Warranted Christian Belief Quotes

“Reason is the power or capacity whereby we see or detect logical relationships among propositions.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin concur on the claim that there is a kind of natural knowledge of God (and anything on which Calvin and Aquinas are in accord is something to which we had better pay careful attention).”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“Most of us form estimates of our intelligence, wisdom, and moral fiber that are considerably higher than an objective estimate would warrant; no doubt 90 percent of us think ourselves well above average along these lines.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“De jure objections are arguments of claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“One said whatever would be of advantage; the question whether it was true no longer arose.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“This argument is like those arguments that start from the premise that God, if he created the world, he would have created the best world he could have; and they go on to add that for every world God could have created (weakly actualized, say) there is an even better world he could have created or weakly actualized; therefore, they conclude, he would have weakly actualized any world at all, and the actual world has not been weakly actualized by God. Again, there seems no reason to believe the first premise. If there were only finitely many worlds among which God was obliged to choose, the perhaps he would have been obliged somehow, to choose the best (although even this is at best dubious). But if there is no best world at all among those he could have chosen (if for every world he could have chosen, there is a better world he could have chosen), why think a world failing to be the best is sufficient for God's being unable to actualize it? Suppose a man had the benefit of immortality and had a bottle of wine that would improve every day, no matter now long he waits to drink it. Would he be rationally obligated never to drink it, on the ground that for any time he might be tempted to, it would be better yet the next day? Suppose a donkey were stranded exactly midway between two bales of hay: would it be rationally obliged to stay there and starve to death because there is no more reason to move the one bale than the other?”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“Contemporary theologians and others sometimes complain that contemporary philosophers of religion often write as if they have never read their Kant. Perhaps the reason they write that way, however, is not that they have never read their Kant but rather that they have read him and remain unconvinced. They may be unconvinced that Kant actually claimed that our concepts do not apply to God. Alternatively, they may concede that Kant did claim this, but remain unconvinced that he was right; after all, it is not just a given of the intellectual life that Kant is right. Either way, they don't think Kant gives us reason to hold that we cannot think about God.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“Now Kant apparently intends these antinomies to constitute an essential part of the argument for his transcendental idealism, the doctrine that things we deal with (stars and planets, trees, animals and other people) are transcendentally ideal (depend upon us for their reality and structure), even if empirically real. We fall into the problem posed by antinomies, says Kant, only because we take ourselves to be thinking about things in themselves as opposed to the things for us, noumena as opposed to mere appearances...We solve the problem by recognizing our limitations, realizing that we can't think, or can't think of any real purpose, about the Dinge...I want to turn to the fatal objection. That is just that all the antinomical arguments are not at all compelling. Here I will argue this only for the premises of the first antinomy, exactly similar comments would apply to the others. In the first antinomy, there is an argument for the conclusion that 'The world had a beginning in time and is also limited as regards to space' (A426, B454); this is the thesis. There is also an argument for the antithesis: 'The world had no beginning, and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards both time and space' (A426, B454). And the idea...is that if we can think about and refer to the Dinge, then both of these would be true or would have overwhelming intuitive support...(Regarding the antitheis) In an empty time (a time at which nothing exists) nothing could come to be, because there would be no more reason for it to come to be at one part of that empty time than at any other part of it...The objection is that there would have been no more reason for God to create the world at one moment than at any other; hence he wouldn't or couldn't have created it at any moment at all. Again, why believe this?...This argument is like those arguments that start from the premise that God, if he created the world, he would have created the best world he could have; and they go on to add that for every world God could have created (weakly actualized, say) there is an even better world he could have created or weakly actualized; therefore, they conclude, he would have weakly actualized any world at all, and the actual world has not been weakly actualized by God. Again, there seems no reason to believe the first premise. If there were only finitely many worlds among which God was obliged to choose, the perhaps he would have been obliged somehow, to choose the best (although even this is at best dubious). But if there is no best world at all among those he could have chosen (if for every world he could have chosen, there is a better world he could have chosen), why think a world failing to be the best is sufficient for God's being unable to actualize it? Suppose a man had the benefit of immortality and had a bottle of wine that would improve every day, no matter now long he waits to drink it. Would he be rationally obligated never to drink it, on the ground that for any time he might be tempted to, it would be better yet the next day? Suppose a donkey were stranded exactly midway between two bales of hay: would it be rationally obliged to stay there and starve to death because there is no more reason to move the one bale than the other?”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“One who states and proposes this scheme makes several claims about the Dinge: that they are not in space and time, for example, and more poignantly, that our concepts don't apply to them (applying only to the phenomena), so that we cannot refer to or think about them. But if we really can't think the Dinge, then we can't think about them (and can't whistle them either); if we can't think about them, we can't so much as entertain the thought that there are such things. The incoherence is patent.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“Kant holds that the Dinge stand in causal or interactive relationship with us, taken as transcendental ego(s); and he also says that they are not in space and time. But on the radical subpicture, Kant (at least if his intellectual equipment is like that of the rest of us) should not be able to refer to the Dinge at all, or even speculate that there might be such things. He certainly shouldn't be able to refer to them and attribute to them properties of being atemporal and aspatial, or the property of affecting the transcendental ego(s), thereby producing experience in them He shouldn't be able to refer to us (i.e., as transcendental egos), claiming that we don't have the sort of godlike intellectual intuition into reality that would be required if we were to have synthetic a priori knowledge of the world as it is in itself. (On this picture, we might say, Kant's thought founders on the fact that the picture requires that he have knowledge the picture denies him.) If this picture were really correct, the noumena would have to drop out altogether, so that all that there is is what has been structured or made by us.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

“Kant holds that the Dinge stand in causal or interactive relationship with us, taken as transcendental ego(s); and he also says that they are not in space and time. But on the radical subpicture, Kant (at least if his intellectual equipment is like that of the rest of us) should not be able to refer to the Dinge at all, or even speculate that there might be such things. He certainly shouldn't be able to refer to them and attribute to them properties of being atemporal and aspatial,
or the property of affecting the transcendental ego(s), thereby producing experience in them He shouldn't be able to refer to us (i.e., as transcendental egos), claiming that we don't have the sort of godlike intellectual intuition into reality that would be required if we were to have synthetic a priori knowledge of the world as it is in itself. (On this picture, we might say, Kant's thought founders on the fact that the picture requires that he have knowledge the picture denies him.) If this picture were really correct, the noumena would have to drop out altogether, so that all that there is is what has been structured or made by us.”
― Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief