Faith and Philosophy

Alvin Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers” had the effect of getting contemporary Christian philosophers to recognize themselves as a part of a community with a worldview different from that found in the rest of Academia, and to take seriously in their work their commitment to that distinct worldview. I argue that in the current climate of opinion, generated at least in part by Plantinga’s advice, it would be worthwhile for contemporary Christian philosophers to consider that we also belong to a community of Christians that extends across centuries, and to ask what we are committed to by our participation in that larger community.

Plantinga says, “... the Christian philosophical community need not devote all of its efforts to attempting to refute opposing claims and/or to arguing for its own claims.... It ought to do this, indeed, but... if it does only this, it will neglect a pressing philosophical task: systematizing, deepening, clarifying Christian thought [about the problems of philosophy].” I express agreement with Plantinga about what the Christian community need not do; I go on to raise some questions about what “systematizing, deepening, clarifying Christian thought” about the problems of philosophy might come down to in practice.

Part of a symposium on the fifteenth anniversary of Al Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” this essay reflects briefly on the current status of Christian philosophy. Then, in the light of three reminders from Plantinga, it suggests that Christian philosophers pay more attention to their other audience, the church, that they reflect on the ways in which their situation is similar to that of feminist philosophers, and that they seek to transcend not only the foundationalism and evidentialism of modernity, but also to go beyond itsmonological concept of reason to a dialogical concept. Finally, and at greater length, it suggests that Christian philosophers abandon the widespread assumption that the coin of their realm is propositions, assuming too easily that we have already transcended Plato’s cave when we start our work. The bearing of this issue on the realism/anti-realism debate and on the relation of metaphysics to both politics and spirituality is explored.

In this article I thank Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen, and Merold Westphal for their gracious and insightful comments on my “Advice”; then I try to reply.

It is not easy to be a materialist and yet believe that there is a way for human beings to survive death. Peter van Inwagen identifies the central obstacle the materialist faces: Namely, the need to posit appropriate “immanent-causal” connections between my body as it is at death and some living body elsewhere or elsewhen. I offer a proposal, consistent with van Inwagen’s own materialist metaphysics, for making materialism compatible with the possibility of survival.

In response to powerful criticisms of older arguments, contemporary defenders of the Church’s traditional stance on homosexuality have fashioned a new kind of argument based upon the special relationship God created between the sexes. In this paper we examine two recent incarnations of this kind of argument and show that both fail to demonstrate the inherent immorality of homosexual relationships, and at most demonstrate that homosexual relationships are inferior to heterosexual relationships in certain respects. At the end of the paper we argue that a good God would have reason to make a certain proportion of humanity homosexual in order to unmask sexist myths. In this way homosexuality could itself strengthen, rather than weaken, the special relationship God created between the sexes.

The logical fatalist holds that the past truth of future tense propositions is incompatible with libertarian freedom. The theological fatalist holds that the combination of God’s past beliefs with His essential omniscience is incompatible with libertarian freedom. There is an ongoing dispute over the relation between these two kinds of fatalism: some philosophers believe that the problems are equivalent while others believe that the theological problem is more difficult. We offer a diagnosis of this dispute showing that one’s view of the modal status of God’s existence and God’s rdation to free creatures should determine one’s position on the relation between the two fatalisms.

In a recent exchange, John M. Fischer and David Widerker have debated whether or not it is appropriate to employ Frankfurt-style examples in efforts to challenge the intuitively plausible “principle of alternative possibilities.” Most recently, David Widerker and Charlotte Katzoff have tried to defend Widerker’s initial claim that such examples beg the question against libertarianism. As a libertarian sympathizer, I would like very much for these arguments to go through. However, I argue here that (1) their “molinist” critique is off-target, (2) their demonstration of the general falsity of Fischer’s libertarianism misses the point, and (3) they infer the relevance of alternative possibilities from the mere existence of such alternatives in a way that requires unprovided justification.