Knowledge of God (Great Debates in Philosophy)

278 Pages·2008·1.58 MB·English

by  Alvin Plantinga

Knowledge of God
Knowledge of God. Alvin Plantinga and Micha el Tooley © 2008 Alvin Plantinga
and Michael Tooley. ISBN: 978-0-631-19363-0
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Great Debates in Philosophy
Series Editor: Ernest Sosa
Dialogue has always been a powerful means of philosophical exploration
and exposition. By presenting important current issues in philosophy in the
form of a debate, this series attempts to capture the flavor of philosophi-
cal argument and to convey the excitement generated by the exchange of
ideas. Each author contributes a major, original essay. When these essays have
been completed, the authors are each given the opportunity to respond to the
opposing view.
Personal Identity
Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne
Consciousness and Causality
D. M. Armstrong and Norman Malcolm
Critical Theory
David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy
Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity
Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson
Atheism and Theism, Second Edition
J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane
Three Methods of Ethics
Marcia W. Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote
Epistemic Justification
Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa
Four Views on Free Will
John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas
Knowledge of God
Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley
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Knowledge of God
Alvin Plantinga
and
Michael Tooley
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© 2008 by Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley
 
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The right of Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley to be identified as the authors of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
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First published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2008
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plantinga, Alvin
Knowledge of God / Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-631-19363-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-631-19364-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. God (Christianity)—Knowableness. I. Tooley, M. J. II. Title.
BT103.P58 2008
212′.6—dc22
2007033954
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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To my children and their spouses – Carl, Cindy, Jane, Jack, Harry, Pam, Ann,
and Ray – sources of pride and great joy.
Alvin Plantinga
To the memory of my teacher, Walter Kaufmann, for whose works on religion
I have the very greatest admiration, and to Anthony Tooley, my oldest grand-
son, who, at the age of seven, and not knowing that anyone had ever even
entertained any doubts about religion, discovered, entirely on his own, a version
of the argument from evil.
Michael Tooley
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Contents

Acknowledgements ix
1 Against Naturalism 1
Alvin Plantinga
2 Does God Exist? 70
Michael Tooley
3 Reply to Tooley’s Opening Statement 151
Alvin Plantinga
4 Reply to Plantinga’s Opening Statement 184
Michael Tooley
5 Can Robots Think? Reply to Tooley’s Second Statement 218
Alvin Plantinga
6 Closing Statement and Response to Plantinga’s Comments 233
Michael Tooley
Bibliography 249
Index 257
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Acknowledgements

