Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who made belief in God a live option again inside university philosophy departments. + In April 1980 Time magazine ran a religion story that opened with a joke and a question: "God? Wasn’t he chased out of heaven by Marx, banished to the unconscious by Freud and announced by Nietzsche to be deceased?" The answer the article gave was that God was making a comeback, and that it was happening in the last place a reader would have guessed. Not in the churches, which had never been told he was in trouble, but among professional philosophers. Of the twenty-odd philosophers it named, the one it gave the most room to was a Christian Reformed professor at a small college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, whom it called "America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God." When Alvin Plantinga started graduate work in the mid-1950s, the ruling opinion in English-speaking philosophy was not that Christianity was false. It was that sentences about God failed to mean anything at all, and that a serious philosopher had no more business defending them than defending the proposition that Tuesday is blue. Plantinga did not answer that with piety or with complaint. He answered it in the profession’s own technical language, which meant modal logic, the branch of logic that handles what has to be true and what merely could have been, and possible worlds, which are the complete ways things could have gone instead, and long careful arguments about what it takes to know anything at all. He kept it up for fifty years. Here is the fact worth remembering. In 2001 the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith wrote that "God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments." Smith was not pleased about it, and he dated the change to a single book: Plantinga’s God and Other Minds, published in 1967.

(●) 1932 AD: Born in Ann Arbor into a Dutch immigrant family where philosophy was the family trade. + Alvin Carl Plantinga was born on 15 November 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while his father was a graduate student there. Cornelius A. Plantinga had come from Garyp, a village in the Dutch province of Friesland. He took a doctorate at Duke and spent his working life teaching philosophy and psychology at one small college after another, which meant the family moved. His mother, Lettie Bossenbroek, was Dutch-American too. Three brothers followed, one of whom, Cornelius Jr., would become president of Calvin Theological Seminary. The household was Christian Reformed, and church on Sunday could still be in Dutch. Plantinga has said that by eleven or twelve he and his friends were arguing about predestination and about whether God’s knowing the future leaves anybody free to do otherwise, which is a fair description of what he spent the next eighty years on. The family landed for a while in Jamestown, North Dakota, where his father taught, and he never quite got over the place. He wrote later of the haunting, supernal beauty of the prairie on a June morning, and of the meadowlarks, and said he left it regretfully.

(●) 1950 AD: He won a scholarship to Harvard and gave it up after sitting in on one class back home. + At the end of eleventh grade his father told him to skip his last year of high school and go to college, so in 1949, a few months short of seventeen, he enrolled at Jamestown College. When his father joined the faculty at Calvin College in January 1950 the son followed him there, and in his first semester at Calvin he won a scholarship to Harvard. He went, in the autumn of 1950, and spent two semesters in one of the strongest philosophy departments in America, taking philosophy from Raphael Demos and logic from W. V. O. Quine. He also spent them wondering whether the faith he had been raised in could survive the company. Then came the spring recess of 1951. He went home to Grand Rapids, sat in on three classes taught by William Harry Jellema, and that was the end of Harvard. Jellema, he wrote afterwards, "seemed to display astonishing and profound insights into the inner dynamics of modern philosophy," and "I came deeply under his spell; had he told me black was white I would have had a genuine intellectual struggle." What Jellema gave him was not comfort but a method: take the great modern systems seriously, find the assumptions underneath them, and notice that those assumptions are not neutral either. Plantinga withdrew from Harvard, finished at Calvin, and graduated in 1954.

(●) 1955 AD: He married Kathleen De Boer and finished his training at Michigan and Yale. + Kathleen De Boer had been a classmate of his, and he married her in June 1955. Four children came in time: Carl, Jane, William Harry, who was named for the teacher, and Ann. The master’s degree came from the University of Michigan the same year, where he worked with William Frankena, Richard Cartwright, and a young philosopher named William Alston. Alston was not then a believer, and there was no reason at the time to think he ever would be. He came back to the church in his fifties, and he became, along with Nicholas Wolterstorff, one of the two philosophers whose names would be tied to Plantinga’s for the rest of his working life. That is the sort of thing that happens over a long enough life in a small enough field. The doctorate came from Yale in 1958, supervised by Paul Weiss, with Brand Blanshard also in the department. The dissertation was on ethics and metaphysical naturalism, the view that the natural world studied by the sciences is all there is. He was arguing with that view at twenty-five and he was still arguing with it at eighty.

