Plantinga's Argument Against En

Ryerson University

Major Writing Assignment

Topic:

Plantinga’s argument against EN

CPHL 709: Religion, Science & Philosophy

In this passage, Alvin Plantinga takes two philosophers arguments from David Hume and Thomas Reid and pins them against each other to help create his own argument. In short, Hume believes in epistemic skepticism which is a belief that all humans lack knowledge altogether and Reid who is responsible for the Christian commonsense philosophy which is a direct response to Hume’s that claims that “people universally accept the data provided by the senses they share with all humans as reliable signs of external reality” (Foster, 2005, p. 230). Plantinga then uses the results of the two arguments and applies them to the theory of naturalism. Naturalism is a theory that claims that humans were created in the natural order of evolution and not from God. Plantinga claims that naturalism is Humean (aligned with Hume’s theory) therefore anyone who decides to adopt naturalism has no knowledge at all. As well, Plantinga also explains why Naturalism is self-undermining (which will be explained later in this exposition) and that if it is true we cannot believe in naturalism either, for we have no just cause to believe in it. But more importantly, Plantinga explains why Evolutionary Naturalism is self-defeating which will also be defined and argued by Plantinga as to why he believes it is self-defeating.

As mentioned in the opening sentence, Plantinga uses these two Philosophers views and creates a model to help support his claim that all humans who were made in God’s image were born with a sensus divinitatus. Plantinga explains with the help of other Christian theories that a sensus divinitatus is a sense that enables humans to believe that there is truly a god in existence and that this sense also enables us to know God. But, on the other hand, humans have been affected by sin. Sin has caused humans to be selfish and proud among...