This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by (...) properly functioning cognitive faculties, thus, insofar as they are warranted, Christian beliefs are knowledge if they are true. (shrink)

The Cognitive Science of Religion represents a contemporary attempt at a naturalistic explanation of religion. There is debate as to whether its account of how religious beliefs arise is reconcilable with the religious account, which holds that religious beliefs are caused by God. In my paper, I argue that these two accounts cannot be reconciled when it comes to the specific question of how Christian religious beliefs arise if one accepts an important theological doctrine of the supernaturality of (...) class='Hi'>Christian belief. This doctrine implies that there can be no natural explanation for how Christian beliefs arise because they are a gift of divine grace. This leads to a conundrum for Christian theists: they can either reject the CSR account of how their religious beliefs arise, or they can reject the supernaturality of Christian belief. I argue that the latter is preferable. I then draw on the work of the theologian Denis Edwards to illustrate how one can drop this doctrine without abandoning some other fundamental tenets of Christian theology. (shrink)

Most people believe in an afterlife, but is such a belief warranted? While Newman did not specifically treat the doctrine of afterlife, his Grammar of Assent furnishes a trajectory that shows that Christians can believe in this doctrine with a warranted assent, precisely because the Church is a warranted belief.

Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief (2000) is the capstone to the latest stage in his views on the intellectual credibility of theism in general, and Christian theism in particular. While Plantinga’s stature in the community of Christian philosophers alone makes gaining familiarity with this text a good idea for contemporary analytic philosophers of religion, its vigorous, innovative defense of specifically Christian theism and daring suggestions for renovating the landscape of analytic philosophy of religion merit serious (...) consideration. I aim to provide a useful introduction to the book’s contents and critique some of its main claims. (shrink)

On Christian Belief offers a defense of realism in the philosophy of religion. It argues that religious belief--with particular reference to Christian belief--unlike any other kind of belief, is cognitive; making claims about what is real, and open to rational discussion between believers and non-believers. The author begins by providing a critique of several views which either try to describe a faith without cognitive context, or to justify believing on non-cognitive grounds. He then discusses (...) what sense can be made of the phenomenon of religious conversion by realists and non-realists. After a chapter on knowledge in general, he defends the idea that religious knowledge is very like other knowledge, in being based on reliable testimony, sifted by reason and tested by experience. The logical status of the content of religious belief is then discussed with reference to Christianity. (shrink)

Book Information Warranted Christian Belief. By Alvin Plantinga. Oxford University Press. New York. 2000. Pp. xx + 508.

Book Information Warranted Christian Belief. By Alvin Plantinga. Oxford University Press. New York. 2000. Pp. xx + 508.

The Cognitive Science of Religion represents a contemporary attempt at a naturalistic explanation of religion. There is debate as to whether its account of how religious beliefs arise is reconcilable with the religious account, which holds that religious beliefs are caused by God. In my paper, I argue that these two accounts cannot be reconciled when it comes to the specific question of how Christian religious beliefs arise if one accepts an important theological doctrine of the supernaturality of (...) class='Hi'>Christian belief. This doctrine implies that there can be no natural explanation for how Christian beliefs arise because they are a gift of divine grace. This leads to a conundrum for Christian theists: they can either reject the CSR account of how their religious beliefs arise, or they can reject the supernaturality of Christian belief. I argue that the latter is preferable. I then draw on the work of the theologian Denis Edwards to illustrate how one can drop this doctrine without abandoning some other fundamental tenets of Christian theology. (shrink)

Can we speak and think about God? -- What is the question? -- Warranted belief in God -- The extended A/C model -- Faith -- Sealed upon our hearts -- Objections -- Defeaters? historical biblical criticism -- Defeaters? pluralism -- Defeaters? evil.