(●) 1958 AD: Wayne State dropped him into a department that argued for weeks at a stretch, and it taught him the trade. + After a year teaching at Yale he went to Wayne State University in Detroit, and later called it one of the best decisions he ever made. The department there had been assembled out of nowhere into one of the sharpest in the country, and it had been done in a hurry. George Nakhnikian, who had recruited him, was already in place, and so were Hector-Neri Castañeda, Robert Sleigh and Edmund Gettier; Richard Cartwright and Keith Lehrer arrived a couple of years later. In a room like that an argument does not stop when the seminar stops. It runs down the hall, and into the next day, and sometimes for weeks. One thing that came out of those corridors matters for the rest of the story. In 1963 Gettier published three pages in a journal called Analysis asking whether justified true belief is knowledge, and answered no, with two short counterexamples that philosophers have been trying to patch ever since. Thirty years later Plantinga would open his own account of knowledge by saying that the patching had failed and that the whole approach needed replacing. Wayne State also taught him what a Christian in that room was up against, and what he was not. His colleagues were not believers and did not pretend to find his faith interesting, but they took his arguments apart on the merits, which is all he ever asked anyone to do.

(●) 1963 AD: He went back to Calvin to fill his own teacher’s chair, and wrote the books that turned the field around. + Jellema retired, and Calvin asked the student to take the chair. Plantinga stayed nineteen years, and they were the years that changed the conversation. God and Other Minds came out in 1967 and argued, in the flat technical register of the journals, that belief in God stands or falls with belief that other people have minds, and that since the second is plainly reasonable, so is the first (T2). Seven years later came The Nature of Necessity, which is the odd one on the shelf: a hard book on modal logic that most of its readers bought for its metaphysics, its account of what sorts of things there are and what they are like, and that quietly carried, almost as applications of the machinery, a repaired version of Anselm’s ontological argument (T5) and the free will defense (T1). The same year he published God, Freedom, and Evil, which put that same free will defense into English a layman could follow, and it is still the book people are handed first. Then in 1980 came Does God Have a Nature?, out of a lecture at Marquette. In 1978 a small group of philosophers founded the Society of Christian Philosophers, with Alston as its first president, and it would grow into one of the largest single-interest groups in American philosophy. Two years later Time ran its story about God’s comeback. In 1981 Plantinga took office as president of the American Philosophical Association’s Western Division, the body now called the Central Division, and gave the presidential address at Columbus the following April, which is not an honour that gets handed out for piety.

(●) 1982 AD: Notre Dame gave him a chair, and he used the inaugural lecture to tell Christian philosophers to stop apologizing. + He moved to the University of Notre Dame as John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy and took over its Center for Philosophy of Religion, which under him became the place in the world to do this work. He stayed twenty-eight years. The inaugural address, delivered in 1983 and printed the next year in the first volume of the new journal Faith and Philosophy, was called "Advice to Christian Philosophers," and it is probably the most consequential lecture he ever gave. Its point was not that Christians should argue for their faith more loudly. It was that a Christian philosopher is entitled to start from what the Christian community actually believes, exactly as a naturalist starts from what he believes, rather than waiting for permission from a supposedly neutral consensus that turns out, on inspection, not to be neutral. The rest followed from there. Faith and Rationality, edited with Nicholas Wolterstorff in 1983, carried his long essay "Reason and Belief in God" and launched what everyone soon called Reformed epistemology. Epistemology is simply the study of knowledge and of when a person is entitled to believe a thing; Reformed names the Calvinist tradition he had been raised in, church on Sunday and predestination at eleven years old, and the two words together mean an account of knowledge worked out from inside that tradition rather than in spite of it. He was asked twice to give the Gifford Lectures, the Scottish series on natural theology, and few philosophers are asked once: at Aberdeen in 1987, where the three warrant books began, and at St Andrews in 2005, where the book on science and religion did. The warrant books themselves came out between 1993 and 2000. And the students kept arriving and then leaving to do the work elsewhere. Michael Bergmann, Thomas Flint, Kelly James Clark, Robin Collins, Trenton Merricks and Michael Rea all took chairs of their own, which is how a position stops being one man’s and starts being a school’s.

