Alvin Plantinga

Some of Roderick Chisholm's more recent work has displayed a conception of warrant, which differs substantially from his earlier conception of warrant. In this chapter, I explain postclassical Chisholmian internalism and then offer four critical observations about it. First, it is relatively uninformative ; second, it remains internalist, but loses the principal philosophical motivation for internalism by moving away from deontology. Third, it is not the case that for a given belief B, there is a set S of evidence bases such that, necessarily, B has warrant for me if and only if it occurs in conjunction with a member of that set S. And, fourth, it is a mistake to suppose that the warrant a belief enjoys for S can be understood as a function solely of the psychological properties S exemplifies.

In this chapter, I take stock of the arguments and conclusions of the previous nine chapters, noting that the idea of proper function figures prominently in the difficulties from which the main current views of warrant suffer. This fact suggests that the notion of proper function is much more deeply involved in our idea of warrant than is currently recognized. In Warrant and Proper Function, I shall examine this suggestion in detail; in this chapter,, I give an outline of the content of Warrant and Proper Function. In so doing, I introduce the claim that the paradigmatic cases of a belief's having warrant are cases such that the belief is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly, the cognitive environment in which the belief is produced is one sufficiently similar to the environment for which the relevant cognitive faculty or faculties were designed, the belief is such that the purpose of the module of the faculties producing the belief is to produce true beliefs, and the design plan in question is a good one.

In this chapter, I introduce the notion of warrant, and then turn to examine the connections between deontology, justification, and internalism. Central to deontology is the thought that being justified in holding a belief is a matter of having fulfilled one's epistemic duties in forming or continuing to hold that belief. The basic thrust of internalism is that the properties that confer warrant upon a belief are properties to which the believer has some sort of special epistemic access. After a brief survey of the great diversity in twentieth‐century views about justification, I argue that internalism flows from deontology, and that we can better understand twentieth century views about justification when we understand the relationships between deontology, justification, and internalism.

In this chapter, I consider coherentism taken generally, and argue that it does not afford the resources for a satisfactory account of warrant. We can better understand coherentism, I think, by contrasting it with foundationalism; I accordingly begin with an examination of ordinary foundationalism. Turning next to coherentism, we find that the coherentist claims that coherence is both necessary and sufficient for warrant in that a proposition has warrant for me if and only if it is coherent with my noetic structure or appropriately follows from propositions that are coherent with my noetic structure. I argue that the coherentist is wrong on both counts – coherence is neither necessary nor sufficient for warrant. I then close with a short discussion of classical foundationalism.

In this chapter, I explain and critically examine Laurence BonJour's version of coherentism, as presented in his The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Speaking roughly, BonJour holds that an empirical belief has warrant only if it is an element in a system of beliefs that is coherent in the long run. Somewhat less roughly, BonJour holds that an empirical belief B has warrant for a person S if and only if S has a reason for thinking B to be true; and that reason, on BonJour's view, can only be the conjunction of B being a member of S's system of beliefs, and that system is coherent and if B is a member of S's system of beliefs and S's system of beliefs has been coherent for a sufficiently long run, then B is likely to be true. After explaining BonJour's coherentism, I comment on two interesting facets of BonJour's thought: his relationship to classical foundationalism and his trust in reason, and the success of his argument for a coherentist justification of empirical belief. Finally, and most importantly for the larger purpose of my book, I consider his conception of warrant, concluding that BonJourian coherence is neither sufficient nor necessary for warrant.

In order to examine the relationship between warrant and justification, I turn, in this chapter, to the views of Roderick Chisholm, or, more precisely, to the classical Chisholm. In important respects, the classical Chisholm's internalism displays much continuity with the deontological internalism of Descartes and Locke. The classical Chisholm's official position on warrant is that warrant is a matter of fulfilling epistemic obligation – a matter of a proposition's being so related to a person that he can better fulfill his epistemic duty by accepting the proposition in question than by, e.g., withholding acceptance. Against Chisholm, I argue that most of Chisholm's epistemic principles are false if warrant is what Chisholm officially says it is, and that the fulfillment of epistemic duty is neither sufficient nor necessary for warrant.

