Top 30 Apologetics Books (#25): Alvin Plantinga, Faith and Rationality

By Rob Bowman

Note: Dr. Rob Bowman continues his series on the 30 most important apologetics books in church history. See his earlier posts in the series in our archive.

Top 30 Apologetics Books (#25): Alvin Plantinga, Faith and Rationality (1983)

Alvin Plantinga (1932–) taught at Calvin College from 1963 to 1982, then at the University of Notre Dame until 2010, when he returned to Calvin College. He has served as president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers (which he helped found) and the American Philosophical Association. In addition to his Ph.D. from Yale, Plantinga holds six honorary degrees, was a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2017 received the Templeton Prize. Like Cornelius Van Til, another Dutch-American Calvinist, Plantinga sought to develop an approach to apologetics grounded in Reformed thought. Plantinga’s way of doing this, however, was quite different from Van Til’s.

In 1983, the year after Plantinga left Calvin for Notre Dame, the latter’s university press published a book of essays edited by Plantinga and a Calvin associate, Nicholas Wolterstorff, with essays by other Reformed philosophers. The book, Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, had a profound impact, not only in Christian apologetics, but also in the halls of academia. Plantinga’s lengthy contribution “Reason and Belief in God,” in particular, changed the direction of philosophy of religion in universities and colleges around the world. Books and articles began appearing every year discussing the merits of Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology,” as it came to be known. Plantinga’s magnum opus is a three-volume series of books: Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function (both 1993) and Warranted Christian Belief (2000). Here we summarize Plantinga’s 1983 essay that launched the Reformed Epistemology movement.

According to Plantinga, a belief is “basic” if a person holds it without basing it on some other belief, that is, if it is not inferred from other beliefs. A belief is “properly basic” if the person holding it is in some significant way warranted in doing so. The fact that a belief is basic for someone does not mean it is groundless. For example, a person’s belief that he sees a tree is basic because it is not inferred from other beliefs; but it is not groundless, because it is grounded in his immediate experience of seeing the tree. Likewise, a person who holds as a basic belief that God exists might do so because he had a religious experience; that experience, then, would be the ground of the belief. Plantinga insisted that belief in God could be properly basic for him without being groundless.

In perhaps the most memorable part of his essay, Plantinga anticipated and answered what he called “the Great Pumpkin objection”: “What about the belief that the Great Pumpkin returns every Halloween? Could I properly take that as basic?” (74). Plantinga’s answer was no, because that belief would have nothing to ground it, and there is no reason why anyone should consider such a belief basic (74–78). A belief held as basic can even be challenged by evidences or reasons that Plantinga called “defeaters,” which themselves need to be defeated for a person to continue being warranted in his belief. Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology, then, is not opposed to apologetics.

Note: This series originally appeared in the Apologetics Book Club group on Facebook and was revised for publication as a book, Faith Thinkers: 30 Christian Apologists You Should Know (Tampa, FL: DeWard, 2019). The book includes an introduction, additional quotes from each of the 30 books, readings for each author, and a list of other recommended readings. For a free excerpt from the published book, please visit https://faiththinkers.org.

— Rob Bowman Jr. is an evangelical Christian apologist, biblical scholar, author, editor, and lecturer. He is the author of over sixty articles and author or co-author of thirteen books, including Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ, co-authored with J. Ed Komoszewski. He leads the Apologetics Book Club on Facebook.

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A Prayer of Thomas Aquinas

Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding.

Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance.

Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.

Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.

Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. I ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Helpful Resources

Hear All of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia Novels as Free Audio Books

A Beginner’s Guide to Apologetics (a helpful overview of about a dozen apologetics arguments written by leading thinkers. Our own Paul Gould writes on cultural apologetics).

Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible.

Master Class: Can We Trust the Gospels? Evidence for the Gospels' Historical Reliability by Peter J. Williams (a five-part video series on the reliability of the Gospels).

If you’re looking for good reading recommendations, David Dockery has published his annual roundup of the best books of 2020.

For a nice list of free lectures in theology and biblical studies, check out How to Get an Advanced Bible Degree for Free.

Receive a free 30-day trial subscription to Zondervan’s MasterLectures. They have lots of great lectures available from leading evangelical scholars. You can listen to or watch the videos on your computer or phone, or on your TV through Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV.

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From Peter S. Williams on Twitter: “Here's the first open access issue of the Nordic Journal 'Theofilos', a special Supplement issue on "Science, Natural Theology, and Christian Apologetics", to which I contributed several pieces and which I was privileged to guest edit.” https://theofilos.no/issues/theofilos-supplement-2020-1/.

See the trailer for Against the Tide, featuring John Lennox and Kevin Sorbo. “Against the Tide is a travelogue, an examination of modern science, an excursion into history, an autobiography, and more. But at heart, it is the story of Prof. John Lennox’s stand against the tide of contemporary atheism and its drive to relegate belief in God to society’s catalogue of dead ideas.”

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