How to answer the de jure question about Christian belief

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion

Volumn 56, Issue 2-3, 2004, Pages 109-129

  Bishop, John ^a   Aijaz, Imran ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 35448986100     PISSN: 00207047     EISSN: 15728684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11153-004-5814-x     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. Plantinga's Reformed epistemology is articulated and defended in its fullest form in Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, hereafter WCB).
2. See WCB, p. 67.
3. In his 'Advice to Christian philosophers' Plantinga maintains that 'the Christian philosopher does indeed have a responsibility to the philosophical world at large; but his fundamental responsibility is to the Christian community, and finally to God.' (See http://www.faithandphilosophy.com/ plantinga-advice.htm. The article's source is Faith and Philosophy 1 (1984) pp. 253-271). We do not here question that assessment of where a Christian philosopher's primary responsibility lies, and accept that PRE's answer to the de jure question is intended as one that can be given credit from within a Christian perspective. Our interest is wholly in whether Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology succeeds in discharging the responsibility to provide an answer to the de jure question as it arises in the case of our reflective believer - and her situation is, of course, one that belongs within the Christian community.
4. See Warrant: the current debate (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 24. 'It is within my power to adopt policies that influence and modify my propensities to believe; I can adopt such policies as paying careful attention to the evidence, avoiding wishful thinking, being aware of such sources of belief as jealousy, lust, contareity, excessive optimism, loyalty, and the like. ... this implies at least a certain degree of indirect control over my beliefs.'
5. Our concern in this paper is solely with Plantinga's version of Reformed epistemology, as it has culminated in WCB. The question of the extent to which the line of argument we develop in this paper would apply to the work of other Reformed epistemologists is beyond our present scope, though obviously of considerable interest. For what are widely regarded as the seminal essays of Reformed epistemology see the essays by Plantinga, Alston and Wolterstorff in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (eds.), Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).
6. William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) is another important and influential work of Reformed Epistemology.
7. See WCB, p. 156.
8. See the opening sentence of his Warrant: the current debate, p. 3.
9. See WCB, Chapters 6-8.
10. See, for example, Jonathan L. Kvanvig (ed.), Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology (NY, Rowman & Littlefield: 1996).
11. Plantinga argues that the only contestable form in which the de jure question arises is as the question whether one is warranted in holding Christian belief. Doubts may be raised about this claim - see, for example, Thomas D. Senor, 'A Critical Review of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief, International Philosophical Quarterly, 42 (2002), especially pp. 390-391. For our purposes, however, provided the meaning of the de jure question is grounded in the situation of our reflective Christian believer, we are prepared initially to concede that the question is about the warrantedness of Christian belief in Plantinga's sense. We wish to ask whether, even with that granted, an adequate answer to the de jure question results from accepting the A/C model.
12. See WCB, p. 170 ('As for classical Christianity there is even less prospect of demonstrating its truth [sc. than of demonstrating the truth that God exists]'), and p. 499 where Plantinga draws the conclusion that none of the 'actual or potential' defeaters for Christian belief that he has surveyed succeed.
13. Note also WCB, p. 201: 'I don't know of an argument for Christian belief that seems very likely to convince one who doesn't already accept its conclusion.'
14. Compare John Hick's thesis of 'religious ambiguity:' the claim that our universe 'is capable from our present human vantage point of being thought and experienced in both religious and naturalistic ways' (An Interpretation of Religion, London: Macmillan, 1989, p. 73). If 'capable' is taken to mean 'capable with respect to the force of the inferential evidence' then the situation we are considering is one of religious ambiguity as regards Christian religious claims.
15. Anthony Kenny puts this objection thus: '[t]he doubting believer in God cannot reassure himself that his belief is warranted; for only if there is a God is his belief warranted, and that is what he was beginning to doubt.' What is Faith? (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 71.
16. It seems that Plantinga never explicitly claims that being able to judge this 'PRE argument' to be sound enables our reflective Christian believer to satisfy herself that she is within her epistemic rights in continuing to take her Christian belief to be true. There are contexts, however, where Plantinga may well seem to make this claim implicitly. Consider, for example, the following passage, which concludes Plantinga's article on 'Reformed Epistemology', Chapter 49 in Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell, 1999), pp. 383-389: '... the Reformed epistemologist will point out that (in all probability) theistic belief has warrant if and only if it is true: since she thinks it is true, she will also think it has warrant ... Here she can't claim ... that it is just obvious that theistic belief has warrant; for it isn't just obvious that theism is true. Instead, she points out that theistic belief has warrant if and only if it is true: hence whether one thinks it has warrant will depend upon whether one thinks it is true'.