In this chapter, I outline the essentials of Bayesianism and ask whether it contributes to a satisfying account of warrant. From the perspective of my overall project in Warrant: The Current Debate, Bayesianism can be seen as essentially suggesting conditions for a rational or reasonable set of partial beliefs, where a partial belief of an agent S is any belief that S accepts to some degree or another, no matter how small. Although Bayesians tend to speak not of warrant but of rationality, I consider in this chapter the relationship between Bayesianism and warrant. I conclude that the conditions for rationality proposed by Bayesians are neither severally necessary nor jointly sufficient conditions for warrant. Taken as a theory of warrant, Bayesianism is incomplete in that it says nothing about the sort of relation between belief and experience required for warrant, and it provides no account of evidence or evidential support.

Rationality, although distinct from warrant, is a notion both interesting in its own right and important for a solid understanding of warrant. In this chapter, I first disambiguate at least five different forms of rationality, and, second, examine the relationship between Bayesianism and rationality. Bayesians often claim that conformity to Bayesian constraints is necessary for rationality. Against this view, I argue that none of the forms of rationality I distinguished requires coherence, and some of them in fact require incoherence, and that changing belief by conditionalization is neither a sensible ideal for human cognizers nor a requirement for rationality. Finally, after a somewhat extended look at Reflection, I argue that while van Fraassen surely has important and probably true things to say about what rational integrity requires with respect to one's commitments and intentions about belief change, it is nonetheless the case that rationality does not require that I conform to Reflection.

The Theory of Worldbound Individuals is the view that each object exists in just one possible world. In this chapter, I argue that there is no good reason to accept T.W.I. and T.W.I. has implausible consequences. I begin by demonstrating that traditional arguments for T.W.I., including the Problem of Transworld Identification, are based on confusion and do not pose problems for the thesis that objects exist in more than one possible world. In the final section of the chapter, I argue that T.W.I. entails that every object has all of its properties essentially. Moreover, T.W.I. entails this even if it is fortified with David Lewis's Counterpart Theory.

The Classical Argument for possible nonexistent objects depends on both the possibility of singular negative existentials and the Ontological Principle. The Ontological Principle is the principle that any world in which a singular proposition is true, is one in which there is such a thing as its subject, or in which its subject has being if not existence. In this chapter, I show that the Ontological Principle is false and that whatever plausibility it enjoys is explained by the truth of a similar principle, namely, the Restricted Ontological Principle. Thus, the Classical Argument fails. Moreover, I give an account of how fictional names function in order to show that statements about fictional subjects, for example, “Othello is a Moor”, do not express predicative singular propositions.

The Fregean view of proper names is that proper names express properties. I begin the essay by pointing out the inadequacies of anti‐Fregean views with respect to puzzles presented by empty proper names, negative existentials containing proper names, and by propositional identity in the context of propositional attitudes. I then develop the Boethian view, which claims that proper names do indeed express properties, proper names express essences, and different proper names of an object can express logically equivalent but epistemically inequivalent essences of that object. The Boethian view is a compromise because it holds that proper names only express essences and that the reference of proper names, in at least some cases, is determined in the way the anti‐Fregeans suggest. Finally, in light of the Boethian compromise, I revise my account of proper names given in The Nature of Necessity, and endorse the position that different proper names of the same object can express different essences.

In the first part of this chapter, I sketch out three grades of modal realism. After developing modal realism, I examine David Lewis's modal theory. I argue that Lewis's theory satisfies none of the grades of modal realism, and that it is really a case of modal reductionism. In particular, I demonstrate that Counterpart Theory is a rejection of the view that objects have properties accidentally or essentially. Moreover, I claim that Lewis merely models things such as propositions, possible worlds or state of affairs, and that he, in fact, is an antirealist with regard to such entities.

In this chapter, I examine John Pollock's conception of warrant, as developed in his article “Epistemic Norms” and his book Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. I argue that his official view of warrant is deeply flawed, foundering as it does on the possibilities of cognitive malfunction. As Pollock uses the phrase, an epistemic norm is a rule describing the circumstances under which it is epistemically permissible to hold beliefs. Central to Pollock's account are several claims about epistemic norms, which I take pains to dispute. After considering several problems with Pollock's conception of warrant, I proceed to argue that, while Pollock describes his theory of knowledge as an internalist view, it is in fact internalist in name only, being not a species of internalism, but a sort of transitional stage to a more satisfactory view of warrant.

