Alvin Plantinga Quotes on Knowledge
Alvin Plantinga’s three-volume Warrant series — Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993), and Warranted Christian Belief (2000) — gives late twentieth-century analytic epistemology one of its most influential externalist accounts of knowledge. The central thesis is that warrant — the property that distinguishes knowledge from merely true belief — consists in the proper functioning of the cognitive faculties in the environment for which they were designed, with the religious-epistemological corollary that Christian belief, formed through the proper operation of the sensus divinitatis, can be warranted in the same way perceptual or memorial belief is warranted, without requiring evidential support from natural theology. The framework, developed alongside Plantinga’s earlier modal-logical work in The Nature of Necessity and the ontological-argument literature, founded the broader Reformed epistemology movement and the contemporary analytic philosophy of religion.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Alvin Plantinga:
“Belief in God is properly basic.”
-
Attributed to Alvin Plantinga:
“Warrant requires that one's cognitive faculties be functioning properly in a congenial environment.”
-
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.”
-
Attributed to Alvin Plantinga:
“If naturalism is true, the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is low.”
-
Attributed to Alvin Plantinga:
“It is rational to believe in God without prior evidentialist proof.”
-
“Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. (Of course we must postulate other changes in Paul's ways of reasoning, including ho”
Warrant and Proper Function . New York: Oxford University Press. 1993. pp. 225-226. ISBN 9780195078640 . -
“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 . -
“At present and especially in academia, there is widespread doubt and agnosticism with respect to the very existence of God. But if we don't know that there is such a person as God, we don't know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because (from the point of view of the model) the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been”
Warranted Christian Belief . 2000. p. 217. ISBN 9780195131925 . -
“I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term 'fundamentalist'. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like 'son of a bitch', more exactly 'sonovabitch', or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to t”
Warranted Christian Belief . 2000. pp. 244-245. ISBN 9780195131925 . -
“Pardi, Paul ( 2011-12-13 ). Interview with Alvin Plantinga on Where the Conflict Really Lies . Philosophy News .”
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 -
“Posed question: Are you mainly trying to show that there's no logical conflict even though there might be a methodological conflict?”
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