Reading: Advice to Christian Philosophers by Alvin Plantinga - Part 10

I have already spoken about epistemology; let me mention another example from this area. Epistemologists sometimes worry about the confluence or lack thereof of epistemic justification, on the one hand, and truth, or reliability, on the other. Suppose we do the best that can be expected of us,  noetically speaking; suppose we do our intellectual duties and satisfy our intellectual obligations: what guarantee is there that in so doing we shall arrive at the truth? Is there even any reason for supposing that if we thus satisfy our obligations, we shall have a better chance of arriving at the truth than if we brazenly flout them? And where do these intellectual obligations come from? How does it happen that we have them? Here the theist has, if not a clear set of answers, at any rate clear suggestions towards a set of answers.

Another example: creative anti-realism is presently popular among philosophers; this is the view that it is human behavior-in particular, human thought and language-that is somehow responsible for the fundamental structure of the world and for the fundamental kinds of entities there are. From a theistic point of view, however, universal creative anti-realism is at best a mere impertinence, a piece of laughable bravado. For God, of course, owes neither his existence nor his properties to us and our ways of thinking; the truth is just the reverse. And so far as the created universe is concerned, while it indeed owes its existence and character to activity on the part of a person, that person is certainly not a human person.

One final example, this time from philosophy of mathematics. Many who think about sets and their nature are inclined to accept the following ideas. First, no set is a member of itself. Second, whereas a property has its extension contingently, a set has its membership essentially. This means that no set could have existed if one of its members had not, and that no set could have had fewer or different members from the ones it in fact has. It means, furthermore, that sets are contingent beings; if Ronald Reagan had not existed, then his unit set would not have existed. And thirdly, sets form a sort of iterated structure: at the first level there are sets whose members are non-sets, at the second level sets whose members are non-sets or first level sets; at the third level, sets whose members are nonsets or sets of the first two levels, and so on. Many are also inclined, with George Cantor, to regard sets as collections-as objects whose existence is dependent upon a certain sort of intellectual activity-a collecting or "thinking together" as Cantor put it. If sets were collections of this sort, that would explain their displaying the first three features I mentioned. But if the collecting or thinking together had to be done by human thinkers, or any finite thinkers, there wouldn't be nearly enough sets-not nearly as many as we think in fact there are.

Reprinted from Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers vol. 1:3, (253-271), permanently copyrighted October 1984. Used by permission of the Editor. New preface by author. Journal web site: www.faithandphilosophy.com

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