Family

Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan to Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908—1994) and Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908—2007). Plantinga's father was a first generation immigrant, born in the Netherlands. His family is from the Dutch province of Friesland. Plantinga’s father earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University and a Master's Degree in psychology, and taught several academic subjects at different colleges over the years. One of Plantinga's brothers, Cornelius "Neal" Plantinga, Jr., is a theologian and the current president of Calvin Theological Seminary. Another of his brothers, Leon, is an emeritus professor of musicology at Yale University. His brother Terrell worked for CBS News.

In 1955, Plantinga married Kathleen De Boer. Plantinga and his wife have four children: Carl, Jane, Harry, and Ann. Both of his sons are professors at Calvin College, Carl in Film Studies and Harry in computer science. Harry is also the director of the college's Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Plantinga's older daughter, Jane Plantinga Pauw, is a pastor at Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Seattle, Washington, and his younger daughter, Ann Kapteyn, is a missionary in Cameroon working for Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Education

At the end of 11th grade, Plantinga's father urged Plantinga to skip his last year of high school and immediately enroll in college. Plantinga reluctantly followed his father's advice and in 1949, a few months before his 17th birthday, he enrolled in Jamestown College, in Jamestown, North Dakota. During that same year, his father accepted a teaching job at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In January 1950, Plantinga moved to Grand Rapids with his family and enrolled in Calvin College. During his first semester at Calvin, Plantinga was awarded a scholarship to attend Harvard University. Beginning in the fall of 1950, Plantinga spent two semesters at Harvard. In 1951, during Harvard's spring recess, Plantinga attended a few philosophy classes at Calvin College. He was so impressed with Calvin philosophy professor William Harry Jellema that he returned 1951 to Calvin College to study philosophy under him. In 1954, Plantinga began his graduate studies at the University of Michigan where he studied under William Alston, William Frankena, and Richard Cartwright, among others. A year later, in 1955, he transferred to Yale University where he received his Ph.D. in 1958.

Teaching career

Plantinga began his career as an instructor in the philosophy department at Yale in 1957, and then in 1958 he became a professor of philosophy at Wayne State University. In 1963, he accepted a teaching job at Calvin College, where he replaced the retiring Jellema. He then spent the next 19 years at Calvin before moving to the University of Notre Dame in 1982.

Awards and honors

Plantinga served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division, 1981-1982. and as President of the Society of Christian Philosophers 1983-1986.

He has honorary degrees from Glasgow University (1982), Calvin College (1986), North Park College (1994), the Free University of Amsterdam (1995), Brigham Young University (1996), and Valparaiso University (1999).

He was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971—1972, and elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975.

In 2006, the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion renamed its Distinguished Scholar Fellowship as the Alvin Plantinga Fellowship. The fellowship includes an annual lecture by the current Plantinga Fellow.

Problem of evil

In The Nature of Necessity, Plantinga presents his free will defense to the logical problem of evil. Plantinga's aim is to show that the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good God is not inconsistent with the existence of evil, as many philosophers have argued.

In a truncated form, Plantinga's argument goes something like this: "It is possible that God, even being omnipotent, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures."

According to Chad Meister, professor of philosophy at Bethel College, most contemporary philosophers accept Plantinga's argument. The problem of evil is now commonly framed in evidential form which does not involve the claim that God and evil are logically contradictory or inconsistent. However, some philosophers continue to defend the cogency of the logical problem of evil.

Reformed epistemology

Plantinga's contributions to the field of epistemology include a contribution to religious epistemology which he dubs "Reformed epistemology". According to Reformed epistemology, belief in God can be rational and justified even without arguments or evidence for the existence of God. More specifically, Plantinga argues that belief in God is properly basic. Plantinga eventually develops a religious externalist epistemology that, if true, explains how belief in God could be justified independently of evidence. His externalist epistemology, called "Proper functionalism," is a form of epistemological reliabilism.

Plantinga develops his view of Reformed epistemology and Proper functionalism in a three volume work on epistemology. In the first book of the trilogy, Warrant: The Current Debate, Plantinga introduces, analyzes, and criticizes 20th century developments in analytic epistemology, particularly the works of Chisholm, BonJour, Alston, Goldman, and others. In the second book, Warrant and Proper Function, he introduces the notion of warrant as an alternative to justification and goes deeper into topics like self-knowledge, memories, perception, and probability. In 2000, the third volume, Warranted Christian Belief, was published. Plantinga applies his theory of warrant to the question of whether or not specifically Christian theistic belief can enjoy warrant. He argues that this is plausible. Notably, the book does not address whether or not Christian theism is true.

Modal ontological argument

Plantinga has expressed a modal logic version of the ontological argument in which he uses modal logic to develop, in a more rigorous and formal way, Norman Malcolm's and Charles Hartshorne's modal ontological arguments.

Evolutionary argument against naturalism

In Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, he argues that the truth of evolution is an epistemic defeater for naturalism (i.e. if evolution is true, it undermines naturalism). His basic argument is that if evolution and naturalism are both true, human cognitive faculties evolved to produce beliefs that have survival value (maximizing one's success at the four F's: "feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing"), not necessarily to produce beliefs that are true. Thus, since human cognitive faculties are tuned to survival rather than truth in the naturalism-cum-evolution model, there is reason to doubt the veracity of the products of those same faculties, including naturalism and evolution themselves. On the other hand, if God created man "in his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means), then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable.

The argument does not assume any necessary correlation (or uncorrelation) between true beliefs and survival. Making the contrary assumption...that there is in fact a relatively strong correlation between truth and survival...if human belief-forming apparatus evolved giving a survival advantage, then it ought to yield truth since true beliefs confer a survival advantage. Plantinga counters that, while there may be overlap between true beliefs and beliefs that contribute to survival, the two kinds of beliefs are not the same, and he gives the following example with a man named Paul:

Position on evolution and Christianity

In the past, Plantinga has lent support to the intelligent design movement. He was a member of the 'Ad Hoc Origins Committee' that supported Philip E. Johnson's book Darwin on Trial against palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould's high profile scathing review in Scientific American in 1992. Plantinga also provided a back-cover endorsement of Johnson's book. He is a member of the (now moribund) pro-intelligent design International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, and has presented at a number of intelligent design conferences.. He is among the charter signatories of the 2008 published "Evangelical Manifesto".

In a March 2010 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, philosopher of science Michael Ruse claims that Plantinga is an "open enthusiast of intelligent design." In a letter to the editor, Plantinga has the following response:

Like any Christian (and indeed any theist), I believe that the world has been created by God, and hence "intelligently designed." The hallmark of intelligent design, however, is the claim that this can be shown scientifically; I'm dubious about that.

...As far as I can see, God certainly could have used Darwinian processes to create the living world and direct it as he wanted to go; hence evolution as such does not imply that there is no direction in the history of life. What does have that implication is not evolutionary theory itself, but unguided evolution [original emphasis], the idea that neither God nor any other person has taken a hand in guiding, directing or orchestrating the course of evolution. But the scientific theory of evolution, sensibly enough, says nothing one way or the other about divine guidance. It doesn't say that evolution is divinely guided; it also doesn't say that it isn't. Like almost any theist, I reject unguided evolution; but the contemporary scientific theory of evolution just as such...apart from philosophical or theological add-ons...doesn't say that evolution is unguided. Like science in general, it makes no pronouncements on the existence or activity of God.