The Plantinga Effect
The story that is not being told to us by the institutions (educational, media-driven, etc.) is that reason, not ‘blind faith,’ is giving birth to Christian faith all over the world, including in the most industrialized and sophisticated cultures on the planet. The question is: why?

The rise of Christianity is not just found in villages and tribes in the third world, but in the highest levels of academia, and across every discipline – science, philosophy, history, and the arts (the former two more than the latter two, which is an interesting story in and of itself).

In her book, Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey points out one important example of this movement. Philo – the philosophical journal – carried an article deploring the way Christians are taking over philosophy departments in universities across America. As an aggressive supporter of philosophical naturalism (the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and nothing supernatural) – the writer of the article, Quentin Smith, warned his colleagues “that the field of philosophy is being ‘de-secularized,’” and that across Universities in America one-quarter to one-third of the philosophy departments “now consist of theists [people who believe in God], generally Christians.”

Pearcey points out that this movement is largely because of the work of one philosopher: Alvin Plantinga – who is a Christian, and at the same time, is seen by many as the greatest living philosopher today. In the past, Christians working in the field of philosophy tended to keep their belief in God restricted to their private lives. Everything changed, however, when Plantinga published his influential works, God and Other Minds in 1967 and The Nature of Necessity in 1974, wherein he argued for the existence of God on such a high philosophical level that they became definitive 20th century philosophical works.

Smith points out that Christians like Plantinga, are capable of “writing at the highest level of analytic philosophy,” resulting – to his chagrin – in a stranger phenomena: that “in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, academically respectable to argue for theism.” This is one of a plethora of examples, including many occurring in fields of science, history and psychology in which the walls between faith and reason are crumbling.

Belief in God is being taken seriously at the highest levels of academia – not just as a private experience, or naïve belief in something irrational, but as the product of reason. Theism is becoming so much the accepted philosophical norm and atheism so much a philosophical problem, that attitudes are almost being reversed in the realm of the academy from those of twenty or thirty years ago.