Christian philosophers and theologians have long been concerned with the question of how to reconcile their belief in three fully divine Persons with their commitment to monotheism. The most popular strategy for doing this—the Social Trinitarian strategy—argues that, though the divine Persons are in no sense the same God, monotheism is secured by certain relations that obtain among them. It is argued that if the Social Trinitarian understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity is correct, then Christianity is (...) not interestingly different from the polytheistic Amun-Re theology of Egypt’s New Kingdom period. Thus, Social Trinitarianism should be classified as a version of polytheism rather than monotheism. (shrink)

This is the text for a presentation I gave at the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, D.C. on December 28, 1998. It was written very quickly, and I haven't had time to go back and fix it up, but I probably won't have time to fix it up any time soon, and several people have requested copies, so I don't see any harm in making it available. Please remember that it is a draft, and don't (...) quote it without permission. (shrink)

We present a general framework for representing belief-revision rules and use it to characterize Bayes's rule as a classical example and Jeffrey's rule as a non-classical one. In Jeffrey's rule, the input to a belief revision is not simply the information that some event has occurred, as in Bayes's rule, but a new assignment of probabilities to some events. Despite their differences, Bayes's and Jeffrey's rules can be characterized in terms of the same axioms: "responsiveness", which requires that (...) revised beliefs incorporate what has been learnt, and "conservativeness", which requires that beliefs on which the learnt input is "silent" do not change. To illustrate the use of non-Bayesian belief revision in economic theory, we sketch a simple decision-theoretic application. (shrink)

In two recent articles, Travis Dumsday has formulated a response to the problem of divine hiddenness on the basis of the Christian doctrine—especially Aquinas’s thought. I agree with Dumsday that Christians qua Christians can significantly contribute to the debate in question. However, in both articles the author overlooks a decisive aspect of Aquinas’s doctrine of faith and the Christian teachings that trace back to it. This article dwells on Dumsday’s interpretation of Aquinas’s thought, and from within my argument (...) proposes a different response to the problem of divine hiddenness. (shrink)

Most atheists are error theorists about theists; they claim that theists have genuine beliefs about the existence and nature of a divine being, but as a matter of fact no such divine being exists. Thus on their view the relevant theistic beliefs are mistaken. As error theorists, then, atheists need to arrive at some answer to the question of what practical course of action the atheist should adopt towards the theistic beliefs held by committed theists. The most natural answer and (...) the one that we see being implemented by many prominent atheists today, can be stated roughly as follows: -/- (1) Theistic Eliminativism: Atheists should marshal the best arguments at their disposal and present them to theists in the hopes that theists will come to appreciate that their religious beliefs are systemically erroneous. Furthermore, on coming to this realization, a theist should abandon not just his specific religious beliefs, but also more generally his religious practices and theistic framework for viewing the world, and adopt a secular point of view instead. -/- One of the main goals of this paper is to show that, despite its popularity, eliminativism is not the only option for the atheist to adopt. In order to do so, I draw on recent work in meta-ethics on moral error theories, work which has helped to outline a number of alterative courses of action that someone might take towards a group which is said to have widespread erroneous beliefs. (shrink)

Tyler Dalton McNabb and Michael DeVito develop a thoroughly original and Orthodox model for how Christian belief, and, even specifically Eastern Christian belief, can be warranted. They do this by creatively bringing recent work on religious experience, in the context of the Divine Liturgy, into conversation with Alvin Plantinga’s well-known explication of Reformed Epistemology. What emerges is a distinctly Eastern Christian approach to warranted Christian belief, that modifies and, arguably, improves upon Plantinga’s original (...) model. (shrink)

This paper has two parts. In the first I give a brief historical account of the a priori and point out the central and problematic role of 'Erfahrung überhaupt' in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In the second and main part I offer a criticism of Kripke’s arguments for the contingent a priori and I thereby question his radical separation of metaphysics and epistemology.

I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in which the propositions are considered. Assuming that earlier decisions constrain later ones, I prove three main results: First, certain rationality violations by the decision-making agent—individual or group—are necessary and sufficient for path-dependence. Second, under some conditions, path-dependence is unavoidable in decisions made by (...) groups. Third, path-dependence makes decisions vulnerable to strategic agenda setting and strategic voting. I also discuss escape routes from path-dependence. My results are relevant to discussions on collective consistency and reason-based decision-making, focusing not only on outcomes, but also on underlying reasons, beliefs, and constraints. (shrink)

