And here you thought all I did was watch summer blockbusters

One thing you may have noticed about me is that I'm afraid of neither the lowbrow nor the highbrow. I watched Shaun of the Dead last night, for the second time, on purpose. I own Masters of the Universe, on purpose. And, at my request, my birthday gifts from Corey consisted of a screening of Terminator: Salvation...and a large volume by Alvin Plantinga.

I'd never heard of him before my husband mentioned the name. It can be handy at times, having a spouse who grew up in academia. I've been re-acquainting myself with the works of Tom Clancy recently, and wanted something a bit deeper to balance things out; fortunately, the Edmonton Public Library was able to deliver. Alvin Plantinga, PhD. (Yale), has been teaching and writing for over thirty years, is the director of the Center for Philosophy and Religion at the University of Notre-Dame, and is widely considered to be America's leading Christian philosopher. Note that this is quite different from being a Christian apologist. The field of apologetics is typically geared toward the widest audience possible, and in my experience is primarily used to battle misconceptions about Christianity, whereas Plantinga is a philosopher in the formal, traditional sense of the word, with the goal of making proofs, and his audience is academic. Word on the street is he's particularly well-known in academia for quietly advancing the rationality of belief in God. As the current, aggressive Big Issue of the atheist movement is the idea that belief in any god is irrational, Plantinga's God and Other Minds: A study of the rational justification of belief in God caught my eye in particular.

I should note here that I'm only about a third of the way through that title. God and Other Minds is a philosophical treatise through and through, and not meant to be something one can quickly flip through on the bus. A formally constructed argument, it requires attention, digestion, re-reading, and, for folks like me with no formal philosophical training, the occasional Googling of a latin philosophy term or two. That being said, with a little effort, it's a brilliant piece of work and well worth the time. Primary atheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens - who is a philosopher by no stretch of any imagination, and whose (in)famous God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is so poorly constructed and written that I could not bring myself to finish it - is a very determined proponent of the idea that belief in any god is inherently and utterly irrational, a notion which comes up frequently in his column syndicated weekly through Slate.com (I read it in The National Post). Plantinga's thirty year-old argument to the contrary is far more rational and convincing than anything I've read by Hitchens yet. He (Hitchens) takes great pains in his writings to ignore arguments by established philosphers like Plantinga, choosing to take aim at easy or sensational targets instead, and at this early point in my reading I can only conclude that a) Hitchens has never read Plantinga, b) Hitchens has read Plantinga, but hasn't understood him, or c) Hitchens has read Plantinga, understood him, and refuses to concede any points but is incapable of mounting a proper counterargument. If you're tired of sensationalism, easily overturned objections, and lazy thinking - on either side of this debate - Plantinga is an essential read.

(He's also quite unintentionally humorous, because since he uses understood, established methods of creating philosophical arguments, he can say things like, "this argument is impeccable" without coming off as a total prig...but it's still funny.)

Fortunately, there are Plantinga works that, while still involved reads, can be read on the bus on the way to work; for example, God, Freedom, and Evil, which I'm about as far through as I am God and Other Minds. If you don't mind a book that'll probably take a couple of months to work through unless you are free to sit and read all day, these are some excellent titles. And when your brain gets tired from all that heavy thinking, you can always kick back and watch Shaun of the Dead. It's good to lead a balanced life.