Knowledge and Christian Belief

Alvin Plantinga

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781467443203
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In his widely praised Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, 2000) Alvin Plantinga discussed in great depth the question of the rationality, or sensibility, of Christian belief. In this book Plantinga presents the same ideas in a briefer, much more accessible fashion.Recognized worldwide as a leading Christian philosopher, Plantinga probes what exactly is meant by the claim that religious -- and specifically Christian -- belief is irrational and cannot sensibly be held. He argues that the criticisms of such well-known atheists as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are completely wrong. Finally, Plantinga addresses several potential "defeaters" to Christian belief -- pluralism, science, evil and suffering -- and shows how they fail to successfully defeat rational Christian belief.

Chapter One

Can We Speak and Think about God?

Our question in this volume has to do with the justification or rationality or reasonableness of holding Christian belief. But according to some, this is a non-­question. That is because, according to these people, in reality there is no such thing as Christian belief. It’s not that Christian belief is false, or foolish, or misguided; it’s that no one in fact holds Christian belief. The thought is that it is impossible for anyone, any of us human beings, at any rate, to hold such belief.

Now this sounds pretty fanciful, to say the least: what about all those people who attend Christian churches every Sunday? Don’t at least some of them hold Christian beliefs? Nevertheless this opinion — that there is really no such thing as Christian belief — is and has been surprisingly widespread. But why would anyone think a thing like that? Why think we can’t have beliefs about God? Perhaps the most popular line of argument proceeds in the following way. Central to the Christian story, of course, is God, the all-­powerful, all knowing, perfectly good creator of all. But according to this line of argument, we human beings can’t have any beliefs about God; God is beyond all of our concepts; our minds are too limited to have any grasp at all of him and his being.

Kant

What reason is there to think that? The proposed answer is that God is ultimate; God is ultimate reality. But according to this way of thinking, we human beings are incapable of thinking about or holding beliefs about ultimate reality. Here those who think this way follow the great Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason. As these people understand him, Kant teaches that there are really two worlds. On the one hand there is the world of things in themselves, things as they are apart from any intellectual activity on our part; on the other hand there is the world of things for us. The latter is the familiar world of experience, the world of houses and people and oceans and mountains. The former, however, is the world of things as they are apart from us, ‘in themselves’; this world is entirely inaccessible to us.

Now Kant is by no means easy to understand, which is no doubt part of his charm. If you want to be a really great philosopher, make sure not to say too clearly what you have in mind (well, maybe that’s not quite enough, but it’s a good start); if people can just read and understand what you say, there will be no need for commentators on your work, no one will write PhD dissertations on your work to explain your meaning, and there won’t be any controversies about what it was you really meant. Kant must have heeded the above advice, and the fact is there are dozens, maybe hundreds of books written about his philosophy, and endless controversy as to his meaning.

According to one historically popular interpretation, and the one relevant to our present concerns, what Kant was claiming is that it is we human beings, we ourselves, who confer its basic structure on the world — the world of appearance, the world we actually live in. For example, one very important structural feature of the world is that it consists in things that have properties. There are horses, houses, and howitzers: horses have such properties as being mammals, being able to run a mile in two minutes, being larger than the average dog, etc.; houses have such properties as being made of bricks, costing a lot, being good places to live, etc.; howitzers have their own rather military properties involving range, adjustability, etc. And according to Kant, at least under this popular interpretation, the fact that our world consists in things that have properties — that fact is due, somehow, to us, to our own intellectual or categorizing activity. It’s a little like looking at the world through rose-­colored glasses: the world looks that way, not because it really is rose-­colored, but because of the glasses I’m wearing. Something similar applies here: the world as it is in itself doesn’t have that thing-­property structure, and in fact we have no way of knowing what sort of structure, if any, the world as it is in itself does have. We know the world only as it conforms to the categories of our mind, not as it is in itself.

