Who is alvin plantinga

From the beginning, you've let your faith be visible in your philosophical research: that took tremendous courage over the decades, and your example helped many other religious men and women feel like they had futures in philosophy. In your writing and teaching, so many others have found a blueprint for asking their own questions about possibility, about freedom, about God and faith, and about the capability of our minds to know.

It is truly a form of love to show others that they have this capacity. The John Templeton Foundation. Photo credit: Templeton Prize-Clifford Shirley. Career Graduates from Calvin College with a degree in philosophy. Also appointed director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame, which becomes the hub of work in the field. Templeton Prize, Books by Plantinga Knowledge and Christian Belief Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?

Knowledge of God Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality Warranted Christian Belief This was, at least in large part, due to the influence of positivism on the philosophical terrain. Plantinga was undaunted by such criticisms. At Michigan, as earlier on, I was very much interested in the sorts of philosophical attacks mounted against traditional theism—the ancient claim that it was incompatible with the existence of evil, the Freudian claim that it arose out of wish fulfillment, the positivistic claim that talk about God was literally meaningless, the Bultmannian claim that traditional belief in God was an outmoded relic of a prescientific age and the like.

These objections except for evil seemed to me not only specious but deceptive, deceitful in a way: they paraded themselves as something like discoveries, something we moderns or at any rate the more perceptive among us had finally seen, after all those centuries of darkness. All but the first, I thought, were totally question begging if taken as arguments against theism. John G. In response to the Templeton honor, Plantinga remarked that he would be pleased if his work played a role in transforming the field of philosophy over the past several decades.

Plantinga grew up in Michigan, with a strong heritage in Dutch Calvinism. He began wondering about the big questions that would later shape his career—understanding evil in a world ruled by an omnipotent God—as a pre-teen in Dutch Sunday school classes.

After two semesters at Harvard University, he returned to Calvin College and went on to doctorate studies at Yale University. Plantinga frequently wrote for the publication from to CT profiled prize winner John Polkinghorne , as well as interviewed him on how he saw the Bible as the laboratory notebook of the Holy Spirit.

CT also interviewed prize winner Michael Novak on being a good capitalist. CT noted when Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright won in , when physicist Ian Barbour won in , when physicist Freeman Dyson won in , when biochemist Arthur Peacocke won in , and when philosopher Charles Taylor won in CT also noted the death and influence of prize winner T. Torrance, a Reformed theologian.

Christian History highlighted the life and legacy of prize winner Dame Cicely Saunders.