A recent interview in the Stone by Gary Gutting of Alvin Plantinga gave rise to expected criticisms, for instance by Massimo Pigliucci. The wide media exposure of Plantinga puts him forward as somehow representative of what Christian philosophers believe, and if his reasoning is not sound then, as Pigliucci puts it “theology is in big trouble”.
For Plantinga, as is well known and again iterated in this interview, the properly functioning sensus divinitatis is sufficient for belief in God, and one need not have any explicit arguments at all for God’s existence. Nevertheless, Plantinga does say that the “whole bunch taken together” of such arguments are “as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get”. In a brief digression to the problem of evil, Plantinga does not even fully acknowledge it as a problem (calling it the “so-called problem of evil”), although he acknowledges there is some strength to it. The problem is then quickly solved with a Fall theodicy, where God mends the abuse of freedom of his creatures through the horrible and humiliating death of his Son, which Plantinga thinks is a “magnificent possible world”.
Overall, I found the tone of this interview somewhat placid. Eleonore Stump has termed this sort of approach toward evil "the Hobbit attitude to evil" (note and update: to clarify, she does not refer to Plantinga's work in the essay, the interpretation is mine). She writes: “Some people glance into the mirror of evil and quickly look away. They take note, shake their heads sadly, and go about their business. … Tolkien's hobbits are people like this. There is health and strength in their ability to forget the evil they have seen. Their good cheer makes them robust.” — In fairness, Plantinga did write defenses to account for the problem of evil, but in my view, he does not take it seriously enough. Eleonore Stump does not share Plantinga’s reasons for being a religious believer, nor do other philosophers of religion who have spoken out in Morris' and Kelly Clark’s collections of spiritual autobiographies of philosophers who believe. So why do Christian philosophers of religion believe that something like Christian theism is true?
For several authors in Clark's edited collection* (including Plantinga), the reasons for belief can be surmised as something like this “I’ve been brought up religiously. I've always liked religion. I like going to church, and the bible inspires me. I’ve had mentors who were Christian philosophers that were very influential in my formative years and that made me think the position is philosophically defensible. And when I walk in nature I do sometimes have the sense that something like the God I was brought up to believe in exists. To make this all philosophically work, I do find I contort myself with all sorts of weird analogies and intuitions that nobody finds remotely plausible, unless they are more committed to theism than to atheism. There are some arguments I think are strong, like the cosmological argument, but they seem to wither in the face of the formidable problem of evil. Now, I can't respond to this problem without sounding very insensitive to those who suffer, but I'll do it anyway, by treating suffering mainly as a philosophical puzzle."
In sum, I think there are all sorts of extra-philosophical reasons why Christian philosophers find themselves attracted to theism (and specifically some Christian version of it). Now, as philosophers of religion have often triumphantly noted, non-realist positions are no longer fashionable, so a kind of Wittgensteinian aspect-seeing position is not attractive, therefore many philosophers find themselves defending a robust realist position, through natural theological arguments, theodicies, and Reformed epistemology, for example. But I don’t think that everyone’s religious temperament is suited to this form of robust realism. The strikingness of narratives, the beauty of religious music, and the like may – also to a philosopher – provide compelling reasons for being a theist; not all these reasons need be philosophical.
*I have not yet read Morris’ book except Stump’s essay, which she sent me.
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