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True. A CT survey of some of the best philosophers in the English-speaking world rendered much praise for Talbot's graduates. Those Zimmerman has known were "among the best prepared of grad students; they understood what serious scholarship was like. They could read and understand current journal articles and talk about them the first day of the seminar."

You cannot talk about the renaissance of interest in philosophy at Talbot without talking about Plantinga, Swinburne, Alston, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Peter van Inwagen. About two or three decades ago, they blazed the trail that Talbot and other schools (including Calvin College, with its fine undergraduate philosophy department) are now taking. These historically orthodox Christians rose to the top of their profession, showing "that you could be a Christian and also be a successful academic," says Zimmerman.

Talbot's philosophers also benefited from a "sea change in philosophy" about a generation or two ago, he adds. The dominant philosophical schools and movements hostile to metaphysics—verificationism and logical empiricism, for example—"splattered and died," many of them failing by their own standards. Metaphysics (which describes reality at a high level of abstraction and is a forte of Christian philosophers) started to make a comeback.

One other reason philosophy has proved hospitable to Christians is that "it's a field where people take all sorts of views seriously, even if you think someone's cracked," says Zimmerman.

J. P. Moreland believes what's going on at Talbot is "a supernatural movement. Things cannot be explained by synergy of human effort and talent. It's bigger than all of us." Aware of this, he and his colleagues stress spiritual formation. "We don't want people who are good arguers and academics but can't relate to people," he says.

Another trait of Biola's philosophers is activism. The morning of his interview with CT, Rae had just spoken on ethics to the California Bankers Association. "We're all highly entrepreneurial," he says. "We take philosophy to the streets." David Horner, an associate professor who teaches in Talbot's master of philosophy program, did a lecture series at the University of Belgrade during the war in the early 1990s.

He and his colleagues often lecture at secular campuses. Their writings—such as Does God Exist? (Prometheus Books, 1993), coauthored by Moreland—are being studied at hundreds of schools, secular and Christian. Some of them have chaired sessions for the American Philosophical Association (APA). William Lane Craig, Talbot's renowned research professor of philosophy, is "one of a kind," says Zimmerman. "He's good at addressing large general audiences and taken very seriously by people who work in metaphysics. He writes for good journals and speaks at APA." Biola invites famous atheist philosophers to address students and to interact with them. Among them has been Anthony Flew, regarded as the most influential atheist among philosophers.

Biola is also committed to inerrancy, dispensationalism, and natural theology. Unlike the Reformed epistemology more likely to be practiced at Calvin College (that belief in God's existence is warranted without propositional evidence), Biola's professors place greater weight on the success of arguments for the existence of God.

Among the professors impressed with what's going on at Biola is Robert Audi, editor in chief of The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995, 1999) and professor of philosophy at University of Nebraska—Lincoln. He's "found the faculty generally excellent and the students bright and conscientious." Plantinga says Talbot grads "have been among the very best students" in Notre Dame's Ph.D. program—"and we get some really terrific students."

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June 2003, Vol. 47, No. 6