(●) 2010 AD: He retired to Grand Rapids, took a chair named for his old teacher, and the Templeton Prize came seven years later. + Plantinga retired from Notre Dame in 2010 and went home to Michigan, where Calvin made him the first holder of a chair named for Jellema and he went on teaching part time. Where the Conflict Really Lies, his book on science and religion, appeared in 2011. The mountains were the other half of the life. Rock climbing and mountaineering were his summer occupation for decades, and at seventy-two he was still working out most days to stay fit for it, which is worth remembering about a man whose books read as dry as a tax code. On 25 April 2017 the John Templeton Foundation named him that year’s laureate, and in September he was handed the prize, £1.1 million, at the Field Museum in Chicago. In 2022 the American Philosophical Association awarded for the first time a prize in his name, given for an essay on theism and judged by the standards he is known for: clarity, rigour, originality. He turned ninety-three in November 2025.

What He Taught

(T1) A world with free creatures who sometimes choose wrong may be better than a world with no free creatures at all. + Imagine a husband who tells his wife he loves her every morning at seven, without fail, because a chip in his head fires at seven. She has the words. She does not have a husband who loves her. Whatever love is, it cannot be installed. That is the intuition, and Plantinga turned it into a proof of a very particular kind. The target was the logical problem of evil, the charge (pressed hardest by the Australian atheist J. L. Mackie in 1955) that the Christian is not merely unsupported but self-contradictory: God is all-powerful, God is wholly good, and there is evil, and no two of those can sit with the third. A contradiction is a strong claim. It can be broken by one possible story on which all three are true together, and the story does not have to be the true one. What he offered in reply is what philosophers call a defense, and it is worth being clear how modest that word is. A theodicy is the ambitious project: an attempt to say why God actually permits the evil there is, which is what most people have in mind when they ask the question at a hospital bedside. A defense attempts nothing so grand. It only shows that the charge of contradiction fails, and for that a merely possible story is enough. Smaller job. Much easier one to finish. His story runs like this. To be significantly free is to be able, in some situation that matters morally, to do the right thing or the wrong one, with nothing outside you settling which way it goes. God can certainly make creatures like that. What he cannot do is make a free creature freely choose the good, any more than a novelist can be genuinely surprised by a character whose every line he is writing. The freedom and the guarantee cannot both be had at once, and that is not a limit on God’s power any more than his inability to draw a square circle is. So suppose, purely as a possibility, that every free creature God might have made suffers from what Plantinga named transworld depravity. The idea is this: whatever circumstances God set up around that creature, and there were endlessly many he might have set up, the creature would have gone wrong somewhere. Nobody has to believe that is actually true, and Plantinga does not say it is. It only has to be possible. And if it is so much as possible, then God could not have had free creatures and no moral evil, and the contradiction the charge alleged is gone. The verdict came in from both sides. Mackie himself went back to the question in 1982 and disputed the reply rather than repeating the original charge. The atheist philosopher William Rowe wrote in 1979 that, granting that free choice and determinism do not mix, there is "a fairly compelling argument" for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of the theistic God, and he footnoted Plantinga. Most of the argument since has moved to the evidential problem of evil, which asks not whether God and evil can both be real but whether so much horror is good evidence against him, and that is a different and harder discussion.

(Q) "A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all." + Source: Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, page 30; the same claim appears in The Nature of Necessity, pages 166 to 167. The sentence is the hinge of the free will defense (T1). Notice how carefully it is qualified: more valuable all else being equal, and said only of a world whose free creatures freely do more good than evil. Plantinga is not claiming to know why God permits what he permits. He is claiming that a good God could have a reason, and that this is enough to answer a charge of contradiction.

