Alvin Plantinga

I try to clear up a couple of misunderstandings in William Craig’s review. The first has to do with the difference between what I call “Historical Biblical Criticism” and historical scholarship. I claim there is conflict between the first and Christian belief; I don’t for a moment think there is conflict between historical scholarship and Christian belief. The second has to do with Platonism, theism and causality. I point out that theism has the resources to see abstract objects as like divine thoughts, in which case they are not causally isolated; this offers a reply to Paul Benacerraf’s suggestion that if, as on Platonism, abstract objects are causally isolated from everything, then there is no way in which we could come to know them or anything about them.

In Part I, I present two traditional arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge with human freedom; the first of these is clearly fallacious; but the second, the argument from the necessity of the past, is much stronger. In the second section I explain and partly endorse Ockham’s response to the second argument: that only propositions strictly about the past are accidentally necessary, and past propositions about God’s knowledge of the future are not strictly about the past. In the third part I point out some startling implications of Ockham’s way out; and finally in part IV I offer an account of accidental necessity according to which propositions about the past are accidentally necessary if and only if they are strictly about the past.

Philip Quinn’s “On Finding the Foundations of Theism” is both challenging and important. Quinn proposes at least the following four theses: (a) my argument against the criteria of proper basicality proposed by classical foundationalism is unsuccessful, (b) the quasi-inductive method I suggest for arriving at criteria of proper basicality is defective, (c) even if belief in God is properly basic, it could without loss of justification be accepted on the basis of other propositions, and (d) belief in God is probably not nowadays properly basic for intellectually sophisticated adults, There is much to be said about each of these four theses; I shall say just a bit about them. I take the fourth claim to be the most important and devote the most space to it.

Two kinds of critical questions have been asked about the propriety or rightness of Christian beliefs. The first is the de facto question: is Christian belief true? The second is the de jure question: is it rational, or reasonable, or intellectually acceptable, or rationally justifiable? This second question is much harder to locate than you’d guess from looking at the literature. In “Perceiving God” William AIston suggests that the (or a) right question here is the question of “the practical rationality,” construed as he construes it. I argue that the question is ambiguous: and one of the disambiguees is too easy to answer, while the other is such that its answer is really irrelevant to any sensible version of the de jure question. I conclude by venturing a suggestion as to what a sensible de jure question might be.

In this paper I propose an amendment to Chisholm's definition of individual essence. I then argue that a thing has more than one individual essence and that there is no reason to believe no one grasps anyone else's essence. The remainder of the paper is devoted to a refutation of existentialism, the view that the essence of an object X (along with propositions and states of affairs directly about x) is ontologically dependent upon x in the sense that it could not have existed if x had not existed.

are properly basic for at least some believers in God; there are widely realized sets of conditions, I suggested, in which such propositions are indeed properly basic. And when I said that these beliefs are properly basic, I had in mind what Quinn calls the narrow conception of the basing relation.[1] I was taking it that a person S accepts a belief A on the basis of a belief B only if (roughly) S believes both A and B and could correctly claim (on reflection) that B is part of his evidence for A. S's belief that there is an error in some argument against p will not typically be a belief on the basis of which he accepts p and will not be a part of his evidence for p.

The following is a synopsis of the paper presented by Alvin Plantinga at the RATIO conference on The Meaning of Theism held in April 2005 at the University of Reading. The synopsis has been prepared by the Editor, with the author’s approval, from a handout provided by the author at the conference. The paper reflects on whether religious belief of a traditional Christian kind can be maintained consistently with accepting our modern scientific worldview. Many theologians, and also many scientists, maintain that the idea of divine intervention is at odds with the framework of natural laws disclosed by science. The paper argues that this notion of a ”religion/science problem’ is misguided. When properly understood, neither the classical (Newtonian) picture of natural laws, nor the more recent quantum mechanical picture, rules out divine intervention. There is nothing in science, under either the old or the new picture, that conflicts with, or even calls in to question, special divine action, including miracles

This book is a long-awaited major statement by a pre-eminent analytic philosopher, on one of our biggest debates—the compatibility of science and religion. The last twenty years has seen a cottage industry of books on this divide, but with little consensus emerging. This book's author, as a top philosopher but also a proponent of the rationality of religious belief, has a unique contribution to make. The theme of this short book is that the conflict between science and theistic religion is actually superficial, and that at a deeper level they are in concord. The book examines where this conflict is supposed to exist—evolution, evolutionary psychology, analysis of scripture, scientific study of religion—as well as claims by Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Philip Kitcher that evolution and theistic belief cannot co-exist. The book makes a case that their arguments are not only inconclusive but that the supposed conflicts themselves are superficial, due to the methodological naturalism used by science. On the other hand, science can actually offer support to theistic doctrines, and the text uses the notion of biological and cosmological “fine-tuning” in support of this idea. The book argues that we might think about arguments in science and religion in a new way—as different forms of discourse that try to persuade people to look at questions from a perspective such that they can see that something is true. In this way, there is a deep and massive consonance between theism and the scientific enterprise.