Two Theories of Change by David Brooks - NYTimes.com

EXCERPTS:

"...there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke.... If the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits. They put more emphasis on our sentiments. People are born with natural desires to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. They are born with moral emotions, a sense of fair play and benevolence. They are also born with darker passions, like self-love and tribalism, which mar rationalist enterprises. We are emotional creatures first and foremost, and politics should not forget that. These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change....

"Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working....

If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.

Alvin Plantinga Retirement Celebration

EXCERPT:

"It would be difficult to overestimate the hostility towards theism among professional philosophers over the past seventy years. The swell of empiricism was thought to sound the death knell of religious belief. From the 1930s to the 1960s religious philosophers went into hiding. What happened from the 1960s to the 1980s to so radically transform the face of philosophy? Few philosophers today fail to recognize the courageous, original and powerful work of Alvin Plantinga as the impetus behind this revolution in philosophy. His first book, God and Other Minds, was an astonishing and potent defense of the rationality of religious belief. His next two major works, The Nature of Necessity and God, Freedom and Evil, included an original argument for the existence of God and a novel and universally recognized solution to the problem of evil.

Plantinga, who taught for twenty years at Calvin College, was one of the co-founders of the Society of Christian Philosophers in April 1978. The society has since grown to over 1,100 members and is the largest single-interest group among American philosophers. In 1984 the society initiated its own scholarly journal, Faith and Philosophy. His inaugural lecture for the O'Brien Chair of Philosophy, 'How to Be a Christian Philosopher', was published as the lead article in the premier issue of Faith and Philosophy and changed the course of Christian philosophy. Philosophers from such leading universities as Yale, Harvard, Rutgers, UCLA, Princeton, and Oxford attribute their subsequent scholarly projects in Christian philosophy to that lecture.

He has lectured around the world and has been admirable in his devotion to furthering philosophical research in developing countries, such as China, Russia, Romania, and Poland.

Plantinga has helped make religious belief once again a rationally acceptable option.