As I use the term, externalism is the complement of internalism; the externalist denies that in order for one of my beliefs to have warrant for me, I must have some sort of special or privileged access to the fact that I have warrant, or to its ground. Recent epistemology has seen a flurry of interest in reliabilism, a particular species of externalism, and in this chapter, I examine three externalist and reliabilist accounts of warrant: those offered or suggested by William Alston, Fred Dretske, and Alvin Goldman. After introducing the notion of Alstonian justification, I point out that Alstonian justification is neither necessary nor sufficient for warrant. I then briefly outline Dretske's account of knowledge, Goldman's earlier version of reliabilism, and Goldman's later version of reliabilism. I conclude that the views of both Dretske and Goldman suffer because they fail to pay explicit attention to the notion of the proper function of our cognitive equipment.

According to the model I proposed in Ch. 8, Christian belief is produced in the believer by the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit; the result of this work of the Holy Spirit is faith. In Ch. 8, I explored the cognitive aspects of faith, but faith is more than just belief; in producing faith, the Holy Spirit does more than produce knowledge in the believer – the Holy Spirit also seals this knowledge to our hearts, which is to say that the Holy Spirit begins to cure our misdirected wills, producing in us the right sorts of affections. In this chapter, I explore the affective side of faith, turning first to the work of Jonathan Edwards in order to examine the nature of religious affections. In doing so, I address the issue of the relationship between intellect and will in the process of acquiring faith. I then turn to that most important of religious affections, the love of God, exploring the nature of this love and arguing that it is, in part, an erotic love, figured or imaged in the phenomenon of human erotic love.

Among objections to Christian belief, we can distinguish between de facto objections and de jure objections, i.e., between those that claim that Christian belief is false and those that claim that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or in some other way rationally unacceptable. In Chs. 3 and 4, I argued that no viable de jure objection to Christian belief can be developed in terms of justification or rationality ; in this chapter, I turn to the objections offered by Freud and Marx, objections best understood in terms of warrant. At the heart of the criticism of religious belief due to Freud and Marx is the claim that religious belief is not produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly and aimed at truth: according to Freud, religious belief arises from the psychological mechanism of wish fulfillment, while according to Marx, religious belief is produced by cognitive faculties malfunctioning due to a perversion in the social structure. After an initial examination of these objections, I briefly recapitulate the account of warrant I proposed in Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function. I then point out that the criticisms of Freud and Marx amount to the objection that religious belief lacks warrant; in the next chapter, I evaluate this objection.

In the last chapter, I pointed out that the objections against religious belief made by Freud and Marx amount to the de jure objection that religious belief lacks warrant. By way of response, I offer in this chapter a model, which illustrates a way in which theistic belief could have warrant. On the Aquinas/Calvin model, we have a faculty or cognitive mechanism, which, in a wide variety of circumstances, produces in us beliefs about God; the theistic beliefs thus produced, furthermore, are properly basic with respect to warrant. After presenting the A/C model, I argue that if theism is true, then it is likely that belief in God has warrant and is properly basic with respect to warrant; this implies that a successful atheological objection will have to be to the truth of theism, not to its warrant, rationality, justification or intellectual respectability. I then turn to the objections of Freud and Marx and argue that these objections fail as de jure objections to theistic belief; what I call the Freud‐and‐Marx complaint is a good objection only on the assumption that theism is false.

Continuing an examination of proposed defeaters for Christian belief, I turn in this chapter to some of the issues raised by contemporary historical biblical criticism, arguing that contemporary historical biblical criticism does not serve as a defeater for Christian belief. After a brief discussion of the divine inspiration of Scripture, I distinguish and examine two different kinds of Scripture scholarship: traditional biblical commentary and historical biblical criticism. Historical biblical criticism is an effort to look at and understand the biblical books from a standpoint that relies on reason alone, i.e., it is an effort to determine from the standpoint of reason alone what the scriptural teachings are and whether they are true. I discuss three different types of HBC and briefly point out some of the tensions between HBC and traditional Christianity: as Van Harvey remarks, “So far as the biblical historian is concerned...there is scarcely a popularly held traditional belief about Jesus that is not regarded with considerable skepticism.” I then argue that none of the varieties of HBC provides a defeater for Christian belief, either because they begin with unsupported assumptions that are contrary to Christian belief, or because they ignore sources of warranted belief that Christians believe they have and fail to give good arguments that Christians do not have such sources of warranted belief.

