ABSTRACT
Alvin Plantinga argues that a person can assert that they know God exists, without argument, as a basic belief; belief in God is rational and basic without evidence of existence. Who is Alvin Plantinga? Alvin Plantinga (1932–) is by any measure a distinguished fixture in the pantheon of twentieth-century analytic philosophers and Christian philosophers. The author condemns all of the honors attached to Plantinga’s achievements, the very “discipline” of philosophy, and merely Christian philosophy, for giving succor to a man who has claimed that “the doctrine of original sin … has been verified in the wars, cruelty and general hatefulness that have characterized human history from its very inception to the present.” What does it say about philosophy and academic scholarship that it has stamped Plantinga’s works with their imprimaturs? This is not a sign of academic freedom, and this is not an exemplar of freedom of expression; it is a signal that in philosophy “anything goes” in the most naïve version of relativistic tolerance one can imagine.
