Philosophy

James S. Spiegel

• Éditeur: P Publishing
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781596386891
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Religious Education

Does philosophy have any value for our faith? James Spiegel insists that Christians need philosophy to discern wrong ideas and shows us how it can enhance biblical faith and living.

Recent Progress

Just as Time magazine was running its famous “Is God Dead?” cover story and the banishment of God from the academy seemed complete, the decisive reply to this movement was being penned by a little-known Dutch Reformed philosopher in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds appeared in 1967,9 and it was a book that would effectively launch what is often called a “renaissance” in Christian philosophy. Plantinga met Flew and the positivists head-on, but not by complying with their mandate for empirical verification by proving theism with evidences. Instead, Plantinga challenged the reasonableness of such a mandate by showing that it was based on grave epistemological errors. Furthermore, he showed that when those errors are corrected and when one applies more sensible standards for knowledge, it turns out that it is perfectly rational to make a presumption of theism. That is, contra Flew, Plantinga argued that belief in God is properly basic, an intellectually valid starting point.

Plantinga’s claim proved radical to the positivistic philosophical milieu of the time. But the rigor and insight of Plantinga’s argument were undeniable, and his notion of the proper basicality of theistic belief began to take root. This move emboldened other Christian philosophers while irritating skeptics, and within a decade Plantinga’s “Reformed epistemology” was a major item of discussion among epistemologists and philosophers of religion. The growing interest in Christian philosophy culminated in the formation of the Society of Christian Philosophers (SCP) in 1978.10 A few years later, the journal Faith and Philosophy was launched, and today it remains one of the premier journals in philosophy of religion.11 In the early years of the SCP, one of the issues that leaders of the movement discussed was just how best to do this thing called “Christian philosophy.” In a landmark article, Plantinga provided some timely advice to his peers for advancing the movement, which he summed up in three points of counsel:

First, Christian philosophers and Christian intellectuals generally must display more autonomy—more independence [from] the rest of the philosophical world. Second, Christian philosophers must display more integrity—integrity in the sense of integral wholeness, or oneness, or unity, being all of one piece. . . . And necessary to these two is a third: Christian courage, or boldness, or strength, or perhaps Christian self-confidence. We Christian philosophers must display more faith, more trust in the Lord; we must put on the whole armor of God.12

Not only was Plantinga’s call for independence, integrity, and boldness affirmed by his peers, it was also implemented with impressive results. Leading Christian philosophers such as William Alston, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, William Lane Craig, George Mavrodes, J. P. Moreland, Richard Swinburne, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Linda Zagzebski, and many others have made significant contributions to multiple philosophical subfields. They have done so both through original research on perennial problems and by addressing issues of special interest to the Christian community. Their work has been so helpful and illuminating that it has spawned new domains of inquiry. But they have not only been insightful; they have also been shrewd and resourceful, sometimes drawing upon Christian theologians and other Christian thinkers and at other times drawing from the work of those outside the Christian community. Moreover, they have been largely irenic toward other scholars, sometimes collaborating with non-Christians and even atheists on scholarly projects.13 Thus, Christian philosophers have displayed virtues that Plantinga did not mention in his counsel for the SCP but that he would no doubt heartily endorse: resourcefulness, shrewdness, and irenicism. These moral and intellectual virtues, combined with the philosophical rigor and innovation of their scholarship, help to account for the revival of Christian philosophy over the last forty years.

Now let’s take a closer look at some of the specific developments that have occurred. In each instance we will see not only how a Christian perspective has enhanced our understanding of a philosophical issue, but also how the resulting philosophical insights are a boon to personal faith and Christian living.

Epistemology

We have noted that the central figure in the Christian philosophical renaissance was Alvin Plantinga, who not only provided a rejoinder to Flew’s “presumption of atheism” but also managed to make a powerful case for the opposite position—a presumption of theism. The fact that Plantinga’s specialty is epistemology is not incidental. It was a badly flawed theory of knowledge that was driving God out of academic philosophy. Therefore it required some careful epistemological work to correct these flaws and reopen the door to theism. So let’s take a closer look at how Plantinga and other Reformed epistemologists made their case.

Flew, Ayer, and other religious skeptics insisted that the rationality of belief in God hinged entirely on whether one could provide evidence for this belief. If no such evidence could be identified, then the belief must be abandoned. While many theists tried to provide this, they inevitably fell short of the demands placed upon them. But was this a problem with the rationality of theism, or with the skeptics’ standards for what counts as rational belief? The Reformed epistemologists claimed the latter. They noted that Flew and company assumed a theory of beliefs and the various relationships that hold between them known as classical foundationalism. The essential claims of classical foundationalism are as follows:

1. There is a foundation to one’s beliefs. These are called “basic beliefs”—those accepted not on the basis of other beliefs.

2. All nonbasic beliefs are ultimately justified by these basic beliefs.

3. All properly basic (foundational) beliefs must be self-evident, evident to the senses, or rationally incorrigible (impossible to deny).14

When we have this understanding of classical foundationalism (CF), the religious skeptic’s mandate for conclusive evidence for theism initially appears reasonable.

Consider the following beliefs:

(a) The desk in my study is made of wood.

(b) All triangles have three sides.

(c) There exists an almighty, perfectly loving creator of the world.

The truth of belief (a) is immediately evident to the senses, at least to anyone who visits my study and looks at the large object buttressing the north wall. The truth of (b) is self-evident, given the concept of a triangle. But what about belief (c)? The existence of such a being is not evident to the senses, and it is neither self-evident nor incorrigible. Apparently, then, such theistic belief must be nonbasic and therefore inferred. But if the existence of God is inferred, this implies that we begin not with belief in God but rather with the absence of such a belief. In other words, we begin with a presumption of atheism. And unless we can discover conclusive evidence for God, we must retain that atheistic perspective. Theists typically worked to supply the required evidence for God in order to meet this demand and thus to overcome the atheistic presumption. So when the traditional theistic proofs all proved to be problematic in one way or another, it’s easy to see why belief in God could be regarded as unreasonable.

But perhaps, as the Reformed epistemologists pointed out, this conclusion was unwarranted. Perhaps the failure of theists to meet the CF standards was not because theism is unreasonable but because the CF standards for knowledge are unreasonable. Consider an analogy. Suppose one is interested in identifying the professional baseball pitchers of today who could be called “truly great.” And suppose a proposed criterion for true greatness is that the pitcher must be able to throw a 105-mph fastball accurately. Now surely having this ability would guarantee that somebody is a truly great pitcher, but that doesn’t make this criterion a reasonable one. The problem is that almost no one can throw that fast, much less with accuracy. While throwing 105-mph with accuracy might be a sufficient condition for being a truly great pitcher, it is not a necessary condition.15 So the failure of pitchers to meet this criterion does not reflect a lack of true greatness among baseball pitchers but rather reflects the unreasonableness of the standard used to define true greatness.

Something like this is the problem with the CF standard for basic beliefs. For consider the following beliefs:

• “Physical objects exist even when I don’t perceive them.”

• “I remember waking up this morning.”

• “There are minds other than my own.”

All of us hold such beliefs. But notice that none of them satisfies any of the CF criteria for knowledge. We do not infer that physical objects are enduring or that our memories are reliable or that other people have minds. And if we tried to justify these beliefs by way of inference, we would run into serious problems in doing so. The fact is that these beliefs are epistemically basic for us. We start with such beliefs. Moreover, we must admit that these are properly basic beliefs in the sense that we are not intellectually irresponsible in starting with them. But if these beliefs are properly basic, then, according to CF, they must satisfy one of the three conditions for proper basicality...