My first impulse when I read Plantinga's work on what constitutes a properly basic belief was to argue that properly speaking, his conclusion that belief in God is a properly basic belief that one is justified in taking for granted is biblically warranted and a sound theological and biblical principle, but that it had no place in philosophy. I believe this to some degree revealed an incipient dualism in my thinking. Our philosophy can never be separated from our worldviews as a whole, which is what I implicitly began to do. We all have sets of worldviews, motives, desires and so on in light of and against which our beliefs must be examined.
Not only is Plantinga's argument fully consistent with philosophy, but it is the only true, legitimate philosophy, from a Christian perspective. "Philosophy" literally means the love of wisdom, and we are commanded to love wisdom, as embodied in the personified Wisdom of God, Jesus Christ. The only true wise person, and therefore the only true philosopher, therefore, is the Christian. Many Christians reject philosophy and embrace a kind of irrationalism because they associate the word "philosophy" with highfalutin, abstract debates that have nothing to do with the real world. But we ought not condemn philosophy. We ought to instead condemn the bad arguments of bad philosophers who it turns out do not love wisdom after all.
We must redefine our terms in light of a Christian worldview. A philosopher is simply a lover of wisdom. The non-Christian philosopher, from a biblical perspective, is not a free-thinker, but a slave to sin. Everyone is free from something and a slave to something else. The Christian philosopher is free from sin (forensically and to some degree volitionally) and is a slave to God.
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