I hope every reader of mine has had a fine Thanksgiving break and is ready for another work week. In New England, the home of the origin story of this feast, we certainly had great weather for it: weather harsh enough that we could think of ourselves as new settlers in a harsh dangerous land and show some Calvinist fortitude in facing up to it! The following may have some connection to Calvinism, but not much. I'll inflict it upon you anyway. A young friend of mine, in college, taking a course on the philosophy of religion, was recently assigned to write a paper about the dispute between Mackie and Plantinga over free will and the problem of evil. Mackie has argued (as have many others, but the Mackie version of the case has become a focal point of recent debate) that it is logically impossible to reconcile three claims: that an omnipotent God exists; that this is also an ideally benevolent being; and that evil exists. Any theology with any hope of plausibility ...
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There is an old theory of knowledge known as the JTB view: the view, that is, that knowledge is "justified true belief." Edmund Gettier gets a lot of credit for weakening the hold of JTB upon conventional wisdom, in his brief article of 1963 in the journal ANALYSIS, arguing that there are cases in which all three circumstances are met, but which one wouldn't ordinarily speak of as "knowledge." Some people believe Gettier gets more credit than he deserves. Alvin Plantinga has written: According to the inherited lore of the epistemological tribe, the JTB [justified true belief] account enjoyed the status of epistemological orthodoxy until 1963, when it was shattered by Edmund Gettier... Of course there is an interesting historical irony here: it isn't easy to find many really explicit statements of a JTB analysis of knowledge prior to Gettier. It is almost as if a distinguished critic created a tradition in the very act of destroying it. ...
I'm about 24 years late to the party, but I've recently learned that Ernan McMullin, of the University of Notre Dame, wrote a fascinating take-down of an essay by Alvin Plantinga. This must have been big news in the world of Christian theologians/apologetics in 1991. Plantinga was easily the better known of the two: he was once (in 1980, or eleven years before McMullin took him on) described by TIME as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God." The exchange may have seemed to some like a hopeless mismatch, a case of "Alvin v. the chipmunk." The essay of his that drew McMullin's ire was titled "When faith and reason clash: Evolution and the Bible." Plantinga writes that "[In] all the areas of academic endeavor, we Christians must think about the matter at hand from a Christian perspective; we need Theistic Science." Theistic science will come to conclusions that a science devoted to methodological natur...