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