Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga is the most influential Christian philosopher of the twentieth century and the architect of reformed epistemology—the view that belief in God can be "properly basic," rational without being based on arguments or evidence, in the same way that perceptual beliefs and memory beliefs are basic. His modal ontological argument for God's existence, developed using possible worlds semantics, is among the most technically sophisticated theistic arguments ever offered.

Plantinga's two volumes on warrant—the property that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief—constitute a major contribution to analytic epistemology independent of their theistic application. His evolutionary argument against naturalism contends that if evolution and naturalism are both true, there is a defeater for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, and therefore for naturalism itself. His dominance over Christian philosophy from the 1960s onward is without parallel.