Alvin Plantinga Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

If we don't know that there is such a person as God, we don't know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence.

Alvin Plantinga
The Christian philosopher has a perfect right to the point of view and prephilosophical assumptions he brings to philosophic work; the fact that these are not widely shared outside the Christian or theistic community is interesting but fundamentally irrelevant.

Alvin Plantinga
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
To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him.

Alvin Plantinga
Hence our verdict on these reformulated versions of St. Anselm's argument must be as follows. They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion.

Alvin Plantinga
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
Well, I don't think there are any methodological conflicts either. As for those social conflicts, those aren't conflicts—in my opinion—between science and religion. They're conflicts between Christians and atheists or Christians and secularists: Christians want to do things one way, secularists want to do things another way. But that's not a science/religion conflict at all. You might as well say it's a science/secularism conflict. In each case, each group wants to do science and then use it in a certain way.

Alvin Plantinga
Reason is the power or capacity whereby we see or detect logical relationships among propositions.

Alvin Plantinga