Argument of the existence of God in Protestant theology. Paul Tillich and Alvin Plantinga

Abstract

The paper studies how the long tradition of proving the existence of God is expressed in Protestant theology through the work of Paul Tillich and Alvin Plantinga. It is mainly analyzed which aspects of the works of those two thinkers can be attributed to the proof of the existence of God, to what extent they can be considered systematic and complete, to what type of evidence they relate. In order to thoroughly talk about the proof of the existence of God in the works of those two thinkers, a historical review of the tradition of proving the existence of God is to be made, with an emphasis on “classical” scholastic arguments. Having studied the work of Tillich and Plantinga, it becomes possible to give an answer to the question of how the tradition continued in their theology and can it be generally considered that it found a continuation in it?

Paul Tillich is one of the most famous Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, whose work belongs to the neoliberal direction in Protestant thought. Alvin Plantinga is an American analytical theologian, author of one of the most famous modern proofs of the existence of God. It seems that the thinkers have nothing in common. However, both of them worked with the same “material” (Christian doctrine), within the framework of the Protestant tradition in the twentieth century, which offered many unique and sometimes unexpected thoughts in philosophy and theology. The most important point of the study is a comparison of the works of Tillich and Plantinga. Of course, only in the sense in which evidence of the existence of God can be found in their work and that is not on all possible points.

Such tasks seem to be very relevant, because a comparative analysis of the work of two Protestant thinkers (almost contemporaries), while referring to different areas of Protestant theology, will help to gain a more complete picture of the intellectual culture of Protestantism of the twentieth century.