Continuing an examination of proposed defeaters for Christian belief, I consider in this chapter the question of whether knowledge of the facts of evil constitutes a defeater for theistic and Christian belief. In the first section of the chapter, I focus on versions of the evidential argument from evil, which claims not that the existence of God and the existence of evil are logically incompatible, but only that the facts of evil offer powerful evidence against the existence of God. I first examine two such arguments due to William Rowe and then turn to one due to Paul Draper; I argue that all three fail. In the second section, I consider what we might call a nonargumentative defeater based on suffering and evil; essentially, the claim at issue here is that one who is properly sensitive and properly aware of the sheer horror of the evil displayed in the world will simply see that no being of the sort God is alleged to be could possibly permit it. After exploring and responding to this claim, I close with a brief look at some relevant themes in the Book of Job.

The extended Aquinas/Calvin model of the last three chapters is intended to show how specifically Christian belief can have justification, internal and external rationality, and warrant. In this chapter, I do two things; first, I consider some of the arguments for the conclusions that theistic and/or Christian belief lacks warrant, and, second, I consider objections to my arguments and claims about the way in which Christian belief can have warrant. I first consider the objection that religious belief can derive warrant from religious experience only if there is a good argument from premises reporting the occurrence of such experience to the existence of God; I rebut this objection by pointing out that it is surely possible for religious belief to derive warrant from religious experience directly, in a basic way, just as perceptual and memory beliefs derive warrant from perceptual and memorial experience in a basic way and not by virtue of inference or argument. After considering a second objection, concerning the alleged incapacity of experience to account for the specificity of religious belief, I reply to an objection due to Richard Gale, according to which it is impossible to have a veridical perceptual experience of God. I then examine and reply to a number of objections to my claim that theistic and Christian belief can receive warrant in the basic way, including the so‐called Great Pumpkin objection and descendants of it, and the objection that there is something circular in my account.

In Ch. 6, I presented a model, which illustrates how belief in God could have warrant; my aim in the next four chapters is to extend the model of Ch. 6 to specifically include Christian belief, and to show how it can be that Christians can be justified, rational, and warranted in holding full‐blooded Christian belief. Now, one important difference between bare theism and Christianity has to do with sin and the divine remedy proposed for it; in the present chapter, therefore, I explore the nature of sin and its noetic effects. After providing an initial statement of the extended A/C model, I turn to an examination of the nature of sin, focusing especially on original sin, a condition affecting both will and intellect. According to the extended A/C model, the noetic effects of sin are concentrated with respect to our knowledge of others, ourselves, and God; most importantly, the sensus divinitatis has been damaged by sin. After exploring this basic noetic consequence of sin, I return to an issue from Ch. 12 of Warrant and Proper Function, and take the opportunity to make some corrections, simplifications, and additions to the arguments I offered there.

Continuing an examination of proposed defeaters for Christian belief, I turn in this chapter to postmodernism and religious pluralism. Some of the claims that can be plausibly labeled “postmodern” are claims that conflict with Christian belief; in the first section of this chapter, I examine some of these claims. Among other things, I inquire as to whether Christian belief is defeated by an argument from the historically conditioned character of religious and philosophical belief, or by the view, often associated with Richard Rorty, that human beings construct the truth. After arguing that neither nor provide a defeater for Christian belief, I examine the question of whether a defeater for Christian belief can be found in the fact of religious pluralism, the fact that the world displays a bewildering and kaleidoscopic variety of religious and antireligious ways of thinking, all pursued by people of great intelligence and seriousness. I then consider and respond to two such proposed defeaters, the second of which involves the charge that there is a sort of egoism, arrogance, or arbitrariness in accepting Christian belief given the fact of religious pluralism; in doing so, I look in some detail at an argument Gary Gutting gives for this charge.

In Ch. 6, I presented a model, which illustrates how belief in God could have the three varieties of positive epistemic status with which we have been concerned: justification, rationality, and warrant. My main aim in this chapter is to extend the A/C model to cover full‐blooded Christian belief ; this model illustrates how Christian belief can be justified, rational, and warranted. The central elements of the extended A/C model are the Bible, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, and faith; I begin the chapter with a quick overview of these three elements. I then look more carefully at faith, which is, in part, belief in the central teachings of the gospel that results from the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, and show how Christian belief can be justified, rational, and warranted, according to the model. In the final four sections of the chapter, I explore and defend the claim that Christian belief is properly basic, show why the supernaturally inspired writings and the individual action of the Holy Spirit, which are part of the model are so important, and argue that if Christian belief is true, then very likely it does have warrant in the way suggested by the extended A/C model, or in some similar way.

