Alvin Plantinga: Quotes about God

Alvin Plantinga is American Christian philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on god.
Alvin Plantinga: 10 quotes0 likes

“To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him.”

Alvin Plantinga book Warranted Christian Belief

[2000, Warranted Christian Belief, 9780195131925, 145, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/plantinga/warrant3.v.iii.i.iv.html]

“Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.”

Alvin Plantinga

“At present and especially in academia, there is widespread doubt and agnosticism with respect to the very existence of God. But if we don't know that there is such a person as God, we don't know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because (from the point of view of the model) the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence. We don't know what our happiness consists in, and we don't know how to achieve it. We don't know that we have been created in the image of God, and we don't grasp the significance of such characteristically human phenomena as love, humor, adventure, science, art, music, philosophy, history, and so on.”

Alvin Plantinga book Warranted Christian Belief

[2000, Warranted Christian Belief, 9780195131925, 217, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/plantinga/warrant3.vi.ii.iv.ii.html]