In the fall of 1968, I found myself, newly married, beginning my junior year at Westmont College in the foothills of Santa Barbara. A year earlier I would have scorned the suggestion that I might attend a Christian college. Now it seemed clearly the right place to be.
I still hadn’t declared a major. Philosophy was one contender–I had taken several classes in that field–and so I enrolled in Stan Obitts’s Philosophy of Religion course. This did me two great services. First, it convinced me not to major in philosophy. We plowed through the ontological argument for the existence of God and various responses to it. That was enough to persuade me that I could continue to read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Simone Weil as a civilian; no need to enlist in the army of philosophers. To this day I can taste the bitter tedium of the arguments surrounding Anselm’s “being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” (None of this, I hasten to add, was attributable to the instruction, which was sharp and lively; the subject matter just wasn’t my cup of tea.)
Then–and this was the second great service–we took up a book called “God and Other Minds,” by a young Calvin College professor, Alvin Plantinga, published only a year or so earlier by Cornell University Press. It was the author’s first book, apart from a couple of collections of edited articles. How to describe it? Well, it was full of arguments of the kind I found tedious, yet even more elaborate than anything we had sampled. (I still have the book, so I can reread my marginal notes; e.g., “1st view of 2nd form of 1st objection.”) But it was also quite different from anything else we had read.
It was funnier, to begin with. Amid rigorous displays of formal logic, there were sentences like this: “One can even see (if one reads the newspapers) that John Buchanan of the House Un-American Activities Committee referred (no doubt mistakenly) to the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan as ‘the Inferior Lizard.’ ” This humor offered welcome glimpses of the man who wrote the book and of the world outside it. Air and light came in.
And it was simply more intelligent. We had been reading essays by John Hick, Anthony Flew–not inconsiderable figures. Then along came Plantinga, who wrote with an almost insolent brilliance that would have reminded me of Michael Jordan, had I then seen Michael Jordan. (I’m enormously grateful to Stan Obitts for throwing us into those deep waters.)
Here is what Plantinga does in “God and Other Minds.” He surveys the traditional “proofs” for the existence of God and finds them wanting. He next surveys the principal arguments against the existence of God and finds that these, too, are not compelling. Then, and this is the key move, he shifts to a “problem” that has exercised philosophers particularly in the wake of Wittgenstein: the “problem of other minds”: “How do I know that there are other beings that think and feel, reason and believe?”
You may say that you’ve never regarded this as a problem (though some teachers have no doubt wondered about it). In a sense, Plantinga agrees. He contends that the best argument we have for belief in other minds is vulnerable to the same objection that attends the teleological argument for the existence of God. Thus, “I conclude that belief in other minds and belief in God are in the same epistemological boat; hence if either is rational, so is the other. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter.”
That argument is as dazzling and elegant as a Mozart sonata. And it was the quality of the argument that made a great impression on one 20-year-old reader. Here was a Christian philosopher thoroughly conversant with the best work in his field. Confronted with widely accepted antitheistic arguments, he neither huffed and puffed nor retreated. Instead, with a kind of philosophical jujitsu, he turned those arguments against their source.
That’s not a bad model for one form of Christian engagement with secular thought. It seems fitting, then, to have Alvin Plantinga in the pages of B&C. In his own work, and in his involvement with the Society of Christian Philosophers, he has epitomized the commitment to Christian thinking that Mark Noll called for in “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” and that prompted the founding of this journal. Don’t miss Plantinga’s essay on Daniel Dennett’s book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life” (in this issue).
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If you are a subscriber to B&C, you spend a lot of time reading (or so our research department tells us, in an impressive demographic survey). There is a chance, then, that you might be interested in a new book by Eugene Peterson, “Take and Read: Spiritual Reading: An Annotated List” (Eerdmans, 122 pp.; $10, paper). This is a wide-ranging guide to recommended reading, organized by category. Among the 20 categories represented are many that would be expected–such as Classics, The Psalms, Prayer, Jesus–and some that might not–Mysteries, for example. (Novelists and poets get their due as well.) There are separate listings for Spiritual Formation, Spiritual Direction, and North American Spirituality in addition to the spiritual classics listed elsewhere.
Readers who have followed Eugene Peterson’s work for many years will value the occasional flashes of self-revelation here. While Peterson’s annotations are generally quite concise, a few are longer and richer: see, for example, the entries on Karl Barth’s “Epistle to the Romans,” William Foxwell Albright’s “From the Stone Age to Christianity,” Rex Stout’s “Fer-de-Lance,” Gerhard von Rad’s “Genesis,” and Austin Farrer’s “The Revelation.” In addition to an introduction to the volume, Peterson provides introductions for each section.
Many of the titles recommended here will be familiar to most B&C readers, but it will be a rare reader who knows them all. The book would make a fine gift for students and for new Christians.
Those who are paid to read should pick up a copy of “The Discerning Reader: Christian Perspectives on Literature and Theory,” edited by David Barratt, Roger Pooley, and Leland Ryken (Baker, 320 pp.; $19.99, paper), a collection of essays reflecting the current turmoil in the academic study of literature. The volume includes a useful bibliographic essay by David Barratt.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 5
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