Alvin Plantinga - Big Pictures of God

To consider God seriously, where to start? To try to see the big picture of God, what are the questions? What are the categories? What would be the prime attributes or traits of a Supreme Being, the supposed Creator of the universe? What would be God's essence and nature, purposes and plans? What can be said for God and against God?



Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher, the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College.


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[WhiteScorpio]

The whole idea of "worship" seems strange to me. Why would we worship anything?

[LucasFer]

I love the channel, but his name is Alvin Plantinga, not Platinga. Please, fix it.

[jmaniak]

If the there where a timeless omnipotent being why would it expect us to spend one moment of our short lives to worship it?
I don’t think a being like that would be worthy of worship at all.

[thomasridley]

God's are always geologically isolated. Indicating that they were developed by the society in that area. Even Jesus could not go worldwide to pass on his message. But only as far as his feet could take him. Which seems to make all powerful gods impossible.

When you say you believe in a god. Are you just not accepting the theology presented by the group. Its foundational consistency and credibility doesn't seem to have much bearing on your choice.

[wells]

Why are modern day believers so quick to reject/dismiss the old Gods like Zeus, Apollo etc., and treat them as fairytales, yet somehow they can't accept that their own modern Gods are just version 2.0 of those older Gods? To me it seems like all of the qualities that believers want to attribute to their God are directly contradicted in the books/bibles that they believe in it. I wonder why (if the message is supposed to be clear and divine) everyone has their own version/interpretation of the text? I also wonder what percentage of believers have actually read beyond the hand picked passages that they hear from the pulpit?

[dennistucker]

I love CTT. I think the more you define what it means to be God, the less likely it is that God could be real.

[lomaschueco]

And to think that the real intellectuals are in the comment section.

[michaelp]

As a species we have evolved to worship. Like other primates we have evolved to worship the leader of the pack. It's only a small jump to invent an even higher alpha male who seems more powerful. One, for example, who has the power to cause thunder and lightening, volcanic eruptions and other such magical phenomena.

[pureflix]

So... an argument from popularity/tradition?

Got it.

[TheTroofSayer]

The universe is a big place. If we doubt this, consider Hubble Deep Field. If anyone still believes that we on Planet Earth are alone, they can stop reading now. As for the rest of us:
1) It does not pay to anthropomorphize/personalize God. There are religions out there with vastly different interpretations to those that we are familiar with here on Earth;
2) There is NO Fermi paradox & there is no such thing as instinct - all living entities make choices from their ecosystems & cultures (biosemiotic theory, Jakob von Uexkull);
3) Platinga talks about trusting God, implying questions of good & evil. No need for God. Questions of good/evil are settled with reference to good culture versus evil culture (heaven/hell);
4) Actually, imho, I think Hinduism does a better job of averting the ball-and-chain that holds up the other religions;
5) It might pay Dr Kuhn to interview some Hindus and Buddhists. Their references to God are from a very different perspective.

So long as we appreciate that this living universe is infinitely immense, conjecturing about God and His form can only lead to frustration. A verse from Hamlet to remind us:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[theMosen]

"The concept of God is deeply embedded in the human psyche. The vast majority of the world's population now and over history believes that there is such a person as God, something very much like God, something very much like, lets say the conception of God in the Abrahamic religions."

The majority of the world's population over history were polytheists, and many still are today. Polytheism is a worldview with fundamentally different ontological premises than modern monotheism which assumes a supernatural, disembodied, in every way perfect intelligence that is above and behind all things. In polytheism, deities are generally not disembodied and omnipresent, nor are they perfect beings. They tend to be part of a mythological world that simply preexists with little further ontological explanation. To claim that this is the same "deeply embedded concept of God" is a stretch.

[antoniorobles]

TMM's response: youtu.be/aUGAGKXne4g

[AubreyLeonaeDoLofonos]

This one seems to be proving Hawkings valuation of current philosophy. Well at least he gets paid for this.

[mtehleel]

I hv been following this channel for quite sometime now.. I wish along with our respected Christian theologians you even added some discussions from the Muslim scholarship.. It can even increase your viewership ten fold...