According to Kant, therefore, there is the world of things in themselves, the world as it is in itself, and also the world of appearance, the world as it is for us. We are at home in the world of appearance, at least in part because we ourselves have constituted it, conferred on it, somehow, the basic structure it displays. But we have no grasp at all of the world of things in themselves. We can’t think about these things; our concepts don’t apply to them; they are in that regard wholly beyond us.

Now God, of course, would certainly be among the things in themselves. This strand of Kant’s thought, therefore, would imply that we human beings can’t think about God. We don’t have any concepts that apply to God. Our concepts apply only to the world of appearance, not to the world of reality. Hence God, who is reality in excelsis, is so far above us, or beyond us, that our puny minds can’t reach him at all. Our minds, and our thought, and our language simply have no purchase on God.1 So some people who understand Kant this way, and think that Kant is fundamentally right about these things, conclude that we can’t think about God. And of course if we can’t think about God, we also can’t talk about him.

Kaufman

Oddly enough, a fair number of theologians are very much taken by Kant, and think he is basically correct. They think that theology must just accept the main lines of Kant’s teaching, and must be conducted under the assumption that Kant is fundamentally right. A good example would be the late Gordon Kaufman, for many years a professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School. In God the Problem he states the problem as follows:

The central problem of theological discourse, not shared with any other “language game,” is the meaning of the term “God.” “God” raises special problems of meaning because it is a noun which by definition refers to a reality transcendent of, and thus not locatable, within, experience. . . . As the Creator or Source of all that is, God is not to be identified with any particular finite reality; as the proper object of ultimate loyalty or faith, God is to be distinguished from every proximate or penultimate value or being. But if absolutely nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term “God” properly refers, what meaning does or can the word have?2

The answer, given in his book The Theological Imagination, seems to be “not much,” or at any rate “not much like what you would have thought”:

God symbolizes that in the ongoing evolutionary historical process which grounds our being as distinctively human and which draws (or drives) us on toward authentic human fulfillment (salvation).3

“God” is the personifying symbol of that cosmic activity which has created our humanity and continues to press for its full realization.4

So our word “God” is not a name of an all-­knowing, all-­powerful, perfectly good Person; it is instead just a symbol of cosmic activity and historical process. Kaufman’s problem with God (or “God”) is that if God is in fact the creator of the universe and the ultimate reality, then he is beyond our experience; hence, following Kant, our concepts can’t apply to him, and our word “God” can’t refer to him; we have to think of some other function for that word.5

Of course this Kantian way of thinking can wreak considerable havoc with religious belief and with theology. One thinks of theology as telling us about God: what he is like and what he has done. One thinks the subject matter of theology is God himself. But if we can’t think or talk about God, then nobody can tell us what God is like and what he has done. If we can’t think or talk about God, then of course we can’t think the thought that he has created the world, or is the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, or hates sin, or whatever. If Kant (thus interpreted) is right, theology can’t be about God; no one, not even theologians, can think about God, and if they can’t think about God, they can’t write about him. As the philosopher F. P. Ramsey once said, “What can’t be said, can’t be said; and it can’t be whistled either.”

Furthermore, when Christians recite the great creeds of the church — the Apostles’ Creed, for example — what they say can’t really be true. They say, “I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. . . .” But if our concepts don’t apply to God, then we can’t in fact believe that God is the creator of heaven and earth: for, of course, we could do that only if our concept creator of heaven and earth did in fact apply to God. Similarly, sermons in which the preacher preaches the gospel, the magnificent story of sin and redemption through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God — these sermons too would be wholly misguided. The preacher would presumably be under the impression that she was in fact talking about God; but she would be absurdly mistaken. She literally wouldn’t know what she was talking about. And of course the hearers would be in an equally absurd condition: they would be thinking that they were being spoken to about the great Christian story, when in fact nothing like that was occurring.

But why should we think any of this is true? Is there really a substantial reason for believing that we can’t think or talk about God? The suggestion is that God is so exalted, so far above us, that we with our puny and limited minds can’t hope to comprehend him. No doubt there is an appropriate caution h...