(T2) Belief in God can be entirely reasonable with no argument standing behind it. + You believe that the woman across the breakfast table has an inner life: that she feels the cold, that the pain in her ankle hurts her the way yours hurts you. You cannot check. All you ever observe is a body behaving. Philosophers have tried for three centuries to build an argument from that behaviour to that inner life, and the arguments are all leaky. Nobody concludes from this that believing in other people’s minds is irrational. We conclude that the leaky arguments were never what the belief rested on. God and Other Minds (1967) took that parallel and pressed it. Plantinga worked through the traditional arguments for God and found them wanting, worked through the traditional arguments against God and found those wanting too, and then turned to the analogical argument for other minds and found it in no better shape. His conclusion, on the last page of the book, was that "belief in other minds and belief in God are in the same epistemological boat; hence if either is rational, so is the other. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter." Over the next fifteen years that grew into a full position. The word to learn is basic. A belief is basic for you when you hold it but not on the strength of some other belief: that you had cereal this morning, that two and two are four, that you are in pain. Basic beliefs are the foundation, and the rest of what you believe is built on top of them the way a house is built on its footings. The question, then, is which beliefs are allowed down there in the footings, and the answer that ruled Western philosophy from Descartes to the twentieth century was classical foundationalism: only what is self-evident, or evident to the senses, or incorrigible (a report of your own experience that you cannot be wrong about). Everything else has to be argued for from those. That rule is where the demand for evidence comes from, and it is where the atheist gets the line that a believer without an argument is failing in his intellectual duty. Plantinga’s reply was not to meet the demand but to check the rule against itself. Is the rule self-evident? No. Evident to the senses? No. Incorrigible? No. So by its own standard the rule may not be believed, and a criterion that fails its own test is not a criterion. With that gone, the question of which beliefs may be basic has to be settled by looking at actual cases rather than by decree, and the Christian is under no obligation to accept a list drawn up by somebody who left his beliefs off it. There is a theological half to this, and it is old. John Calvin held that God has planted in every human being a sensus divinitatis, a sense of the divine: not an argument but a faculty, like sight, that produces belief in God when it is working and when the circumstances trigger it, in a night sky, in guilt, in gratitude, in danger. "That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute," Calvin wrote in the Institutes (book I, chapter 3, section 1, Beveridge translation). Paul says the same thing in Romans 1:19-20. On that account, a believer who has never read a page of philosophy is not believing without grounds; he is believing on the deliverance of a faculty God gave him, which is exactly what the rest of us are doing when we trust our eyes. The obvious objection came at once, and Plantinga named it himself: if belief in God can be basic, why not anything? Why not voodoo, why not astrology, why not the Great Pumpkin who returns each Halloween to the most sincere pumpkin patch? His answer is that saying there is no general criterion is not saying there are no cases. We reject the Great Pumpkin the way we reject any belief: there is no faculty that produces it, no circumstance that triggers it, and no community of people who have ever found it forced on them. A rule is not the only thing that can tell a good belief from a silly one.

(Q) "What the Reformers meant to hold is that it is entirely right, rational, reasonable, and proper to believe in God without any evidence or argument at all; in this respect belief in God resembles belief in the past, in the existence of other persons, and in the existence of material objects." + Source: Alvin Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God," in Faith and Rationality, edited by Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, page 17. He is stating the Reformed position at the opening of the essay and then spending the next seventy-odd pages defending it as his own (T2). Notice the company he puts belief in God in: the past, other persons, the chair under you. Nobody argues his way to those. In the companion paper of 1981, "Is Belief in God Properly Basic?", he put the same point at its strongest, holding that the believer is entirely within his intellectual rights even if he knows of no good theistic argument, does not believe there is one, and there is in fact none. Plantinga does not think that is the actual situation, and he spent decades collecting arguments. He does think the believer’s standing does not wait on them.

