Alvin Plantinga makes the AP wire again. The article actually packs a bit of Plantinga's personal history in with snippets of his philosophical views. Given what Plantinga says in Warranted Christian Belief about evidential arguments, and here I should plug Tim McGrew's recent paper "Has Plantinga Refuted the Historical Argument?" (Philosophia Christi), the following is a striking statement.
The external evidence, assessed by Oxford's Richard Swinburne and others, includes the Apostles' Easter testimonies and the dramatic spread of their belief. Mr. Plantinga finds this convincing: "Maybe it's not knockdown, drag-out 100 percent conclusive evidence, but it's pretty strong evidence."Given that Plantinga, in WCB, says such arguments are not "nearly sufficient to support serious belief" I find it odd that he claims they are convincing here.
Everybody's favorite "friendly atheist" gets a nice send up in the Tribune-Star. I actually found this rather informative in regards to Rowe's personal history. For obvious reasons he keeps failing to make the cut for Philosophers Who Believe. I had no idea Rowe started out as a very serious theist. I find it interesting that his "unlikely route to atheism was a gradual and very personal process, not the result of philosophical or scientific arguments contradictory of his theistic beliefs." This sounds remarkably similar to the accounts of theist philosophers who started out atheist or agnostic. If even the philosophers are not convinced by arguments we might start to worry that we are doing something wrong... I also found the article interesting because Rowe's trajectory on the problem of evil seems to be the opposite of Daniel Howard-Snyder's. As I heard it Howard-Snyder originally intended to defend the problem of evil in his dissertation, but half way through writing the dissertation he saw that the arguments let the other way.
Update:I emailed Professor Plantinga about the apparent discrepancy above and asked the following. I was wondering if perhaps Ostling misconstrued what you said, if we've failed to understand what you were saying in Warranted Christian Belief, or if you've changed your view on evidential arguments. Any help in setting us straight would be greatly appreciated. What follows is Plantinga's response.
"I think that was about arguments for Christ's resurrection, right? I go up and down about how strong these arguments are. Given theism, I think they are pretty strong, but not strong enough to support the sort of belief Christians usually have. I'd also say that there is pretty strong evidence for our universe's beginning in a big bang, but (given the way in which scientists have been changing their minds on this over the last 100 years) I wouldn't really believe--certainly not very strongly. I'd say it was pretty likely, or very likely given current evidence."
I think most of the philosophers I know who started as theists from strongly committed Christian families and ended up as atheists have similar stories. Sometimes they'll list one argument that made a difference, but most of the time they just didn't feel a kinship with the Christianity they were raised with. It was totally alien to them. Of course, that's not surprising if Christianity is correct about human nature.
Matthew,
Thanks for the plug -- that makes three people,to my certain knowledge, who have read the Phil Christi paper. I was also puzzled by that quotation in the story re: Plantinga. I wonder whether the interviewer simply got it wrong: It does seem to contradict WCB, p. 280.
Well, there's an ambiguity in 'supports Christian belief'. It could mean something like "provides sufficient epistemic support for Christian belief such that Christian belief can be knowledge". It could simply mean "provides some epistemic support as part of a larger epistemic framework that makes Christian belief reasonable (or at least not unreasonable)". I could see how he could say that it supports Christian belief and mean the second thing while saying it doesn't provide sufficient support for Christian belief in another context, meaning the first thing.
Jeremy,
I think the contrast is between Plantinga's characterizing the public evidence, historical and otherwise, as "nowhere nearly sufficient to support serious belief" and his being quoted in the article as saying that the external (= public?) evidence is "pretty strong." Up until now Plantinga has relegated the public evidence for Christianity to second-class status, allowing it to be defeater-defeater, a cherry on top, or a sort of weak tiebreaker but never to do the primary thing that evidence can do, namely, to move someone decisively from reasonable unbelief to reasonable belief.
I'm genuinely curious about this apparent contradiction and I suspect that the interviewer simply got something crossed up. But I hope I'm wrong.
I asked Tom Senor about this and he had the same thought as Tim. It is an apparent contradiction and he suspects that the interviewer simply got something wrong.
In hopes of clearing up the matter I emailed Professor Plantinga. Hopefully I'll hear back soon. Update: See Plantinga's response above.
Matthew,
Thanks! That's helpful, though not as helpful as one might have hoped. I'm still struggling to reconcile this with the "nowhere nearly sufficient to support serious belief" language of WCB. It looks like Plantinga is working with a notion of belief that has some very high cutoff and holds that unless the evidence meets that cutoff one cannot (strongly) believe it. There are some indications of this in WCB, somewhere around pp. 268-9 if memory isn't misleading me.
Whatever its philosophical merits, I think this use of terms gives a misimpression to the philosophically uninitiated (and even some of the initiated). Most of us, when we say something's pretty likely, are indicating something about the strength of our belief.
Maybe the best clue we've got is the admission that Plantinga himself goes up and down on the strength of the arguments. I wish he had written WCB when he wasn't quite so "down."