Christianity Today magazine calls Notre Dame professor Alvin Plantinga " the most important philosopher of any stripe."Celebrating Easter
God, science, miracles coexist, philosopher says
Protestant intellectual has arguments for a belief in the Lord, but admits there is no clear-cut proof.
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SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- In a scientific era, is it still possible to believe in God and such events as the Easter miracle of Jesus' resurrection from the grave?
Can a rational person see God as all-powerful and benevolent despite horrendous suffering in disasters like the Asian tsunami?
From the perspective of philosopher Alvin Plantinga, the answers are emphatic: yes and yes.
A Protestant professor at the University of Notre Dame, Plantinga applies modern analytic philosophy to the age-old questions about God and the universe. While he's little known outside his specialty, an assessment in Christianity Today magazine called him "not just the best Christian philosopher of his time ... (but) the most important philosopher of any stripe."
Even atheist opponents recognize his importance. William Rowe of Purdue University and Michael Tooley of the University of Colorado -- who is co-authoring a book with Plantinga -- each consider him among the top two or three defenders of traditional belief in God.
Plantinga's Roman Catholic campus, which decades ago hired no Protestant philosophers, provides congenial surroundings for his work. Notre Dame boasts the nation's largest philosophy faculty, and scholars surveyed by PhilosophicalGourmet.com rate it first in the English-speaking world for graduate study in the philosophy of religion. Plantinga long led its graduate center in that field.
After attending Harvard University in the early '50s, he transferred to Michigan's faith-affirming Calvin College, affiliated with his lifelong denomination, the Christian Reformed Church. He then did graduate work at Michigan and Yale and taught at Calvin before moving to Notre Dame in 1982.
Defending evolution
Plantinga argues that if evolution was godless and operated only to enhance reproductive fitness, there's no particular reason to think the results of humanity's thinking processes are reliable. But with God, he says, our minds are geared to discover truth, including scientific truth.
"As far as I can see there aren't any scientific results that are incompatible with miracles," he asserts. Nor has any thinker, ancient or modern, provided reasons why intelligent people can't believe in them, he said.
Scientific laws state "the way in which God ordinarily treats the stuff he's made. That doesn't mean he always has to treat it the same way," Plantinga, 72, said.
Especially in an era of quantum mechanics, science "doesn't preclude someone's rising from the dead or turning water into wine. These things are very unlikely, but of course we already knew that." In fact, highly improbable events happen all the time, he said.
But if miracles are possible, how do we substantiate a specific miracle such as Jesus' resurrection?
According to Plantinga, the initial probability of any such claim is low, though it would obviously rise if Christians are right that Jesus "is the incarnate second person of the Trinity."
The external evidence, assessed by Oxford's Richard Swinburne and others, includes the apostles' Easter testimonies and the dramatic spread of their belief. Plantinga finds this convincing: "Maybe it's not knockdown, drag-out 100 percent conclusive evidence, but it's pretty strong evidence."
Plantinga adds a factor emphasized by Aquinas and Calvin -- internal knowledge from the Holy Spirit that convinces an individual such things are true.
For decades, Plantinga has argued it is reasonable to believe in the monotheistic God affirmed by Christians, Jews and Muslims. He focuses on his own Christian faith in the career-capping work "Warranted Christian Belief" (Oxford).
Does God exist?
In Plantingese, "warrant" refers to the things we can really know, as opposed to a "lucky guess" -- like thinking against all probability that a hapless Detroit Tigers baseball club will win the pennant, and then they actually do. He also distinguishes between belief in God and following an unwarranted idea (something we'd have no good reason to believe), answering what he calls atheism's Great Pumpkin Objection.
Ultimately, Plantinga sees a couple dozen good arguments for God's existence, but admits nobody has airtight proof. That doesn't faze him a bit.
"There are plenty of other things we rationally accept without argument," he said.
Plantinga has beaten down many older cases made in favor of atheism, which leaves the perennial problem of evil: How can God be all-powerful and all-loving if he allows suffering?
Plantinga says this also poses a problem for atheism, under which it is hard to see how there can really be such a thing as evil if the cosmos lacks a moral structure, besides which everyone believes evil and good are real.
The philosopher also contends that, logically, a good God could have created a world without suffering only by denying the benefit of free will to humans and supernatural demons.
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