God Among Philosophers

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Using contemporary analytical philosophy, a number of philosophers in America and England have developed impressive responses to atheistic evidentialism. Especially striking is the work of Plantinga and the well-known Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne. Both insist on theism’s rationality and richness, though their arguments differ in important and interesting ways. Swinburne gladly accepts the evidentialist challenge. He agrees that belief in God is rational only if there is sufficient evidence, scientifically demonstrable, of God’s existence. Appealing to confirmation theory and employing Bayes’s Theorem of Probability Calculus, he has developed a cumulative-case argument for God’s existence that he claims inductively justifies the existence of God as the best explanation for a wide variety of well-known data. Indeed, Swinburne treats the existence of God as an explanatory hypothesis superior to its competitors.

While Plantinga denies that theists have a special "burden of proof," he does not acknowledge that there is insufficient evidence for the claim that God exists. Rather, he thinks that belief in God is rational even if none of the arguments (even Swinburne’s) for God’s existence succeeds. To appreciate Plantinga’s approach we might first consider the following passage from Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son (Eerdmans, 1987):

"When I survey this gigantic intricate world, I cannot believe that it just came about. I do not mean that I have some good arguments for its being made and that I believe in the arguments. I mean that this conviction wells up irresistibly within me when I contemplate the world. The experiment of trying to abolish it does not work. When looking at the heavens, I cannot manage to believe that they do not declare the glory of God. When looking at the earth, I cannot bring off the attempt to believe that it does not display his handiwork." 

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God Among the Philosophers

The Theory of Forms

"Plato's Theory of Forms, then, seems to involve two main ideas: first, that Forms are themselves - in some way - one; and second, that Forms do not exist in the world of experience: they are 'trascendent'. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, however, Aristotle had a different view. Aristotle thought that Forms reside in the substances whose matter is organized by the Form: Forms are not transcendent but 'immanent'. The Form of a horse, for examğle, resides in each individual horse. The difference between Plato and Aristotle here is over the question of what is most fundamentally real. Does the ultimate reality of the world lie within the ordinary things of experience? Or does it transcend those things? To say that a Form of the horse is in the horse is to say that the horse is fully real in itself; the reality of an individual horse does not have to be underwritten by the horse's relationship to something outside the world."

                                                                            Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas, Metaphysics, p. 219

Kierkegaard on Boredom

"Boredom has a long cultural history and an adaptive function in human life — it serves avital creative purpose and protects us by helping us tolerate open-endedness; in childhood, it becomes the wellspring of imaginative play. And yet we live in a culture that seems obsessed with eradicating boredom, as if it were Ebola or global poverty, and replacing it with a peculiar modern form of active idleness oozing from our glowing screens...." 

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Kierkegaard on Boredom