What is the relationship between degrees of belief and binary beliefs? Can the latter be expressed as a function of the former—a so-called “belief-binarization rule”—without running into difficulties such as the lottery paradox? We show that this problem can be usefully analyzed from the perspective of judgment-aggregation theory. Although some formal similarities between belief binarization and judgment aggregation have been noted before, the connection between the two problems has not yet been studied in full generality. In this (...) paper, we seek to fill this gap. The paper is organized around a baseline impossibility theorem, which we use to map out the space of possible solutions to the belief-binarization problem. Our theorem shows that, except in limiting cases, there exists no belief-binarization rule satisfying four initially plausible desiderata. Surprisingly, this result is a direct corollary of the judgment-aggregation variant of Arrow’s classic impossibility theorem in social choice theory. (shrink)

On Hume’s account of motivation, beliefs and desires are very different kinds of propositional attitudes. Beliefs are cognitive attitudes, desires emotive ones. An agent’s belief in a proposition captures the weight he or she assigns to this proposition in his or her cognitive representation of the world. An agent’s desire for a proposition captures the degree to which he or she prefers its truth, motivating him or her to act accordingly. Although beliefs and desires are sometimes entangled, they play (...) very different roles in rational agency. In two classic papers (Lewis 1988, 1996), David Lewis discusses several challenges to this Humean picture, but ultimately rejects them. We think that his discussion of a central anti-Humean alternative – the desire-as-belief thesis – is in need of refinnement. On this thesis, the desire for proposition p is given by the belief that p is desirable. Lewis claims that ‘[e]xcept in trivial cases, [this thesis] collapses into contradiction’(Lewis 1996, p. 308). The problem, he argues, is that the thesis is inconsistent with the purportedly plausible requirement that one’s desire for a proposition should not change upon learning that the proposition is true; call this the invariance requirement. In this paper, we revisit Lewis’s argument. We show that, if one carefully distinguishes between non-evaluative and evaluative propositions, the desire-asbelief thesis can be rendered consistent with the invariance requirement. Lewis’s conclusion holds only under certain conditions: the desire-as-belief thesis conflicts with the invariance requirement if and only if there are certain correlations between non-evaluative and evaluative propositions. But when there are such correlations, we suggest, the invariance requirement loses its plausibility. Thus Lewis’s argument against the desire-as-belief thesis appears to be valid only in cases in which it is unsound. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga is John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. This book is the third volume in his trilogy on warrant, which is that elusive x that turns true belief into knowledge and which is bound up with the proper function of our cognitive processes and faculties according to a design plan.

Alvin Plantinga s Warranted Christian Belief has very quickly become one of the most influential books in philosophy of religion. In this collection of essays, German philosophers, theologians and a mathematician deal critically with several aspects of Plantinga s seminal work. In a long essay, Plantinga answers these critics.".

This book is concerned with the religious and socio-ethical aspects in the writings of selected idealists. It addresses the question: was post-Hegelian philosophical idealism, in its friendliest guise, more a help than a hindrance to the expression of Christian convictions and the articulation of Christian doctrines?

In Warranted Christian Belief, Alvin Plantinga makes use of his earlier two books, Warrant: the Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function, to show how it is possible for someone to have a warranted belief that God exists and that all of the great things of the Christian Gospel are true even if the believer is unable to give any argument to support these beliefs. Three objections are lodged against Plantinga’s position. First, the alleged sensus divinitatis (...) and the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit are crucially disanalogous to the cognitive faculties, such as memory and perception, in the standard package, thereby destroying his argument based on an analogy between the former and the latter. Second, in order to defeat defeaters for these beliefs one must give arguments, thus merely relocating the point at which the believer must produce argumentative support for her belief. Third, there are moral defeaters for exclusivist basic theistic and Christian beliefs based on the undesirable consequences of such beliefs. (shrink)

This critical study of the third book of Plantinga's trilogy on proper-function epistemology begins by denying that classical foundationalism proposes a deontic conception of justification. Nor is it subject to Gettier counterexamples, as, I show, Plantinga's fallibilism is and must be. Plantinga's central thesis is that there's no way of attacking the rationality of central Christian beliefs without attacking their truth. That, I argue, is not so on several grounds, e.g., because one can demand independent evidence for the existence (...) of the _sensus divinitatis and Holy Spirit, because of doctrinal disagreements, and because of the morally checkered character of "saved" Christians. (shrink)