Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American
analytic philosopher, the John A.
O'Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
at the University of Notre Dame, and the
inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in
Philosophy at Calvin College.
Plantinga is widely known for his work
in philosophy of religion, epistemology,
metaphysics and Christian apologetics.
He is the author of numerous books
including God and Other Minds, The
Nature of Necessity, and a trilogy of
books on epistemology, culminating in
Warranted Christian Belief. He has
delivered the Gifford Lectures two times
and was described by TIME magazine as
"America's leading orthodox Protestant
philosopher of God". Plantinga is a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences and is widely regarded as
the world’s most important living
Christian philosopher.
Biography 
= Family =
Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932,
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Cornelius A.
Plantinga and Lettie G. Bossenbroek.
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 former 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 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,
and was so impressed with Calvin
philosophy professor William Harry
Jellema that he returned in 1951 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 during its heyday
as a major center for analytic
philosophy. 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. He retired from the University
of Notre Dame in 2010 and returned to
Calvin College, where he serves as the
first holder of the William Harry
Jellema Chair in Philosophy. He has
trained many prominent philosophers
working in metaphysics and epistemology
including Michael Bergmann at Purdue and
Michael Rea at Notre Dame, and Trenton
Merricks working at University of
Virginia.
= 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, Calvin College, North Park
College, the Free University of
Amsterdam, Brigham Young University, and
Valparaiso University.
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.
In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh's
Philosophy Department, History and
Philosophy of Science Department, and
the Center for the History and
Philosophy of Science co-awarded
Plantinga the Nicholas Rescher Prize for
Systematic Philosophy, which he received
with a talk titled, "Religion and
Science: Where the Conflict Really
Lies".
Philosophical views 
Plantinga has argued that some people
can know that God exists as a basic
belief, requiring no argument. He
developed this argument in two different
fashions: firstly, in God and Other
Minds, by drawing an equivalence between
the teleological argument and the common
sense view that people have of other
minds existing by analogy with their own
minds. Plantinga has also developed a
more comprehensive epistemological
account of the nature of warrant which
allows for the existence of God as a
basic belief.
Plantinga has also argued that there is
no logical inconsistency between the
existence of evil and the existence of
an all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly
good God.
= Problem of evil =
Plantinga proposed a "free will defense"
in a volume edited by Max Black in 1965,
which attempts to refute the logical
problem of evil, the argument that the
existence of evil is logically
incompatible with the existence of an
omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God.
Plantinga's argument states that "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."
Plantinga's defense has received wide
acceptance among contemporary
philosophers when addressing moral evil.
However, the argument's handling of
natural evil has been more heavily
disputed, and its presupposition of a
libertarianist, incompatibilist view of
free will has been seen as problematic
as well. According to the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the argument
also "conflicts with important theistic
doctrines", including the notion of
heaven and the idea that God has free
will. J.L. Mackie sees Plantinga's
free-will defense as incoherent.
Plantinga's well-received book God,
Freedom and Evil written in 1974 gave
his response to what he saw as the
incomplete and uncritical view of
theism's criticism of theodicy.
Plantinga's contribution stated that
when the issue of a comprehensive
doctrine of freedom is added to the
discussion of the goodness of God and
the omnipotence of God then it is not
possible to exclude the presence of evil
in the world after introducing freedom
into the discussion. Plantinga's own
summary occurs in his discussion titled
"Could God Have Created a World
Containing Moral Good but No Moral
Evil," where he states his conclusion
that, "...the price for creating a world
in which they produce moral good is
creating one in which they also produce
moral evil."
= Reformed epistemology =
Plantinga's contributions to
epistemology include an argument 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, and due
to a religious externalist epistemology,
he claims belief in God could be
justified independently of evidence. His
externalist epistemology, called "Proper
functionalism", is a form of
epistemological reliabilism.
Plantinga discusses his view of Reformed
epistemology and Proper functionalism in
a three-volume series. 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 book,
Plantinga argues specifically that the
theories of what he calls “warrant”-
what many others have called
justification- put forth by these
epistemologists have systematically
failed to capture in full what is
required for knowledge.
In the second book, Warrant and Proper
Function, he introduces the notion of
warrant as an alternative to
justification and discusses topics like
self-knowledge, memories, perception,
and probability. Plantinga's "proper
function" account argues that as a
necessary condition of having warrant,
one's "belief-forming and
belief-maintaining apparatus of powers"
are functioning properly—"working the
way it ought to work". Plantinga
explains his argument for proper
function with reference to a "design
plan", as well as an environment in
which one's cognitive equipment is
optimal for use. Plantinga asserts that
the design plan does not require a
designer: "it is perhaps possible that
evolution has somehow furnished us with
our design plans", but the paradigm case
of a design plan is like a technological
product designed by a human being.
Ultimately, Plantinga argues that
epistemological naturalism- i.e.
epistemology that holds that warrant is
dependent on natural faculties – is best
supported by supernaturalist metaphysics
– in this case the belief in a creator
God or designer who has laid out a
design plan that includes cognitive
faculties conducive to attaining
knowledge.
According to Plantinga, a belief, B, is
warranted if:
(1) the cognitive faculties involved in
the production of B are functioning
properly…; your cognitive environment is
sufficiently similar to the one for
which your cognitive faculties are
designed; … the design plan governing
the production of the belief in question
involves, as purpose or function, the
production of true beliefs…; and the
design plan is a good one: that is,
there is a high statistical or objective
probability that a belief produced in
accordance with the relevant segment of
the design plan in that sort of
environment is true.
