Alvin Plantinga Quotes on God
Plantinga's God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), and the Warrant trilogy (1993–2000) reorganized analytic philosophy of religion around the development of reformed epistemology. Belief in God, Plantinga argues, can be properly basic — held without inferential support from other beliefs — and rational on the same modal-epistemological terms as belief in other minds, the past, or the external world. The free will defense in The Nature of Necessity supplies the most sophisticated contemporary response to the logical problem of evil, and Warranted Christian Belief (2000) develops the positive case that traditional Christian doctrine, on Plantinga's account, can be held with full epistemic warrant if produced by a properly functioning cognitive faculty.
Quotes
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Attributed to Alvin Plantinga:
“Belief in God is properly basic.”
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Attributed to Alvin Plantinga:
“There is a deep concord between Christian belief and the methods of science, and a deep conflict between naturalism and science.”
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Attributed to Alvin Plantinga:
“It is rational to believe in God without prior evidentialist proof.”
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“To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him.”
Warranted Christian Belief . 2000. p. 145. ISBN 9780195131925 . -
“Aquinas believes that human beings (even in our earthly condition here below) can have knowledge, scientific knowledge of God's existence , as well as knowledge that he has such attributes as simplicity , eternità , immateriality , immutability , and the line. In Summa Theologiae Aquinas sets out his famous Five Ways or five proofs of God's existence: in Summa Contra Gentiles he sets out the proof”
The Analytic Theist: An Alving Plantinga Reader , Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1998. ISBN 9780802842299 . Ch. "Reason and Belief in God: Reformed Epistemology , pp. 125-126 -
“Well, I don't think there are any methodological conflicts either. As for those social conflicts, those aren't conflicts—in my opinion—between science and religion. They're conflicts between Christians and atheists or Christians and secularists: Christians want to do things one way, secularists want to do things another way. But that's not a science/religion conflict at all. You might as well say it's a science/ secularism conflict. In each case, each group wants to do science and then use it in a certain way.”
Pardi, Paul ( 2011-12-13 ). Interview with Alvin Plantinga on Where the Conflict Really Lies . Philosophy News . | Posed question: Are you mainly trying to show that there's no logical conflict even though there might be a methodological conflict?