(T3) A belief is warranted when the mind that produced it was working the way it was meant to work. + Suppose you glance at the station clock, see ten past four, and believe it is ten past four. As it happens you are right. Also as it happens, the clock stopped dead twelve hours ago. Your belief is true, and you had every reason to hold it, and nobody would call it knowledge. That is the shape of the puzzle Edmund Gettier set in 1963, and it is why philosophers stopped saying that knowledge is simply justified true belief. Plantinga’s answer took three books. The word he coined for the missing ingredient is warrant: whatever it is that has to be added to a true belief to make it knowledge. And his account of warrant is not about the believer’s duties at all. It is about whether the equipment is working. A belief has warrant, roughly, when it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly, in the kind of environment those faculties were made for, according to a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs rather than at something else, and when a plan like that in fact yields truth most of the time. The stopped clock fails the second condition: your eyes and your habits of clock-reading are fine, but they were not designed for an environment containing dead clocks that look alive. Notice what that does to the argument about God. If knowledge depends on a design plan, then whether Christian belief amounts to knowledge depends on whether there is anyone who designed us and whether he meant us to know him. Suppose Christianity is false, that there is no God and we are the product of blind processes. Then there is no sensus divinitatis, no faculty aimed at knowing God, and belief in God is very probably produced by wishful thinking or fear or a cognitive accident, and so has no warrant. Now suppose Christianity is true. Then we were made in the image of a God who wants to be known, and belief in him is exactly what properly functioning equipment would produce, and it very probably does have warrant. The upshot, which Plantinga worked out over four hundred pages of Warranted Christian Belief (2000), is that the two questions cannot be pulled apart. The de facto question is whether Christianity is true. The de jure question is whether a person is within his rights to believe it, whether it is rational, justified, warranted. Sceptics have long preferred the second, because it looks as though you can settle it without settling the first: never mind whether it is true, you have no business believing it. Plantinga’s reply is that there is no such shortcut. Every serious version of the de jure objection turns out to depend on the assumption that Christianity is false. If you want to say Christian belief is unwarranted, you will have to argue that it is untrue, and that is a far longer walk. He was careful about what this does not do. It does not show Christianity is true, and he says so plainly. It clears the ground.

(Q) "But is it true? This is the really important question. And here we pass beyond the competence of philosophy, whose main competence, in this area, is to clear away certain objections, impedances, and obstacles to Christian belief. Speaking for myself and of course not in the name of philosophy, I can say only that it does, indeed, seem to me to be true, and to be the maximally important truth." + Source: Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, page 499; reworked at the close of the shorter version, Knowledge and Christian Belief (2015), page 126. These are the closing lines of the warrant trilogy, five hundred pages of technical epistemology ending in the first person. A philosopher who had just spent a career showing that the objections do not work declines, in the last paragraph, to claim more than he has earned (T3).

(T4) The real quarrel is not between science and Christian belief but between science and naturalism. + In July 1881 Charles Darwin wrote to a correspondent named William Graham and let something slip. He had just said he could not believe the universe was the result of chance. Then he added: "But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy." Plantinga picked that doubt up and made an argument of it, first in a paper in 1991 and then as the last chapter of Warrant and Proper Function. Start with naturalism, the view that there is no God and nothing beyond nature. Add evolution, which the naturalist accepts as the only story available for how we got here. Now ask what natural selection was selecting for. It was selecting for behaviour that keeps a creature alive and reproducing. Beliefs get selected only through the behaviour they help produce, and behaviour is a joint product of belief and desire, so the same useful running-away can be got from any number of ridiculous belief-and-desire pairs. Plantinga’s own example is a man named Paul who very much likes the idea of being eaten, and who runs off every time he sees a tiger because he thinks this particular tiger is unlikely to oblige him and a better prospect may be along shortly. So on naturalism plus evolution, what is the probability that our faculties are reliable, that they generally give us truth rather than merely useful noise? Plantinga argues it is low, or at best not assessable. And here is the sting: that verdict is itself a product of those same faculties. If you cannot trust the equipment, you cannot trust what the equipment has just told you about the equipment, and you cannot go on trusting naturalism either, because you believe that with the same brain. In the trade this is called picking up a defeater, which is a reason you have acquired for no longer trusting a belief you already hold. Walk into a factory, see a widget on the line glowing red, and you reasonably believe it is red; then the foreman mentions that everything on that line is lit by red lamps, and you have a defeater, and the belief has to go, though you may believe it again later for better reasons. Plantinga’s claim is that the naturalist who thinks this through has picked up a defeater for everything he believes, his naturalism included. The argument is not that naturalism is false. It is that naturalism, joined to evolution, cannot be rationally held. Turn the same lens the other way and the picture reverses. On theism, our faculties were built by someone who wanted us to know things, which is precisely the assumption every scientist works under and none can justify from within his own naturalism. Plantinga has been careful and unfashionable in both directions here. He does not think the evidence for design can be turned into science, and he has said so: he believes the world was created by God and hence intelligently designed, but the claim that this can be shown scientifically is one he calls himself dubious about. The conflict he is interested in is not between the laboratory and the pew. It is between the laboratory and the philosophy that has been riding along beside it, uninvited.

