Christianity is a thinking faith. For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

Back in 1993, Chuck Colson received the Templeton Prize, which honors a living person “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension…” Other winners include Mother Teresa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Michael Novak.

This year’s winner: Alvin Plantinga, the Christian philosopher behind such impactful books as “God and Other Minds,” and “Warranted Christian Belief.” As William Doino writes at First Things, Plantinga brought God back into philosophy departments, “sparking a global renaissance” in Christian thought.

One of his best-known contributions, the evolutionary argument against naturalism, shows that without a God who designed our minds to comprehend truth, there’s no reason to trust our minds. In other words, naturalistic evolution can’t be true, because if it were, we couldn’t trust out “monkey minds” to understand it.

Most of all, Plantinga has shown that Christianity can compete on the highest intellectual levels, and reminds us to love God not only with our hearts, but our minds.