I’ve been reading Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s Knowledge and Christian Belief (Eerdmans,
2015) this week. This is the popular level version of Plantinga’s influential (and more technical) Warranted Christian
Belief (Oxford, 2000).
A few gleanings:
Plantinga argues that moral categories do not necessarily
apply to beliefs. He gives this illustration:
If I fell out of an airplane at 3,000
feet, I would fall down not up; and it wouldn’t be up to me which way I fell… my
falling down isn’t something that can be morally evaluated. I can’t sensibly be
either praised or blamed for falling down.
He concludes:
And isn’t the same thing true for religious
belief? I am a theist; I believe that there is such a person as God; but I have
never decided to hold this belief. It
has always just seemed to me to be true. And it isn’t as if I could rid myself
of this belief just by an act of the will (17).
He later connects this to Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis, or sense of
divinity, which is “subject to malfunction” (33).
After reviewing Freud’s rejection of theism as “wish-fulfillment,”
Plantinga turns the argument on its head:
Indeed, unbelief can also be seen as
resulting from wish-fulfillment—a result of the desire to live in a world
without God, a world in which there is no one to whom I owe worship and obedience
(44).
JTR
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