(Q) "there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism." + Source: Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, preface, page ix. One sentence carrying a whole book (T4). The superficial conflict is the familiar quarrel over evolution and miracles; the deep concord is that science needs a world that is orderly and minds that can read it, and theism supplies both. The superficial concord is that naturalists and scientists are usually the same people; the deep conflict is the argument above.

(T5) If a being than which none greater can be conceived is even possible, then it exists. + Anselm of Canterbury argued in 1078 that a God who exists only in the mind would be less than a God who exists in reality, so the greatest conceivable being cannot be merely conceivable. Almost everybody has felt that something is wrong with this and almost nobody has agreed on what. Kant thought the mistake was treating existence as a property, like being tall. Plantinga rebuilt the argument in a language Anselm did not have. A possible world, in this way of speaking, is not another planet; it is a complete way things could have been, described down to the last detail. You use the idea whenever you say the toast could have burned. Now define two terms. A being has maximal excellence in a world if it is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good in that world. A being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every world, without exception. Greatness of that kind cannot be a local achievement; a being that happened to be supreme here but was absent elsewhere would not be the greatest conceivable being, because you can conceive of one better. Here is the move, and it is quick enough to miss. Suppose maximal greatness is merely possible, which is to say there is at least one way things could have been in which such a being exists. By the definition just given, a maximally great being exists in every world or in none at all; there is no middle option, because being present in only some of them would already disqualify it. So if it exists in one world, it exists in all of them, and this world is one of them. The step from "possibly necessary" to "necessary" is a rule of a standard system of modal logic rather than a piece of sleight of hand, and it is the technical heart of the thing. Everything therefore rests on the first premise, and Plantinga knew it. Is maximal greatness really possible? An atheist can say no with no contradiction, and if he does the argument stops. What Plantinga claimed for it was much less than proof, and his own summary of the verdict is worth reading twice, because it is the note his entire career is written in.

(Q) "They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion. But since it is rational to accept their central premise, they do show that it is rational to accept that conclusion." + Source: Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, page 221. His verdict on his own reformulations of Anselm (T5). Plantinga almost never says an argument proves God. He says it shows that a reasonable person may believe, which is a smaller claim, much harder to dislodge, and the exact claim the philosophy of his generation had said could not be made at all.

(Q) "We who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers. We must therefore pursue our projects with integrity, independence, and Christian boldness." + Source: Alvin Plantinga, "Advice to Christian Philosophers," Faith and Philosophy, volume 1, number 3 (1984). The lecture was his inaugural address at Notre Dame in 1983, and it was printed in the opening volume of the journal the Society of Christian Philosophers had just started. Independence meant not letting the current fashion of the profession set the agenda; integrity meant working from what one actually believes rather than from a borrowed neutrality; boldness meant saying so. Several hundred philosophers took it as instructions.

What the Church and the Academy Made of Him

(†) The comeback Time reported was largely his doing, and his opponents are the ones who say so. + Testimony from a hostile witness is worth more than testimony from a friendly one. In 2001 Quentin Smith, an atheist philosopher, published an article complaining that his own side had lost the field. Academic philosophy, he wrote, had begun to come apart as a secular enterprise with the publication of God and Other Minds in 1967, because the book showed the profession that a realist theist could match the naturalists at their own standards of precision and rigour. His estimate, which he plainly did not enjoy making, was that something like a quarter or a third of philosophy professors were by then theists, most of them Christians. The institutions grew alongside the arguments, which is usually how a change of this kind becomes permanent rather than a passing mood. The Society of Christian Philosophers, founded in 1978 with William Alston as its first president and Plantinga in the chair from 1983 to 1986, is often described as the largest single-interest group among American philosophers, and it has more than a thousand members. Its journal Faith and Philosophy began in 1984, so that the work had somewhere to be published. The Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame, which Plantinga directed until he stepped down in 2002, trained a generation, and his own students now hold chairs across the English-speaking world. Then, in 2022, the American Philosophical Association, which is the profession’s central body and not a religious one, awarded the first prize given in his name. None of that settles whether he was right. It does settle a question that had been treated as closed: whether a Christian could do first-rate work in this field as a Christian, in public, without changing the subject.

