The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader.  Edited by James F. Sennett.  Eerdmans. 367 pages. $30.00.  [This review by Philip Blosser was first published under the title of “God Among the Philosophers” in New Oxford Review 66, No. 9 (October 1999), 39-42.  Reproduced with permission.]

In the spring of 1980, Time magazine reported: “In a quiet revolution in thought and arguments that hardly anyone could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback.  Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers . . . but in the crisp, intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.” 
            That earlier consensus—according to which theism was held to be intellectually untenable, and “God talk” neither verifiable nor falsifiable and, hence, meaningless—had long put Christian philosophers on the defensive.  Few Christian philosophers were to be found in the decades preceding the 1970s, and even fewer willing to publicly identify themselves as such. 
            But all this has changed.  The Society of Christian Philosophers, which Plantinga helped to found in 1978 has over 1100 members today and has become what one observer called “the largest single interest group among American philosophers.”  Christian philosophers enjoy an unprecedented credibility today in the secular academy.  Plantinga himself, an evangelical Calvinist, has served as President of the American Philosophical Association, and was invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 1987.
            How did all this come about?  First, the earlier philosophical consensus has disintegrated.  The logical empiricists’ principles of rational justification were shown to be incapable of meeting the demands of their own criteria.  Further, by around 1980, most philosophers were admitting that the whole Enlightenment project of making pure reason the only infallible guide to faith and practice (as envisioned by Kant) was a failure.  This pulled the rug out from under the earlier attacks on theism by discrediting their presuppositions.
            Second, among those pointing out the failure of the Enlightenment project and attacking some of its most pervasive and entrenched orthodoxies were Christian philosophers.  Among these, probably none has been as close to the heart of contemporary philosophical conversations as Plantinga, whom Time called “America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God.” 
            Largely as a result of Plantinga’s influence, the Christian philosophers’ earlier beleaguered posture, resulting from their perpetually unsuccessful attempts at trying to meet the skeptic’s insatiable demand for “sufficiently credible” empirical evidence and rational verification for their beliefs, has become a thing of the past.  In its place have come confident assertions of the theist’s “epistemic rights” in taking belief in God, including a wide range of beliefs about the existence and nature of God, as “properly basic,” and, as such, as a foundational “deliverance of reason.”
            The heart of this bold new initiative among Christian philosophers, sometimes referred to as “Reformed epistemology” because of its loosely Calvinistic historical associations, is a dual challenge to the evidentialist and foundationalist assumptions underlying the Enlightenment’s rejection of theism.  In its most generic sense, evidentialism holds that a belief is rational only if it is based on sufficiently compelling evidence or rational justification, and foundationalism holds that some of our beliefs (non-basic beliefs) rest on other beliefs (basic beliefs).  For example, my (non-basic) belief that there must be a fire somewhere is based on my inference from my (basic) belief that I am perceiving smoke, while my belief that I am perceiving smoke is immediate (basic) and not inferred from any other belief.
            Thus, evidentialism, as a theory about what beliefs we are entitled to have and the degree of confidence we may be permitted to have in them, is viewed by Reformed epistemology as an adversary of theism when it is linked to a form of foundationalism, which, in addition to distinguishing basic from non-basic beliefs, relegates religious beliefs to “non-basic” status.  On this view, only those beliefs are properly basic which are (1) self-evident, (2) evident to the senses, or (3) incorrigible.  Since theistic belief does not meet these criteria and is not inferable from beliefs that do, it is viewed as rationally unjustifiable. 
            These assumptions have set the agenda for the modern debate about the rationality of religious belief since the 17th century, with defenders of theism repeatedly trying to meet these criteria.  Plantinga’s approach is best understood as a completely different strategy for responding to this challenge.  Instead of agreeing to play according to the rules set by the opposition, Plantinga disputes the rules, claiming that they indefensibly restrict the beliefs that qualify as properly basic, and that belief in God can sometimes be perfectly rational even without being based on an inference or argument.
