Summary
Alvin Plantinga contrasts a materialistic and a theistic understanding of what a human being is.
For materialism – probably for almost any kind of non-theism; maybe not every kind but many kinds of non-theism – you have to think about human beings as substantially animals. Well, I guess human beings are animals; we’re rational animals. But animals in the sense of which we think of animals as different from human beings. Animals we don’t think of as being interested in such things as poetry or music or science, knowledge more generally. Animals’ main interests are just to survive and reproduce. Now if you think that’s the be–all and end–all for human beings, you’ll think about them quite differently from the way in which you think about them if you think of them as created by God and created in his image.
