Calvin's "sense of divinity" and externalist knowledge of God

Faith and Philosophy

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 253-270

  Reiter, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST THOMAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79954112698     PISSN: 07397046     EISSN: 21533393     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/faithphil199815330     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill and translated by Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960). The reference here is to book I, chapter 3, section 1, and page 43. All further references to Calvin's Institutes will be from this edition.
2. For the causal theory, see Goldman's "A Causal Theory of Knowing," Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967): 355-72.
3. Goldman provides an initial and relatively simple presentation of the reliabilist theory in "What is Justified Belief?" in Justification and Knowledge, ed. George Pappas (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1979): 1-23.
4. For Plantinga's argumentation against reliabilism, see chapter nine of his Warrant: The Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
5. For his theory of warrant, see Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), especially chapters one and two. For other significant attacks on reliabilism, see Keith Lehrer's Theory of Knowledge (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), ch. 8
6. William P. Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991): 285.
7. Although Reformed epistemology is organized around the claim that theistic belief can be properly basic, two epistemologists have recently done interesting work in exploring the role of nonbasic theistic belief within the Reformed epistemology framework. Michael L. Czapkay Sudduth suggests that "mediate natural theology" (a form of nonbasic theistic belief) may be implicit in John Calvin's theology in his "The Prospects For 'Mediate' Natural Theology in John Calvin," Religious Studies 31 (1995): 53-68.
8. Stephen J. Wykstra argues that some Reformed epistemologists have tended (perhaps due to the influence of internalism) to understand nonbasic belief in general in an artificially narrow manner. So Wykstra sketches what he takes to be a more realistic account of nonbasic belief, in his "Is Theism a Theory? Externalism, Proper Inferentiality and Sensible Evidentialism" in Topoi (1995).
9. This is the main point of Alston's elegant and insightful article entitled "Knowledge of God" in Faith, Reason, and Skepticism, ed. Marcus Hester (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992): 6-49.
10. See Warrant: The Current Debate, 132-37. Actually, Plantinga identifies five different concepts of rationality, but I am going to forego discussion of "Foley-rationality."
11. This concept of deontological rationality is an essential component of the "evidentialist objection" against theistic belief. For discussion of this objection, see Plantinga "Reason and Belief in God" in Faith and Rationality, eds. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983): 16-93.
12. For Hasker's challenge, see his "Proper Function, Reliabilism, and Religious Knowledge: A Critique of Plantinga's Epistemology," in Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge, eds. C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans Publishing, 1993): 66-86. Plantinga responds to the Hasker objection in Warrant and Proper Function: 29-31. For Alston's challenge, see his "Epistemic Warrant as Proper Function"
13. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. LV, no. 2 (June 1995): 397-402. Plantinga responds to Alston in the same volume.
14. Alvin Plantinga, "The Foundations of Theism: A Reply" Faith and Philosophy vol. 3 no. 3 (July 1986): 310.
15. Richard Foley, "Is It Possible to Have Contradictory Beliefs?" in Midwest Studies in Philosophy X, eds. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., Howard K. Wettstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 327-355.
16. Plantinga discusses the distinction in "Reason and Belief in God": 37-38.
17. L. Jonathan Cohen develops his theory of the distinction in An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
18. Keith Lehrer provides an interesting discussion of the distinction in his Theory of Knowledge (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), see especially pp. 10-11 and 26ff.
19. William Alston expresses sympathy for Fred Dretske's hardcore externalist account of knowledge in "Knowledge and Justification" in Epistemic Justification (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). There Alston explains a case where S knows that p, in spite of the fact that S has an undefeated (undermining) defeater for p.
20. In a seminal article in the literature on self-deception, Raphael Demos characterizes self-deception as follows: "Self-deception exists, I will say, when a person lies to himself, that is to say, persuades himself to believe what he knows is not so. In short, self-deception entails that B believes both p and not-p at the same time." Raphael Demos, "Lying to Oneself," Journal of Philosophy 57 (1960): 588-595.
21. According to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, " agnosticism" is the "term invented by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 to denote the philosophical and religious attitude of those who claim that metaphysical ideas can be neither proved nor disproved." Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Robert Audi, editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).