[scruffypupper]

Of the religions that teach god is perfect, all knowing, wise and loving and that we are created in his image, think of him in this light: if he is perfect, he cannot create something in his image that is imperfect-humanity. To do so would make god an oxy-moron. It seems like god is trying to resolve his own neurosis. God gives us free will of only two choices-heaven or hell. Not much of a choice. God violates his own commandments to us. We’re told not to kill but he kills at will. We’re commanded not to feel jealousy and he even says he’s a jealous god. Many human attributes reflect attributes of god which we seldom focus on-jealousy, hate, anger, vengeance, laughter at our calamities. Aren’t humans really mirroring god’s own behavior? He could easily be compared to any bully on earth. In fact, he sounds quite bi-polar. God is said to not be a respecter of persons yet he picks and chooses who to bless or curse, heal or maim, allow to live or die at will. He wants to be worshiped, feels deserving of our loyalty and worship yet he puts many in dire straits such as Job in order to prove their obedience. He killed Job’s family to prove a point-did he ever think of the lives he was destroying? Does he think giving Job a new family and life adequate recompense for what he willfully destroyed? And don’t say he didn’t kill them, that he allowed them to be killed, because that would be a direct reflection of current events where police officers stood by and allowed another officer to put his knee on the neck of a man he’d already subdued and who died. If you think what they did was wrong, it seems they only mirrored god’s own behavior. God doesn’t want humans to think for themselves. He inspired countless texts with laws and commandments used to control humans, subdue their will. Put god’s own behavior side by side with the parenting of people who abuse their children, even kill them. Do you see any difference? Go back and read my first sentence, then think about it.

[albertjackson]

There is no big picture of God or a tiny picture, because, he does not exist, except inside the minds of gullible people. End of story.

[fayyazmehmood]

And if you ask them: ‘Who has created them?’ they will certainly say: ‘Allah.’ Then where are they wandering disorientated?‏

(الزُّخْرُف‏ - Al-Zukhruf [43 : 87])

The Glorious Quran App
Minhaj Publications

[stevecoley]

X-Files
We are made in the image of good (god). Not dogs, wolves and pigs.

Good (god) is the exact opposite of vampires (greed) and their ignorance (hate).

Question. Why are the evangelical counting corpses using the bible as a springboard to perform somersaults to do the exact opposite of "love their neighbors" and "treat others like they want to be treated"?

Answer. This is sick. Because these simple concepts are too far out there to grasp for vampires (greed).

Vampires (greed) who suck the joy out of life have joined the zombies who eat the futures of their children.

Zombie Apocalypse is here and happening now.

[EfronGary]

Professor Kuhn, please go interview more Muslims that are well versed in theology or Kalam, they have all the answers you need in respect to God, much more than the Jews or Christian, Infact the Jews or Christians borrowed all of their concepts from Muslims but please go interview people straight from the source of these arguments, both the concept of God and the concept of worship is logically and thoroughly explained in Islam, without a doubt. Please do an entire video about your investigation on the islamic concept of God, you will not regret it because by far they have the strongest position. Their are many proofs in Islam, we have the proof of the truthful discovered by ibn sina, and the Islamic ontological argument created by mulla sadra, infinite argument developed by alghazali, we also have other giants like ibn Arabia and ibn tammiya, etc etc, focus on each and every one of them and their arguments, one by one, video by video, not all together.

Because I've realised you have an urge to find the truth about this, and those people are the key that unlocks that truth for you with certainty. The arguments are tremendously deep, so to really get down to the bottom of them, you need to go one by one, segment by segment.

[claudiozanella]

The almighty God is normally supposed to BOTH A) being able to make decisions and B) to know the future.
Here you should make a distinction between "optional futures" - God could maybe interact and modify them - and "THE ONE FUTURE", because ONLY ONE DETERMINED future will eventually come true. (The one that will become our ONLY ONE PAST). Well, God is supposed to be able to get the best performance: to know that ONE future. But then God MUST JUST LET IT UNFOLD EXACTLY like it is, He is NOT ALLOWED to change anything in it, because God makes no errors in his knowledge of the future! God cannot decide ANYTHING more: ALL God's decisions are already included in that future.
What above means that EITHER God is free to decide, but this implies He does NOT know the ONE future, OR He knows the ONE future, but this prevents Him from making ANY further decision. Even worse than that, GOD WOULD BE OBLIGED to HIMSELF slavishly follow that one determined future. This all means the two abilities A) and B) are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE ("either", "or", but never "BOTH" at the same time). Since obviously God was able to make his decisions and we are also confident that He knows the future, the path followed must be from A) to B). When that transition occurred ? Certainly not during the man's history, of course that must have happened BEFORE the birth of the universe.
However, God only arrived at step B) BUT WITHOUT ENTERING that step, we saw earlier that God is absolutely NOT INTERESTED IN TAKING PART to that future: He would be obliged to "SLAVISHLY" follow it. The God's actions in that one future (for example words) will AUTOMATICALLY come true instead. In other words that one future will come true WITHOUT GOD. Thus NOBODY will be there to take the God's actions. The God's words will thus be spoken by the SPIRIT OF GOD since God is not there to speak. Everything was done, God was thus FREE from any other duty. But where has the almighty God gone after that ? Of course He is now the Son of God. The almighty God dropped his then USELESS power to become like a normal man: Jesus. Thus, the almighty God is only IN THE PAST, "no one ever saw God" ""The world has not known you". Jesus is the only one really existing God. He is not omnipotent.