Alvin Plantinga b. 1932

Alvin Plantinga is an American philosopher of religion, long associated with Calvin College and the University of Notre Dame, and the most influential analytic Christian philosopher of the late twentieth century. God and Other Minds and The Nature of Necessity defended modal arguments for the rationality of theistic belief, while his three-volume warrant trilogy proposed an externalist epistemology in which warrant requires properly functioning cognitive faculties aimed at truth in a congenial environment. Warranted Christian Belief argued that theistic belief, if true, is properly basic and so does not stand in need of evidentialist argument.

Alvin Carl Plantinga was born at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in November 1932 into a Dutch Reformed family — his father, Cornelius Plantinga, was a philosopher and psychologist of Frisian origin. He took his bachelor's at Calvin College in 1954, his master's at the University of Michigan, and his doctorate at Yale in 1958 under Paul Weiss. He taught at Wayne State, returned to Calvin College in 1963, and from 1982 until his retirement in 2010 was John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he founded the Center for Philosophy of Religion.

His major works are God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), Does God Have a Nature? (1980), and the trilogy Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993), and Warranted Christian Belief (2000); his late books include Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011) and Knowledge and Christian Belief (2015). He received the Templeton Prize in 2017.

Plantinga's free-will defence is widely regarded as having shown that the existence of a perfectly good, omnipotent, omniscient God is logically compatible with the existence of evil; his reformed epistemology argued that belief in God can be 'properly basic' and need not rest on argument; his evolutionary argument against naturalism contends that the conjunction of naturalism and evolution undermines its own warrant. Together with Nicholas Wolterstorff and William Alston he is the principal architect of the Christian analytic philosophy of the late twentieth century.