Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Plantinga on being unawed by secularist arguments

Also from Philosophers who Believe, from Plantinga's "A Christian Life Partly Lived, p. 53.

About his teacher from Calvin Harry Jellema, Plantinga wrote:

Clearly he (Jellema) was profoundly familiar iwth the doubts and objections and alternative ways of thought cast up by modernity; indeed he seemed to undertand them better than those who offered them. But (and this is what Ifound enormously impressive) he was totally unawed. What especially struck me then in what he said (partly because it put into words something I felt at Harvard but couldn't articulate) was much of the intellectual opposition to Christianity and theism was really a sort of intellectual imperialism with very little basis. Wea re told that humankind come of age has got beyond such primitive ways of thinking, that they are outmoded, or incompatible with a scientific mindset, or made irrelevant by the march of history or maybe by something else lurking in the neighborhood. (In the age of the wireless, Bultmann quaintly asks, who can accept them?) But why should a Christian believe any of these things? Are they more than mere claims?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your link doesn't work.

Victor Reppert said...

I fixed it.