Mark J. Boone

Although Augustine is rightly associated with the rationalistic epistemology of the Platonist tradition—which holds that knowledge comes from the mind rather than from experience—there is an underappreciated, and significant, empirical aspect to his epistemology, which I aim to clarify in this article. In Augustine’s epistemology, knowledge of God depends on the history of his people, his revelation, and above all his Messiah. However, the empirical aspect of Augustine’s theology does not overrule his rationalism, but rather is integrated into it. Augustine is a Christian representative of a broader epistemological tradition which includes Plato as well as Immanuel Kant and which considers warrant for our beliefs to come from the mind even as experience provides the input necessary for the process to begin. It is, of course, a Christianized version of such a nuanced rationalism: In both its rationalistic core and its empirical aspect, knowledge is explained in Christian terms: in the former because the mind does not have these ideas of its own powers but from God’s indwelling and gracious assistance, in the latter because the experience leading to knowledge is the religious experience that founded the Christian church and Scriptures.

Plantinga’s God and Other Minds, Reformed Epistemology articles, and Warrant Trilogy are all part of the same epistemological project. Although the project develops in phases focusing progressively on anti-theism, evidentialism, and internalism, the epistemology is consistently a Reidian particularism. It follows Roderick Chisholm’s famous particularist strategy for finding an epistemic criterion, uses principles of common sense from Thomas Reid as clear cases of beliefs satisfying that criterion, and applies that criterion to belief in God in order to show that this belief is epistemically respectable. Understanding this will help to clarify Plantinga’s philosophical contributions to our understanding of religious belief. In my article I introduce Plantinga’s epistemological sources, explain the structure of his project, overview its development in these three phases, and correct some misunderstandings of Plantinga that arise from inattention to his Reidian particularism. I also show how Reidian particularism itself suggests an improvement to Plantinga’s epistemology which his critics often recommend: that we recognize that evidence for the existence of God, even if it is not necessary for theistic belief to be warranted, may yet be valuable.