Quotes from Alvin Plantinga

The conclusion that we were misled by our senses clearly involves several faculties: memory, induction…and sense perception itself

These questions that philosophers confront have to be reconfronted in every generation. The problems of philosophy reoccur in different forms.

If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God.

God creates a world containing evil and has a good reason for doing so.

Belief in the existence of God is in the same boat as belief in other minds, the past, and perceptual objects; in each case God has so constructed us that in the right circumstances we form the belief in question.

One who states and proposes this scheme makes several claims about the Dinge: that they are not in space and time, for example, and more poignantly, that our concepts don't apply to them (applying only to the phenomena), so that we cannot refer to or think about them. But if we really can't think the Dinge, then we can't think about them (and can't whistle them either); if we can't think about them, we can't so much as entertain the thought that there are such things. The incoherence is patent.

True: the existence of the experiences that go with the operation of the sensus divinitatis is compatible with there being no omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good creator of the universe. It doesn't follow from that, however, that we can't know — and know, broadly speaking, by experience — that there is such a person.

If we can't think about God, then we can't think about him; and therefore can't make statements about him, including statements to the effect that we can't think about him. The statement that we can't think about God-the statement that God is such that we can't think about him- is obviously a statement about God; if we can't think about God, then we can't say about him what we can't think about him.

How could there be truths totally independent of minds or persons?... How could the things that are in fact true or false—propositions, let's say—exist in serene and majestic independence of persons and their means of apprehension? How could there be propositions no one has ever so much as grasped or thought of?

There seem to be two strands to this notion of justification. On the one hand, justification seems to have something to do with evidence: a belief (or the believer) is unjustified if there isn't any evidence, or enough evidence, for that belief. On the other hand, justification seems to have something to do with duty, or obligation, or moral rightness.

My whole account of positive epistemic status, not just this example, owes much to Thomas Reid with his talk of faculties and their functions and his rejection of the notion (one he attributes to Hume and his predecessors) that self-evident propositions and propositions about one's own immediate experience are the only properly basic propositions.

My whole account of positive epistemic status owes much to Thomas Reid with his talk of faculties and their functions and his rejection of the notion (one he attributes to Hume and his predecessors) that self-evident propositions and propositions about one's own immediate experience are the only properly basic propositions.

To recount the essential features of the model: the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit working in concord with God's teaching in Scripture is a cognitive process or belief-producing mechanism that produces in us the beliefs constituting faith, as well as a host of other beliefs.

God has ...created us with cognitive faculties designed to enable us to achieve true beliefs with respect to a wide variety of propositions - propositions about our immediate environment, about our own interior lives, about the thoughts and experiences of other persons, about our universe at large, about right and wrong, about the whole realm of abstracta - numbers, properties, propositions - ... and about himself.

The Reformed epistemologist may concur with Calvin in holding that God has implanted in us a natural tendency to see his hand in the world around us; the same cannot be said for the Great Pumpkin, there being no Great Pumpkin and no natural tendency to accept beliefs about the Great Pumpkin.

Accordingly, criteria for proper basicality must be reached from below rather than above; they should not be presented ex cathedra but argued to and tested by a relevant set of examples.

Now Kant is by no means easy to understand, which is no doubt part of his charm. If you want to be a really great philosopher, make sure not to say too clearly what you have in mind (well, maybe that's not quite enough, but it's a good start);

faith is the belief in the great things of the gospel that results from the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit.

It's hard to say what philosophy is. Somebody, and I forget who, defined it as just thinking exceptionally hard.

If you have evidence for every proposition you believe, then you will believe infinitely many propositions. So presumably some propositions can properly be believed and accepted without evidence. Well, why not belief in God? Why is it not entirely acceptable, desirable, right, proper, and rational to accept belief in God without any argument or evidence?

The experiences and beliefs involved in the operation of the sensus divinitatis and IIHS serve as occasions for theistic belief, not premises for an argument to it.

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. From a theistic point of view, the natural conclusion is that sets owe their existence to God's thinking things together

Hence our verdict on these reformulated versions of St. Anselm's argument must be as follows. They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion.

There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism