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WillowOne's Positions

Reformed Epistemology Argument

Form

Alvin Plantinga's position (Warranted Christian Belief, 2000), drawing on John Calvin's sensus divinitatis (Institutes, 1559, I.3):

  1. Some beliefs are properly basic: rationally held without being inferred from other beliefs. Perception, memory, and belief in other minds are of this kind; nobody argues their way to the existence of the past.
  2. Humans possess a faculty, the sensus divinitatis, which produces belief in God directly, in appropriate circumstances (awe at the night sky, guilt, gratitude, danger), as perception produces belief in trees.
  3. If God exists and made us with such a faculty, then belief in God produced by it is properly basic and warranted, with no argument required. This is the "Aquinas/Calvin model".
  4. Therefore the believer is rational without evidence, and the atheist's demand for evidence is a demand that no one makes of perception.

The "Great Pumpkin" objection, that Linus could claim the same for the Great Pumpkin, is answered by saying that only beliefs produced by a faculty that actually exists and is working properly are warranted, and that the believer need not be able to prove this from outside.

My Positions

  1. It is not an argument that God exists, and Plantinga says so. The claim is conditional: if God exists, belief in him is warranted. I grant the conditional. The question was the antecedent, and this model declines to address it. Warrant-if-true is available to every belief system: the Muslim builds the identical model on the fitrah, the Mormon on the burning in the bosom, Linus on the Pumpkin. Plantinga's reply that only the true one actually has warrant concedes the point, which is that from the inside you cannot tell which you are.
  2. The sensus divinitatis is an empirical claim about a faculty, and the evidence is against it. A faculty that produced belief in God in appropriate circumstances would produce roughly the same belief in Riyadh, Varanasi, and Copenhagen. What it produces is Allah in the first, Vishnu in the second, and nothing in the third. Its output tracks what the surrounding culture put in, which is the signature of learning, not of perception (Religious Upbringing of Children). The naturalistic account (Hyperactive Agency Detection, Argument from Universal Religious Belief) predicts this distribution; the Calvinist account predicts a different one.
  3. Perception earns its basic status; belief in God has not. Perceptions check each other, cohere, and predict; a tree I see I can also touch, and others can see it too. There is no equivalent for the sensed presence of God: no second channel, no prediction, no intersubjective check (Popper's Razor). To call the two "analogous" is to name a similarity that does not exist.
  4. The non-believer is, on the model, cognitively damaged by sin. The explanation for why the faculty does not fire in me is that the Fall broke it, and the explanation for why it fires differently in a Hindu is the same. This is the No True Scotsman applied to the whole human race, it is unfalsifiable, and it is a claim about the inner life of strangers that no one is in a position to make (Divine Hiddenness).
  5. The model does not escape the arguments anyway. Plantinga grants that properly basic beliefs can be defeated by evidence. So the believer must still answer the Problem of evil, hiddenness, the brain-dependence of mind, and the religious diversity of the world, and we are back where we started, except that the believer has declared in advance that no argument was needed to get in.
  6. In practice it is an exit from the conversation. Reformed epistemology is used to decline the burden of proof: "I don't need evidence, my belief is basic." A belief that cannot be examined cannot be shared, and the person who holds it has given up on giving me a reason.

In fairness, Plantinga is one of the few apologists who admits that the arguments are not why anyone believes, which agrees with my general observation under Religious apologetics. Where we differ is that he takes this to show the arguments were never needed, and I take it to show the belief was never earned.

Sources

  • Plantinga, A., "Reason and Belief in God", in Plantinga and Wolterstorff (eds), Faith and Rationality (1983)
  • Plantinga, A., Warranted Christian Belief (2000)
  • Calvin, J., Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), I.3
  • Grigg, R., "The Crucial Disanalogies Between Properly Basic Belief and Belief in God", Religious Studies 26 (1990)
  • Beversluis, J., "Reforming the 'Reformed' Objection to Natural Theology", Faith and Philosophy 12 (1995)
  • Schellenberg, J. L., Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993)

Also see