Among objections to Christian belief, we can distinguish between de facto objections and de jure objections, i.e., between those that claim that Christian belief is false and those that claim that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or in some other way rationally unacceptable. In this chapter, I ask whether there is a viable de jure objection to Christian belief formulated in terms of rationality, i.e., I ask whether the objection that Christian belief is not rational is a strong one. In order to assess this sort of objection, we must be clear on what is meant by the term “rational,” and so I distinguish several senses of that term: Aristotelian rationality, rationality as proper function, rationality as within or conforming to the deliverances of reason, means–end rationality, deontological rationality, and William Alston's practical rationality. I conclude that there is no viable de jure objection to Christian belief in terms of any of these senses of rationality, with a possible exception of the second – rationality as proper function. In the next chapter, I begin to explore this remaining possibility and take up the question of the relation between proper function, warrant, and de jure objections to Christian belief.

In this and the next three chapters, I deal with proposed defeaters for Christian belief. In this chapter, I begin with a brief examination of the nature of defeaters. I then turn to projective theories of religious belief, such as those of Freud, Marx, and Durkheim, which propose to explain theistic and other religious beliefs in terms of our projecting into the heavens something like an idealized father. I argue that such theories do not in fact constitute a defeater for Christian belief, and, in so doing, examine and respond to some suggestions to the contrary due to Philip Quinn.

Since the Enlightenment, most discussions of the rational justifiability of religious belief have assumed the truth of evidentialism, the view that religious belief is rationally justifiable or acceptable only if there is good evidence for it, where good evidence usually means good propositional evidence. But what is this rational justification, and why does it require propositional evidence, and why did everyone just take for granted this connection between justification and propositional evidence? In order to address these questions I turn first to the thought of John Locke, and then to an examination of the classical picture comprised of evidentialism, deontologism, and classical foundationalism – a picture of which Locke is a main source. After briefly indicating the great extent to which the classical picture is still with us in contemporary discussions of religious belief, I point out some of the crippling problems the classical picture faces, and then consider contemporary analogical extensions of the various elements of the classical picture to see whether any of them supports evidentialism. I conclude that in fact there is no reason at all to think that Christian belief requires argument or propositional evidence if it is to be justified; Christians can be justified even if they don’t hold their beliefs on the basis of arguments or evidence, even if they aren’t aware of any good arguments for their beliefs, and even if, indeed, there aren’t any such arguments.

My interest in Warranted Christian Belief is in this question: Is it rational, or reasonable, or justified, or warranted to accept Christian belief? But there is a prior question: Is the very idea of Christian belief coherent? Many theologians and others believe that there is real difficulty with the idea that our concepts could apply to such a being as the Christian God, and that this constitutes a serious problem for Christian belief: Christian belief involves the belief that it is possible to think of, refer to, and predicate properties of God, but in fact none of these things are possible, because human concepts cannot apply to God. In this chapter and the next, I examine this objection to Christian belief, turning in this chapter to the thought of Immanuel Kant. Against the opinions of some, I argue that there is no good reason provided by Kant for the conclusion that our concepts do not apply to God.

Many contemporary theologians hold that there are profound problems in the very idea that we can refer to and think about a being characterized in the way Christians characterize God; in this chapter, I consider the claims of two such thinkers, Gordon Kaufman and John Hick. Roughly, Kaufman's position appears to be the following: the term “God” may or may not have a real referent, but if so this real referent transcends our experience and hence is something to which our concepts don’t apply; the term “God” does, however, have an available referent, which is a human construction. I examine and reject this view, as well as some of Kaufman's claims about the function and utility of religious language. I then examine and attempt to clarify John Hick's position that there is an unlimited and transcendent being, the Real, which is “the noumenal ground of the encountered gods and experienced absolutes witnessed to by the religious traditions,” and which is such that only our formal concepts and our negative concepts apply to it. I argue that although this position may manage to avoid incoherence, Hick gives us no good reason to think that we cannot predicate of God such positive, nonformal properties as wisdom, knowledge, love, and the rest.