One of the most important topics in religious conversations is the nature of human freedom. On July 26, 2008 , Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio interviewed Alvin Plantinga, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame as part the American Masters of Christian Thinking series. Listen to the interview at the Unbelievable website (mp3 here). The interview begins at audio marker 16:20.
If you’ve never read Alvin Plantinga, or are less familiar with the problem of evil and notions of free will, I highly recommend listening to this interview. In fact, because Plantinga focuses heavily on the concept of free will, I believe Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints would find the interview particularly relevant since this topic tends to linger in the background of many discussions between Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints.
Highlights: Plantinga discusses his early years and particularly how he grappled with the challenges to Christianity from other students while he attended Harvard. He discusses his views on the role of philosophy in the defense of Christianity, the problem of evil, the relation between Christians and the academy, and other topics.
I was interested to learn that when he was young, Alvin’s father taught him Latin and he read Plato’s Dialogues around the age of 12 or 13.
The first year of university, I went to Harvard University. There for the first time, I ran into people who were extremely intelligent, extremely accomplished intellectually, and who didn’t share my beliefs at all, who were agnostics or atheists or naturalists or whatever, and I got involved in all kinds of discussion and argument. At that point in my life, these questions about whether Christian beliefs are true, whether it is rational or reasonable, these questions then assumed a very large, they took a large portion of what I thought about. . .
I didn’t hear a whole lot of people arguing against Christian belief in these courses, I heard a great deal more of it outside among my student companions. Then, as now, I think perhaps the three main objections brought against Christian belief were first, as you mentioned, the problem of evil: how could it be that if there is this all-powerful all-knowing perfectly good God, how could it be there are so many horrifying things that go on in our world? And secondly, the thought was, there just aren’t any good arguments for Christianity. Why should I believe that? Give me some arguments. And then the third one would be something like, well hasn’t science really dispensed with the whole necessity or reason for believing in Christian, accepting Christian belief, or just believing God, don’t we now know so much more than people knew in the old times that these beliefs are no longer sensible?
Justin: Did you have to grapple with this? Or did you sort of relish this as a kind of challenge to your intellect? Did you ever have any ultimate doubts about your Christian belief?
I can’t say I had any ultimate doubts, but first I was somewhat shaken. I mean, here were these people, many of them far more accomplished intellectually than I, who knew a great deal more, seemed to have thought about these things more deeply and their views were so completely different from mine. Could it really be that mine were right and theirs wrong?
As usual, Justin Brierley does a great job conducting the interview and always seems to follow up with the just the right questions.
0 Responses to “Alvin Plantinga: Free Will and the Problem of Evil”