Warranted religion: answering objections to Alvin Plantinga's epistemology

Religious Studies 51 (4):477-495 (2015)
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Abstract

Alvin Plantinga over the decades has developed a particular theory of warrant that would allow certain beliefs to be warranted, even if one lacked propositional arguments or evidence for them. One such belief that Plantinga focuses on is belief in God. There have been, however, numerous objections both to Plantinga's theory of warrant and to the religious application that he makes of it. In this article I address an objection from both of these categories. I first tackle an objection that attempts to show that proper function isn't a necessary condition for warrant. After tackling this, I move on to interact with the Pandora's Box Objection. This objection argues that Plantinga's epistemology is weakened by the fact that all sorts of serious religious beliefs could be warranted by using his system.

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Tyler McNabb
St. Francis University

Citations of this work

Recent Work in Reformed Epistemology.Andrew Moon - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (12):879-891.
How to Use Cognitive Faculties You Never Knew You Had.Andrew Moon - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (S1):251-275.
An epistemic defeater for Islamic belief?Erik Baldwin & Tyler McNabb - 2015 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 76 (4):352-367.

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References found in this work

Knowing One’s Own Mind.Donald Davidson - 1987 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60 (3):441-458.
In defense of proper functions.Ruth Millikan - 1989 - Philosophy of Science 56 (June):288-302.
Proper functionalism.Kenneth Boyce & Alvin Plantinga - 2012 - In Andrew Cullison (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Epistemology. Continuum. pp. 124.
Warrant and Contemporary Epistemology.J. J. Kvanvig (ed.) - 1996 - Rowman and Littlefield, Savage, Maryland.

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