Knowledge and Christian Belief
by alvin plantinga
eerdmans, 141 pages, $16
D
oes God exist? Is it reasonable to believe in God? A common line of thought holds these two questions to be importantly distinct. Since no one has been able to settle the matter of God’s existence one way or another, it has to be the subject of belief rather than knowledge. But we can still ask whether that belief is reasonable or not. Once the questions are distinguished in this way, it is easy to identify a long line of “modern” thinkers who are agnostic about the reality of God’s existence but think it obvious, or at any rate easy to show, that belief in God is irrational. The writers that Mark Johnston has dubbed “undergraduate atheists”—Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and co.—have attracted a great deal of attention and sold several million books. But they are just the latest wave in a long line. Furthermore, as the title of Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell indicates, this wave makes use of a recurrent idea whose most famous exponents were Marx and Freud—namely, the suspicion that there must be some nonrational driver behind religious belief, since its irrationality so obviously conflicts with its persistence.
Alvin Plantinga, arguably the most brilliant philosopher of religion in half a century or more, has spent many years undermining the assumptions that lie behind this familiar and plausible way of thinking. Plantinga thinks that belief in God is warranted if there really is a God, and unwarranted only if there is not. This may sound like stating the trivially true, but in fact it is an astute and powerful move that owes its origins to two of the greatest Christian theologians—Thomas Aquinas and Calvin.
