What Hath Plantinga Wrought

Atheist philosophy Quentin Smith notes in a 2001 article that the theistic arguments of Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Alston, and others opened the door for God to return to philosophy.  Plantinga’s work in particular made it “apparent to the philosophical profession that realist theists were not out-matched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original worldview . . . . In philosophy it became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable’ to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academy today . . . . God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”

Two comments: First, this suggests that “new atheism” is something of a backlash; like most aggressive and shrill movements (militant Islam), it is driven by panic and defensiveness not confidence.  Second, the revival of theism in philosophy is a prime illustration of the kind of cultural change that James Davison Hunter advocates in his most recent book.