Plantinga seeks to defend this view of
proper function against alternative
views of proper function proposed by
other philosophers which he groups
together as "naturalistic", including
the "functional generalization" view of
John Pollock, the
evolutionary/etiological account
provided by Ruth Millikan, and a
dispositional view held by John Bigelow
and Robert Pargetter. Plantinga also
discusses his evolutionary argument
against naturalism in the later chapters
of Warrant and Proper Function.
In 2000, the third volume, Warranted
Christian Belief, was published.
Plantinga reintroduces his theory of
warrant to ask whether 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. His basic
argument is that if evolution and
naturalism are both true, human
cognitive faculties evolved to produce
beliefs that have survival value, not
necessarily to produce beliefs that are
true. Thus, since human cognitive
faculties are tuned to survival rather
than truth in the naturalism-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, then
Plantinga argues our faculties would
probably be reliable.
The argument does not assume any
necessary correlation 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:
Although the argument has been
criticized by some philosophers, like
Elliott Sober, it has received favorable
notice from Thomas Nagel and others.
= 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 1991 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 was a Fellow of
the pro-intelligent design International
Society for Complexity, Information, and
Design, and has presented at a number of
intelligent design conferences.
In a March 2010 article in The Chronicle
of Higher Education, philosopher of
science Michael Ruse labeled Plantinga
as an "open enthusiast of intelligent
design". In a letter to the editor,
Plantinga made the following response:
Like any Christian, 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, 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.
Selected works by Plantinga 
God and Other Minds. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. 1967. rev. ed., 1990.
ISBN 0-8014-9735-3
The Nature of Necessity. Oxford:
Clarendon Press. 1974. ISBN
0-19-824404-5
God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans. 1974. ISBN 0-04-100040-4
Does God Have A Nature? Wisconsin:
Marquette University Press. 1980. ISBN
0-87462-145-3
Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief
in God. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press. 1983. ISBN 0-268-00964-3
Warrant: the Current Debate. New York:
Oxford University Press. 1993. ISBN
0-19-507861-6
Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 1993. ISBN
0-19-507863-2
Warranted Christian Belief. New York:
Oxford University Press. 2000. ISBN
0-19-513192-4 online
Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality.
Matthew Davidson. New York: Oxford
University Press. 2003. ISBN
0-19-510376-9
Knowledge of God. Oxford: Blackwell.
2008. ISBN 0-631-19364-2
Science and Religion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2010 ISBN
0-19-973842-4
Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science,
Religion, and Naturalism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2011. ISBN
0-19-981209-8
Knowledge and Christian Belief. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans. 2015. ISBN 0802872042
See also 
American philosophy
List of American philosophers
Notes 
References 
"Self-profile" in Alvin Plantinga, James
Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen ed.,,
1985
Forrest, Barbara; Gross, Paul R..
Creationism's Trojan Horse. Oxford
University Press. ISBN 0-19-515742-7. 
Mackie, J.L. The Miracle of Theism:
Arguments for and Against the Existence
of God. Oxford University Press. ISBN
0-19-824682-X. 
Meister, Chad. Introducing Philosophy of
Religion. Routledge. ISBN
978-0-415-40327-6. 
Further reading 
Baker, Deane-Peter, Alvin Plantinga. New
York: Cambridge University Press. 2007.
Mascrod, Keith, Alvin Plantinga and
Christian Apologetics. Wipf & Stock.
2007.
Crisp, Thomas, Matthew Davidson, David
Vander Laan, Knowledge and Reality:
Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga.
Dordrecht: Springer. 2006.
Beilby, James, Epistemology as Theology:
An Evaluation of Alvin Plantinga's
Religious Epistemology. Aldershot:
Ashgate. 2005
Beilby, James, Naturalism Defeated?
Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary
Argument Against Naturalism. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. 2002.
Sennet, James, The Analytic Theist: An
Alvin Plantinga Reader. Grand Rapids:
Eeardman. 1998. ISBN 0-8028-4229-1
Kvanvig, Jonathan, Warrant in
Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in
Honor of Plantinga's Theory of
Knowledge. Savage, Maryland: Rowman &
Littlefield. 1996.
McLeod, Mark S. Rationality and Theistic
Belief: An Essay on Reformed
Epistemology. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press. 1993.
Zagzebski, Linda, Rational Faith. Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
1993.
Sennett, James, Modality, Probability,
and Rationality: A Critical Examination
of Alvin Plantinga's Philosophy. New
York: P. Lang. 1992.
Hoitenga, Dewey, From Plato to
Plantinga: An Introduction to Reformed
Epistemology. Albany: State University
of New York Press. 1991.
Parsons, Keith, God and the Burden of
Proof: Plantinga, Swinburne, and the
Analytic Defense of Theism. Buffalo, New
York: Prometheus Books. 1989.
Tomberlin, James and Peter van Inwagen,
Alvin Plantinga. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
1985.
External links 
Alvin Plantinga's faculty page at the
University of Notre Dame
Plantinga's Curriculum Vitae
Virtual Library of Christian Philosophy
a collection of some of Plantinga's
papers
Papers by Plantinga Extensive collection
of online papers.
Interviews from the PBS program Closer
to Truth
"The Dawkins Confusion", Plantinga's
review of Richard Dawkins's The God
Delusion from Books and Culture magazine
Alvin Plantinga's spiritual
autobiography
Warrant: The Current Debate Plantinga's
Gifford Lecture, and volume 1 of his
trilogy on warrant.
Warrant and Proper Function Plantinga's
Gifford Lecture, and volume 2 of the
warrant trilogy.
Warranted Christian Belief, full
electronic text of volume 3 of the
Warrant trilogy.
Daniel C. Dennett and Alvin Plantinga,
Science and Religion: Are They
Compatible?
