Alvin Platinga: Knowledge and Christian Belief

I am reading Platinga’s new book on epistemology, one he has gleaned from his opus Warranted Christian Belief. His new book, Knowledge and Christian Belief from 2015, aims at the general public, and you do not have to be trained in symbolic logic to understand his arguments. That makes it accessible for most of us.

I have read excerpts from his work earlier, and I am favourable to his main thesis: that we can have knowledge based on our Christian faith, provided that the content of our belief is indeed true. That means that I know that God is, and I can act upon it, perform research on the basis of it, because God is.

           

I looked into the book Knowledge and Christian Belief, flipping to a chapter on “defeaters”, where he deals with historical biblical criticism. I liked how he identified the basic premises and presuppositions of the strands of such biblical criticism. One main strand sees no special aspects with biblical text material, and treats it like any historical or literary text. In relations to truth-value, this trend (attributed to Ernst Troeltsch) prefers a systematic and methodical doubt. Whatever the church tradition has held, can not be considered as having any truth value, and should preferably be denied.

            I have seen this trend in variation in theological scholarship, and I always question the value of it. What is the outcome? Is it furthering scholarship? Is it an academic game, or a spiel to advance one’s own academic profile? The methods of historical research are always ideologically tempered, and whatever the researcher wants to find, he finds ‘evidence’ for in order to support the idea he had in the outset. The typical model has its hypotheses, and some may suffer adjustment, but if the research does not give heed and support to the desired thesis, then the project is dropped.  It is important for me to examine the premises a scholar brings into his hypothesis. If, for instance, an archaeologist, like W.G. Dever, relates to the biblical material and he in the outset has decided that archaeology trumps biblical texts in information, then I am left to question his interpretation of his pieces of pottery in the ground. All historical artefacts are like pieces in a puzzle, and it takes both knowledge and humility to fit the pieces together. On the other hand, scholars that have presupposed that the biblical texts must be historically accurate in all and any sense of the word, also fall into a tight grid, too tight for its own good. In principle, I have reverence for the Word and I know God is the Lord of history; but when it comes to the texts, I see the focus and purpose as being in God’s relation to us earthlings, and not as much on historical record keeping. If a date is indicated as “in the year of King Uzzia”, it has historical information which is intended. This should not be overlooked. Sometimes it looks like inscriptions of this kind on a piece of pottery seems to be taken more seriously than when found in the biblical material.

My main question to the historical critical approach to the bible is: Does it serve the church? I see dead churches in its wake; I see lack of humility before God, lack of respect for the authority of God and of his Word. What is the real purpose of this strand of research? It does not seem occupied with truth.

In its beginning, I think it was an aspect of the learned wanting honour from men, be reckoned with the scientific crowd, and with desperate efforts by men, save the field of theology from the stamp of ‘ignorance’ and non-scientific non-relevance. Trends in literary criticism, like structuralism, entered the scene, and started treating literature, and any text as such, within the grids of scientific enquiry. At the time, the method of the hypothetical-critical method was established in the natural sciences, and it was predominantly empirical. It was real, hands-on stuff. The fields of ‘Geisteswissenshaften’ – humanities, like theology, philosophy, history, literature, etc. were left in the dust as immaterial, non-scientific. So, there were great efforts made in defining humanities as a field of science on its own terms -

A second approach in Platinga’s chapter on defeaters in historical biblical criticism is one that calls for consensus of scholars in the field. Whatever they agree upon must be true. This becomes a rather minimalist approach.

(I have not given his position and argument any justice here, naturally, for I have simplified the matter. )

However, as I started looking into other parts of the book, I found one other valuable asset: the initial descaling of ideologies in the counter-Christian approaches: the ones that call Christian faith un-warranted, its adherents ignorant, the faculty of faith irrelevant, etc.  He discusses 5-6 attitudes to Christians and the Christian faith and has no trouble dismiss them

When he lays down his presuppositions for the warranted Christian belief, however, I do not see eye to eye with him. The main difference deals with the statement that we are naturally inclined to believe in God. He builds on texts by Thomas Aquinas and on Calvin (who in turn leans on Aquinas). This faculty he refers to, this ‘sensus divinitatis’ as an a priori faculty of perception, faculty of knowledge – that I see no clear justification of. Simply to assume that it is an all-human need and experience to seek God is unwarranted. I may agree to a general tendency being observed in the human species towards stretching itself towards something greater than oneself, but to indicate something barely short of a ‘god-gene’ – that is not convincing.

            Ok, so he finds support in Calvin’s writings, but how does this concur with the thesis of total deprivation?

Anyway – I have not finished reading his book yet, so I may find some answers to my puzzlement, as I go along. Alvin Platinga is one of the great minds in our century, but he is a mere human, and as a mere human, he is prone to make mistakes. What I am saying is that although his arguments are solid, he also comes to the table with sets of a priori presuppositions, and I need not agree with them. He criticises Kant for creating a an impossible split between ‘Das Ding an Sich’ and what I can know about it, and applying this to the realm of God: it is beyond comprehension, beyond reach. But I see it this way, and that is why God acts and breaks into my world; that is why it is only by an act of God that I can be convinced about His existence. God breaks into our history by special revelation – through dealing with a people, through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.