(†) He handed ordinary believers a defense of their own standing that most of them had never been offered. + Think of the man who has believed since childhood, has never read a page of Aquinas, could not reconstruct the cosmological argument at gunpoint, which is the old reasoning from the fact that a world exists at all to a cause of its existing, and who is told over Sunday dinner by a confident nephew home from university that he is believing without evidence and ought to know better. For a century the standard advice to that man was to go and learn some apologetics. That is good advice, and it is not an answer to the charge, because it concedes the charge and then tries to satisfy it. Plantinga gave him the answer instead: the charge assumes a rule about what may be believed without argument, and the rule cannot pass its own test (T2). Among philosophers the free will defense is the piece with the widest agreement. It is now commonly said, by atheists as readily as by Christians, that the logical problem of evil has been answered and that the live version is the evidential one. Mackie went back to the question in The Miracle of Theism in 1982 and argued against the reply rather than restating the charge, which is itself a concession about where the discussion had moved. Reformed epistemology has had a rougher and more interesting reception, which is what usually happens to a thesis that is actually doing work. Christian philosophers took it up, extended it, and fought about it: William Alston applied a similar treatment to religious experience in Perceiving God, Nicholas Wolterstorff traced the demand for evidence back to John Locke and argued that it was never as compelling as it looked, and William Lane Craig has argued that it is right as far as it goes and needs the arguments of natural theology alongside it. That argument is not settled and is not going to be, and the fact that it is being had at all in professional journals is the change.

(†) His 1991 essay on evolution drew fire from Christians in the sciences, and others worry that his account of knowledge quietly retires the arguments for God. + Two criticisms come from inside the church, and both are aimed at things Plantinga actually wrote rather than at what others made of him. - The evolution essay. In 1991 he published "When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible" in the Christian Scholar’s Review, arguing that a Christian is entitled to weigh what he takes God to have revealed alongside the scientific evidence, that the evidence for universal common ancestry, the claim that every living thing traces back to one original population, is weaker than its advertising, and that the working rule of the sciences, which he called methodological naturalism, amounts in practice to what Basil Willey had called a provisional atheism. The answers came back from his own side of the church, and in the same issue. His old Calvin colleague Howard Van Till, a physicist, wrote under the title "When Faith and Reason Cooperate," arguing that the language was pejorative and the warfare framing wrong and that the way forward lay in Christian scientists and Christian biblical scholars working together. Ernan McMullin, a philosopher of science at Notre Dame, replied that the evidence for common ancestry was far stronger than Plantinga allowed and that a scientist who leaves God’s direct action out of the hypotheses he tests is not thereby an atheist, provisional or otherwise. Pattle Pun, a biologist, wrote in as well, and Plantinga answered all three at length. Twenty years later, in Where the Conflict Really Lies, he located the quarrel differently and more narrowly, saying the Christian objection is not to evolution but to the claim that it was unguided, and disowning the idea that design can be established scientifically. The 1991 essay is still the sharpest thing he wrote on the subject, and many Christians who work in the sciences think he overreached in it. - The arguments left on the shelf. He gave a lecture in 1980 called "The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology," and the title is fair warning. If a believer is within his rights with no argument at all, a reader can conclude that arguments no longer matter, and Christians who work in natural theology have said so. Richard Swinburne, who has spent his life arguing that Christian belief is probable on the total evidence, pressed exactly this in a 2001 paper in Religious Studies called "Plantinga on Warrant": an account of warrant that never asks whether the belief is likely to be true, given everything one knows, has left out the question most people are asking. Plantinga’s answer is that he never said the arguments are worthless; he lectured in 1986 on "Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments" and kept adding to the list for years afterwards. Still, the worry is a real one about his own emphasis, not a misreading of it, and Scripture puts weight on the other side too: "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15). Neither of these touches the central claim, and neither is the sort of thing Plantinga has ever refused to discuss. He is on record, at the end of five hundred pages of his best work, saying that philosophy’s job here is to clear away obstacles and that the question of truth lies past its competence.