Alvin Plantinga
I wish to record my gratitude for good advice and wise counsel to many,
including Brian Boeninger, E.J. Coffman, Chris Green, Jeff Green, Marcin
Iwanicki, Nathan King, Dan McKaughan, Dolores Morris, Brian Pitts, Luke
Potter, and especially Mikes Bergmann and Rea. I also ask forgiveness from
those I have inadvertently overlooked.
Michael Tooley
During the early, initial research that preceded the actual writing for this
volume, I was fortunate to have the help of two excellent graduate students
who served as research assistants: Jessica Wilson (now at the University
of Toronto) and Rich Geenen (now at Westminster College). I had many
stimulating conversations with each of them concerning a number of relevant
issues.
Many people provided me with excellent and very detailed comments on
my opening statement: Dennis Earl, Michael Huemer, Daniel Korman, Wes
Morriston, Graham Oddie, Graham Oppy, Robert Pasnau, Quentin Smith,
and Eric Vogelstein. Then Evan Fales, Scott Hagaman, Christian Lee, and Wes
Morriston all provided me with extremely helpful feedback on my response to
Plantinga’s opening statement, while Christian also offered many very incisive
comments on my closing statement. I very much appreciate this very extensive
input from people who were interested in this debate, and all three of my con-
tributions to this volume have been strengthened significantly by the excellent
suggestions and incisive criticisms that I received.
Finally, it is not often that one has a chance to engage in a very extended
conversation about a central philosophical question with a philosopher whose
views are very different from one’s own, and who has thought very deeply about
the issues. I am therefore very grateful to Alvin Plantinga for inviting me to
join him in this debate.
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1
Against Naturalism
Alvin Plantinga
I Theism
Our topic is theistic belief, i.e., belief in God, and, more particularly, the
epistemology of theistic belief. Now the main part of my initial contribution
will be an epistemological attack on one of the two principal alternatives to
theism: philosophical naturalism. First, however, I must say something to char-
acterize theism. Following that, I’ll argue that theism has a significant epistemic
virtue: if it is true, it is (very likely) warranted; this is a virtue naturalism most
emphatically lacks. Then I’ll deliver a three-part indictment against philosoph-
ical naturalism. I’ll argue that (1) if naturalism were true, there would be no
such thing as proper function, and therefore also no such thing as malfunction or
dysfunction. Hence there would be no such thing as health or sickness, sanity
or madness; further, and in this epistemological context crucial, there would be
no such thing as knowledge. That’s bad enough, but there’s worse to follow: I’ll
argue (2) that the naturalist is committed to the sort of deep and debilitating
skepticism according to which he can’t trust his cognitive faculties to furnish
him with mainly true beliefs; he has a defeater for whatever he believes, includ-
ing naturalism itself. And (3) I’ll argue that naturalism, insofar as it implies
materialism about human beings, has no room for the essential features of our
mental life, including in particular belief.
A. Theistic belief: what is it?
According to classical theistic belief—classical Muslim and Jewish as well
as Christian belief—first of all there is God, the chief being of the universe,
who has neither beginning nor end. Most important, God is personal. That is,
Knowledge of God. Alvin Plantinga and Micha el Tooley © 2008 Alvin Plantinga
and Michael Tooley. ISBN: 978-0-631-19363-0
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2 Alvin Plantinga
God is the kind of being who is conscious and enjoys some kind of awareness
of his surroundings (in God’s case, that would be everything). Second (though
not second in importance), a person has loves and hates, wishes and desires;
she approves of some things and disapproves of others; she wants things to be
a certain way. We might put this by saying that persons have affections. A person,
third, is a being who has beliefs and, if fortunate, knowledge. We human beings,
for example, believe a host of things. At the moment I believe that I am typing
on my computer, that I just had breakfast, that outside it is bright and sunny,
that I recently went rock climbing, that I live in Indiana, and so on. I also have
a host of beliefs about things more distant from myself: that Beijing is larger
than Chicago, that scientists seem to believe that quantum mechanics is highly
confirmed, that there once was a war between the Athenians and the Spartans,
that even the simplest forms of life are enormously complex, that there is such
a person as God, and a thousand other things.
Persons, therefore, have beliefs and affections. Further, a person is a being
who has aims and intentions; a person aims to bring it about that things should
be a certain way, intends to act so that things will be the way he wants them
to be. Thus I intend to bring it about that my part of this book is written, and
written by me. (Put less pedantically, I intend to write my part of this book.)
Finally, persons can often act to fulfill their intentions; they can bring it about
that things are a certain way; they can cause things to happen. To be more tech-
nical (though not more insightful or more clear), we might say that a person is
a being who can actualize states of affairs. Persons can often act on the basis of
what they believe in order to bring about states of affairs whose actuality they
desire.
So a person is conscious, has affections, beliefs, and intentions, and can act.
Of course this would be a well-formed, paradigmatic person. Disease or mal-
function can deprive a person of one or another of the above characteristics.
Due to malfunction a person may lose affect, so that nothing seems either good
or bad, desirable or undesirable. A person in a coma is not conscious and can-
not act; perhaps a person in a coma also lacks belief or knowledge. The point
is that a properly functioning well-formed person will display these properties,
not that every person must display them at every time at which she exists.
First, therefore, God is a person. But second, unlike human persons, God is a
person without a body.1 He acts, and acts in the world, as human beings do, but,
unlike human beings, not by way of a body. Rather, God acts just by willing: he
wills that things be a certain way, and they are that way. (God said “Let there
1 The Christian doctrine of the Trinity introduces complications here: the second person of the
Trinity had, and indeed has, a body. Here I propose to avoid these complications; I’ll use the word
‘God’ as a name of the first person of the Trinity.
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