Knowledge and Christian Belief Quotes

“Faith is not to be contrasted with knowledge: faith (at least in paradigmatic instances) is knowledge, knowledge of a certain special kind.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“The sensus divinitatis is a belief-producing faculty (or power, or mechanism) that under the right conditions produces belief that isn’t evidentially based on other beliefs.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“And according to Martin Luther, there are two ways of believing. In the first place I may have faith concerning God. This is the case when I hold to be true what is said concerning God. Such faith is on the same level with the assent I give to statements concerning the Turk, the devil and hell. A faith of this kind should be called knowledge or information rather than faith. In the second place there is faith in. Such faith is mine when I not only hold to be true what is said concerning God, but when I put my trust in him in such a way as to enter into personal relations with him, believing firmly that I shall find him to be and to do as I have been taught. . . . The word in is well chosen and deserving of due attention. We do not say, I believe God the Father or concerning God the Father, but in God the Father, in Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit.3 Jonathan”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“The believer,” says Aquinas, “has sufficient motive for believing, for he is moved by the authority of divine teaching confirmed by miracles and, what is more, by the inward instigation of the divine invitation.”5”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“while there is indeed conflict between science and naturalism (the view that there is no such person as God or anything like God), there is no conflict between science and religion.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“Perhaps God permits my father, or my daughter, or my friend, or me to suffer in the most appalling way. I may then find myself thinking as follows: “No doubt he has all those dandy divine qualities and no doubt he has a fine reason for permitting this abomination — after all, I am no match for him with respect to coming up with reasons, reasons that are utterly beyond me — but what he permits is appalling, and I hate it!” I may want to tell him off face to face: “You may be wonderful, and magnificent, and omniscient and omnipotent (and even wholly good) and all that exalted stuff, but I utterly detest what you are doing!” A problem of this kind is not really an evidential problem at all, and it isn’t a defeater for theism.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“Am I really arrogant and egoistic just by virtue of believing something I know others don’t believe, where I can’t show them that I am right? I can’t see how. Of course I must concede that there are a variety of ways in which I can be and have been intellectually arrogant and egoistic; I have certainly fallen into this vice in the past, will no doubt fall into it in the future, and am not free of it now. Still, suppose I think the matter over, consider the objections as carefully as I can, realize that I am finite and furthermore a sinner, certainly no better than those with whom I disagree, and indeed inferior both morally and intellectually to many who do not believe what I do. But suppose it still seems clear to me that the proposition in question is true: am I really immoral in continuing to believe it?”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“True: the existence of the experiences that go with the operation of the sensus divinitatis is compatible with there being no omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good creator of the universe. It doesn’t follow from that, however, that we can’t know — and know, broadly speaking, by experience — that there is such a person.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“The experiences and beliefs involved in the operation of the sensus divinitatis and IIHS serve as occasions for theistic belief, not premises for an argument to it.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“To recount the essential features of the model: the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit working in concord with God’s teaching in Scripture is a cognitive process or belief-producing mechanism that produces in us the beliefs constituting faith, as well as a host of other beliefs.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’ — more exactly, ‘sonofabitch’, or, perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) But there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ than ‘sumbitch simpliciter. But it isn’t exactly like that term either, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend upon who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote anyone who accepts traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, on the other hand, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase “considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.” The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use) can be given by something like “stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“Due to sin, the knowledge of God provided by the sensus divinitatis, prior to faith and regeneration, is both narrowed in scope and partially suppressed. The faculty itself may be diseased and thus partly or wholly disabled. There is such a thing as cognitive disease; there is blindness, deafness, inability to tell right from wrong, insanity; and there are analogues of these conditions with respect to the operation of the sensus divinitatis.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“Now Kant is by no means easy to understand, which is no doubt part of his charm. If you want to be a really great philosopher, make sure not to say too clearly what you have in mind (well, maybe that’s not quite enough, but it’s a good start); if people can just read and understand what you say, there will be no need for commentators on your work, no one will write PhD dissertations on your work to explain your meaning, and there won’t be any controversies about what it was you really meant. Kant must have heeded the above advice, and the fact is there are dozens, maybe hundreds of books written about his philosophy, and endless controversy as to his meaning.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“Now Kant is by no means easy to understand, which is no doubt part of his charm. If you want to be a really great philosopher, make sure not to say too clearly what you have in mind (well, maybe that’s not quite enough, but it’s a good start);”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“faith is the belief in the great things of the gospel that results from the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

“There seem to be two strands to this notion of justification. On the one hand, justification seems to have something to do with evidence: a belief (or the believer) is unjustified if there isn’t any evidence, or enough evidence, for that belief. On the other hand, justification seems to have something to do with duty, or obligation, or moral rightness.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief