Plantinga unterscheidet in seinem Aufsatz “Christian Philosophy At The End Of The 20th Century” zwischen zwei “Fürstentümern” innerhalb der “Civitas Mundi” (angelehnt an Augustinus; dieser unterschied in seiner Geschichtsphilosophie „Vom Gottesstaat“ zwischen „Gottesstaat“ und „Weltstaat“). Das erste Reich ist der „perennial naturalism“
Naturalism is perhaps the dominant perspective or picture among contemporary Western intellectuals; its central tenet is that there is no God and nothing beyond nature. Human beings, therefore, must be understood, not in terms of their being image bearers of God, but in terms of their commonality with the rest of nature, i.e., nonhuman nature. The things we think distinctive about ourselves–re ligion, morality, love, scholarship, humor, adventure, politics–all must be understood in natural terms, which in our day means evolutionary terms. An astonishing number of contemporary scholarly projects, both inside and outside philosophy, are explicit or implicit attempts to understand one or another area of human life in naturalistic terms…
Das zweite Reich ist der ‘Creative Anti-realism’:
Here the basic claim or idea is not that we hum an beings are just one more kind of animal with a rather unusual means of survival, but that we are actually responsible for the basic lineaments, the fundamental structure and framework of the world itself.
Plantinga holt etwas weiter aus:
The story begins with Immanuel Kant. His basic idea in his monumental first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, is that the fundamental categories that characterize the world in which we live are imposed upon that world by our noetic activity: they do not characterize that world as it is in itself. Such features of the world as space and time, substance-property structure, number, modality, and even truth and existence are not to be found in things in themselves. They are rather to be found in the ‘things for us’, they are contributed to the world; these structures are there as a result of our noetic or intellective activity.
Das führt zur Umkehr des Schöpfer-/Geschöpfverhältnisses:
From this perspective, then, it is not God who has created the heavens and the earth, but we ourselves–or at any rate God could not have done it without our help.
Und es führte in der letzten Konsequenz zum postmodernen Relativismus:
It is then tempting to take the next step: that we live in different worlds, that there simply isn’t any such thing as the way the world is, the same for each of us. Instead, there is my way of structuring reality (by choice or language, or whatever), your way, and in fact many different ways. There is no such thing as the way the world is, and no such thing as truth, objective truth, the same for each of us whether we know it or not. Instead, there is what is true from my perspective, in my version, in the world as I’ve structured it, what is true from your perspective, in your version, in the world as you’ve structured it, and so on.
