Book Review
Fidei Defensor
Knowledge and Christian Belief
by Alvin Plantinga
Eerdmans, 2015
(129 pages, $16.00, paperback)
reviewed by Graeme Hunter
Ever since the Enlightenment, religious belief of all kinds has come under close, unsympathetic scrutiny. Christianity has been the main target, of course, because it is the religion that fathered the Enlightenment, and therefore the one that must be buried before the enlightened can consider themselves free. With time, the attacks on Christianity have grown fiercer, and it is not unusual today to be warned of coming persecution and even martyrdom in the very Western countries that once were Christian. How could such apostasy have come upon us?
The so-called New Atheists shrilly proclaim that Christian belief fell prey to discoveries of the natural and social sciences that are irreconcilable with Christian belief. Great numbers of Christians seem to fear this may be so, and many may have relinquished their Christian beliefs on that account. Not a few of those who remain Christian have been panicked by the growing voice of atheism into lightening and downsizing their dogmatic load until they are reduced to beliefs so thin and weightless that there is nothing left to attack.
How good it would be if someone had the patience to sift through the most intimidating criticisms of our faith and find their central claims. It would be even better if that person had the philosophical and theological acumen to understand and refute those claims. Best of all would be if that person's intent lay not in defending some bland form of moral rectitude he called Christianity, but a robust and orthodox account of the faith.
There is such a person. He is Alvin Plantinga, and his new book, an abridgement and simplification of his theological-philosophical masterpiece, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, 2000), is what the shell-shocked survivors of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment attacks have been waiting for.
Engaging the Critics
The structure is very simple. First, Plantinga engages the arguments of a certain type of superior intellectual who would not stoop to denying the existence of God any more than that of Santa Claus. Because he can imagine no good reason for such beliefs, this type of critic looks for causes instead. Belief in God, says this critic in his Freudian moments, is caused by fear of the dangers and chaotic injustice of life. Our fear makes us wish for a loving, fatherly Being to look after us, and that wish is so strong that it transforms itself into a conviction that such a Being must exist. The idea of God is therefore a kind of wish fulfillment.
When the Marxist fit is on him, however, the critic puts his objection a little differently. Religion he then considers as "the sigh of the oppressed," and he admits that oppression is real. "But," he asks, "what does a rational being do on becoming aware that he is oppressed?" A strong one turns his mind and strength to rooting out the causes of oppression. Only a weak man would invent the idea of a providential Being to console him in his misery. The idea of God on this account is the outworking of an oppressive social order.
Neither type of critic, Plantinga points out, is concerned with the question of whether or not there really is a God. Both act as if the existence of illegitimate ways for arriving at our beliefs shows that there are no legitimate ones. But that is absurd, since it would deny us warranted beliefs on any subject. Plantinga, however, does not go on plumbing the bottomless wells of irrationality from which many of the critiques of Christianity are drawn. He keeps his focus on the constructive project of showing how warranted Christian belief is
possible.
Warranted Belief
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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