Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga is, more than any other single person, the reason philosophy of religion exists as a respected sub-discipline of analytic philosophy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He arrived at Notre Dame in 1982 from Calvin College, and over the next three decades published a sequence of books that took theism in general and Christian belief in particular and made it the subject of careful, technical analytic argument in journals where it had previously been embarrassed off the page.

Three contributions are central. First, the Free Will Defense, his response to J. L. Mackie‘s Logical Problem of Evil, used the modal logic of possible worlds to show that the existence of evil is not strictly inconsistent with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. Mackie himself eventually conceded the logical version of his argument in light of the defense. Second, the modal Ontological Argument, a reformulation of Anselm of Canterbury‘s argument in S5 modal logic that, while it does not convince skeptics, made the ontological argument respectable to discuss in technical journals again. Third, Reformed Epistemology, the position developed in God and Other Minds (1967) and brought to its mature form in Warranted Christian Belief (2000), which holds that belief in God can be properly basic, that is, rationally held without being inferred from other beliefs.

The third contribution is what Margaret Halloran is wrestling with through the year. The first two she has read; the third has changed where she stands.