitrary and even arrogant in holding that Christian belief is true and anything incompatible with it false. De facto and de jure objections are separate species, but they sometimes coincide. Thus there is a de jure objection from suffering and evil as well as a