17. Our reflective Christian believer, then, will think her belief warranted (and will do so by taking the PRE argument to be sound). The question is whether that suffices to resolve her de jure question. Plantinga doesn't say ... but might well be understood to be implying that it does. In his article, 'Religion and Epistemology' in Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (New York, Routledge, 1998, pp. 209-218), Plantinga claims that the de jure question about Christian belief 'reduces to' the de facto question of its truth, and this claim might also plausibly be interpreted as equivalent to the claim that the reflective believer may answer her de jure question by rehearsing the PRE argument. In any case, whether Plantinga would or would not endorse the PRE argument as resolving the de jure question, we think it is certainly helpful to determine whether it does - and that is the issue we here take up.
18. In WCB Plantinga anticipates charges of circularity against his A/C model, and seeks to set them aside by emphasising that the source of warrant for Christian belief is not, on the model, any kind of argument at all, and so, a fortiori, not an argument that could exhibit vicious circularity (see p. 352). Our discussion is within the scope of the assumption that Plantinga's A/C model is correct, and so we agree that if Christian belief is true, then Christian belief is warranted, and, indeed, warranted in a way that does not depend on the believer's accepting any argument for its truth (or warrant). Our allegation of epistemic circularity arises, however, in the context of considering how this conditional claim can be employed in providing for our reflective Christian believer a categorical answer to her de jure question - and, in particular, in the context of considering whether the PRE argument can be properly used to yield that categorical answer. Accordingly, Plantinga's correct observations about the non-circularity of his model of warrant do not amount to any kind of reply to the charge of epistemic circularity that is our present concern.
19. See, for example, WCB, p. 170.
20. 'Evidentialism is the view that belief in God is rationally justifiable only if there is good evidence for it, where good evidence would be arguments from other propositions one knows.' This evidentialist view follows from the classical foundationalist epistemology which Plantinga rejects on the grounds that it is too narrow and, anyway, self-referentially incoherent (see WCB, pp. 93-107).
21. 'Faith, according to the [extended A/C] model, is far indeed from being a blind leap; it isn't even remotely like a leap in the dark ... [y]ou might as well claim that a memory belief, or the belief that 3 + 1 = 4 is a leap in the dark' (WCB, p. 263).
22. For Plantinga's account of properly basic belief, see, for instance, WCB pp. 175-179.
23. Plantinga does make explicit this wider use of the notion of a person's evidence: '... evidence includes not just other propositions that you believe (although it does include that) but also your current experience: the ways in which you are being appeared to, for example, when you look out at your backyard ...' in Quinn and Taliaferro, WCB op cit., p. 387.
24. The need to distinguish between a broad and a narrow sense of evidence is helpfully articulated by Stephen J. Wykstra, who further notes that the 'natural' sense of the word 'evidence' is the broad sense. See his 'On behalf of the Evidentialist: a reply to Wolterstorff in D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, eds, Philosophy of Religion in the Twenty-first Century, Palgrave, New York, 2001, 64-84, pp. 66-67.
25. Alston maintains that this 'double standard' is a feature of what he calls 'epistemic imperialism.' See Perceiving God, p. 199.
26. Plantinga himself would not endorse this claim - and so could not himself run the 'parity' reply along the lines we are here considering. This is because Plantinga argues that on 'naturalist' evolutionary assumptions, our cognitive structures 'were not selected for their penchant for producing true beliefs in us ... [T]he ultimate ... function of... belief-producing mechanisms will not be the production of true beliefs but survival...' (WCB, p. 228). One might, however, plausibly argue that, though the ultimate function of perceptual belief-producing mechanisms is no doubt survival, they could not have that ultimate function unless they had the proximate function of producing (under normal conditions) beliefs true of our 'phenomenal' lived environments. In that case, an externalist case for the warrant of perceptual beliefs would be plausible, and so a 'parity' reply along these lines is certainly worth considering by a proponent of PRE.
27. Bernard Williams, Descartes: the Project of Pure Inquiry (Penguin Books, 1978). See especially, pp. 46-51.
28. It has been observed that theists frequently do not hold their basic theist beliefs with the degree of firmness envisaged on Plantinga's A/C model (see Richard Swinburne, 'Plantinga on Warrant', Religious Studies 37 (2001), p. 203,
29. and Andrew Chignell, 'Epistemology for Saints' (http:/www. christianitytoday.com/bc/2002/002/10.20.html). We are here making the further point that, even for those theists who do (on occasion, anyway) very firmly believe their basic beliefs, that firmness of belief is not experienced as just like the firmness of belief that arises utterly routinely with (e.g.) perceptual beliefs under normal conditions.
30. We thus agree with C. Stephen Evans' diagnosis of PRE as in a certain sense 'fideist,' a sense which Evans argues is implied by commitment to an externalist epistemology. See his Faith beyond Reason: a Kierkegaardian account, W.B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1998, pp. 45-47. In Evans' terms, then, our contention is that an affirmative answer to the de jure question about Christian belief will require a defence of the epistemic propriety of fideism, understood as the thesis that doxastic venture is permissible under certain conditions.
31. William James, 'The Will to Believe' in The Will to Believe, Human Immoratlity, and other essays on popular philosophy (Dover, 1956).
32. For a thorough recent discussion see Richard M. Gale, The Divided Self of William James, Cambridge University Press, 1999, Chapter 4. Even if it is defensible as an interpretation of James's own views, we doubt whether Gale's 'belief-consequentialist' account of the James's will-to-believe doctrine can provide an ultimately successful defence of the epistemic propriety of passionally motivated doxastic venture. We think the proposal we are about to canvass potentially more promising in that respect.
33. Compare William James: 'If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side - that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right.' ('The Will to Believe', p. 27).