I’ve looked a bit recently into the way in which William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga say that belief in God is properly basic, and it is somewhat concerning. I have heard it said by them that the proper basically of belief in God and in Christianity based on the witness of the Spirit can act as a defeater of
any potential defeater that could
possibly be presented against it. This mens that according to them, no amount of publicly available evidence could make it irrational for them to believe in God, even in principle. This seems hypocritical at best. Once you say this about your belief in God, you have absolutely no leg to stand on in order to:
- Claim that you are seeking the truth.
- Accuse atheist X of being closed-minded, having dogmatic naturalistic assumptions, etc.
- Mock the idea that faith is belief in spite of evidence.
I don’t think it’s quite that bad. (However, I have not read Plantinga, and what I know is garnered from second-hand mentions, etc.) The idea seems to posit a
sensus divinitatis, a sense of the divine, as a “sixth sense” by which people acquire knowledge of God, so that the average believer knows God like he knows other minds. It’s pretty difficult to prove that someone else has a mind and is not an automaton–but that’s a common sense conclusion that we would like to accept (and it tells against a philosophy to fail to account for it).
It is a theory of
warranted belief. But it doesn’t act as proof for the purposes of dialectic; I cannot, for instance, say that I sense God, so you should believe that he exists, and expect you to accept that as an argument. The conclusion is epistemological: is Christian belief rational? (Some rationalists, and I guess a lot of popular atheism, might equate rationally held belief with belief that you can demonstrate to other people. But from an epistemological perspective that is a mess; it can be rational for you to believe something in some cases where you cannot convince anyone else for it, or even provide an argument.) They are essentially claiming that, given that God exists, believers are not “believing in spite of evidence,” but are rather believing by means of the
sensus divinitatis.
The concern is correct. One task of the Christian philosopher is to address the question of Christian belief and give an explanation why, given that most Christians are not philosophers, Christians could be warranted in believing in God. I would disagree with the particular approach on some grounds, in that I think that the proper mode of warranted Christian belief has more to do with proper authority and witness than some interior sense of God (which, I believe, some believers experience veridically, but has not really been a part of my faith and so, in my view, “leaves something out”).
There is some difficulty, I think, in arguing that one can have a subjective experience of God that warrants belief, but that all atheism is irrational off the bat. It just seems like a strong conclusion for me, and I have doubts about whether it can be rigorously substantiated, but Plantinga said something to that effect in a recent NYT interview with, I think, Gary Gutting. Again, I would have to read him to see if I can assess it.
There may also be some Wittgensteinian concerns about whether there could be any sort of
feeling of knowledge or certainty. But that could probably be avoided.
I recently found a cheap copy of Linda Zagzebski’s collection
Rational Faith: Catholic Responses to Reformed Epistemology, though I haven’t read it yet (and I probably should read Plantinga first). It is exciting because it includes an essay by James Ross… a fantastic Catholic author who approached some of these issues.