            At this point, Plantinga’s strategy banks on an emerging consensus about the failures of modern epistemology.  For several centuries, philosophers have been trying to prove the rationality of a number of common sense beliefs, such as our belief that the world is more than five minutes old, our belief in an external world, and our belief in other minds than our own.  Since none of these beliefs is self-evident or incorrigible, it was thought necessary to show how such common sense beliefs could be rationally inferred from other properly basic beliefs.  The spectacle of so many brilliant philosophers struggling to prove what virtually nobody ever doubted, and then utterly failing in their attempts, could not fail to break the spell of solemnity surrounding the epistemological canons of evidentialism and foundationalism.  The consensus that has emerged is that the mistake was not in the attempts at rational justification, but in the assumption that they were ever necessary.
            In his early book, God and Other Minds (1967), Plantinga first fired the epistemological shot heart ‘round the philosophy-of-religion world.  There he argued that the attempt to prove the existence of other minds suffers from similar difficulties as the attempt to prove God’s existence by arguing from analogy to an intelligent designer.  Both attempts bank on problematic arguments from analogy.  The impossibility of proving that other minds exist by means of analogy from our direct experience of our own minds, he argued, should not cast doubt on the rationality of our belief in other minds, but rather on the foundationalist theories that permit us to hold only beliefs that we can support by rational inferences.  In fact, he argued, if it is rational to believe in other minds immediately, without being able to prove their existence, then it is no less rational to likewise believe in God.
            In his now famous 1983 inaugural address as John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame, Plantinga called Christian philosophers to independence from the agenda set by the secular academy, advising that they have as much right to start from Christian assumptions as secular thinkers to start from naturalistic ones.  Since that time, in keeping with his own advice, Plantinga has continued to define and refine his own standards of rationality in terms of “warrant” and the “proper function” of cognitive faculties. 
            Some of Plantinga’s contentions are controversial even among his allies.  His claim that a person is rationally entitled to believe in God even if he can offer no argument for his belief, or infer his belief from other beliefs he holds, does not seem problematic in itself.  Aquinas would agree.  But neither Aquinas nor many Catholic philosophers would agree with his claim that belief in God is not merely a foundational belief, but a foundational knowledge; or with his frequent suggestion that since theistic belief is properly basic, natural theology is useless; or with his view that the rational “warrant” for beliefs lies in the “proper function” of an individual’s cognitive faculties, a criterion not only involuntary but external and inaccessible to the consciousness of the believer.  Further, even Reformed philosophers have wondered what, exactly, is Reformed about Reformed epistemology, although some affinities may exist between the theory’s individualistic, externalist, and nonvoluntarist emphases and Calvin’s predestinarian individualism, his notion that theistic belief is a natural disposition (sensus divinitatis) implanted in us by God but corrupted by the noetic effects of sin.
            Plantinga clearly remains an outstanding ally and resource for Christian philosophers in the academy today.  The Analytic Theist offers an excellent introductory anthology of his writings, with a large cross-section of representative material, as well as some lesser-known but invaluable essays.  Subjects range from natural theology, the ontological argument, free will and divine foreknowledge, to religious pluralism and exclusivism, Christian philosophy at the end of the 20th century, and an amusing expose of “historical-critical” biblical scholarship gone to seed (“Sheehan’s Shenanigans: How Theology Becomes Tomfoolery”).  The selections were clearly made with a scholarly audience in mind.  Moreover, as the adjective in the book’s title denotes, Plantinga is an “analytic” philosopher, intensely focused on close analysis of logical arguments.  Some selections will prove quite challenging.  Yet, one certainly need not be a philosopher (or even an “analytic” philosopher) to benefit from the book.  The editor generally steered clear of using Plantinga’s most technical pieces, and a few of the essays included were written for broader audiences.  The book would make an ideal text for an intermediate level course in philosophy of religion.
             

Philip Blosser
Lenoir-Rhyne College