Book Review Preview: Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga

See also the review and postview.

I got my copy of Warranted Christian Belief in the mail yesterday. I have read this book, back when I was college, probably in 2008 or 2009. So I have a vague memory of what it says, beyond its basic premise.

Here are some questions I'm interested in answering:

It could be claimed that Reformed epistemology equally justifies Islamic belief, so how can we tell between Christianity and Islam? This is potentially a very important question, because both of them teach hell. If one of them is right and we don't believe it, we may end up not being saved. Does Plantinga have anything to say that closes off the possibility of other religions being just as justified as Christianity via their own properly basic beliefs?

Another objection: If I have what reasonably enough seems to me to be a properly basic belief in God, and then it goes away (and maybe then comes back, and then goes away, and so on), what should I think about whether God really does exist? Should I trust the beliefs in God when they come? Does Plantinga address this at all?

A question: did Abraham have warranted [not exactly "Christian", but maybe we could say "Yahwist"] belief? We have the benefit of billions of fellow Christians to validate our belief. But he was alone at first. If there was someone like him in our day, we would likely think him to be a crazy person who trusted the "voices in his head". How did Abraham know that he was listening to God? Did he not even really know? The Bible presents him as an exemplar of faith. Should we believe like Abraham? I'm wondering if Plantinga addresses this to any extent. (A side question: what is the Bible's epistemology?)

Here is a question / set of questions that, to be fair, may not need to be answered by Plantinga, for being outside his area of expertise, and that I don't really expect the text to directly address. But maybe after I'm done reading the book, I will have a better idea of what I think the answer is, and I can report it when I do the postview for this book. The question is, to what extent does adopting a Reformed epistemology-based approach to belief incline a person to no longer index themselves to reason, and therefore not feel driven to any of reason's other conclusions, the whole skein of perceptions, intellectual relations, and cause-and-effect in which people live?

Is this an approach to truth that inclines us to weep like Jesus (who was weeping when technically he didn't have to, because of his superior divine knowledge), or more toward a kind of inactivity, or even self-satisfaction? For the portion of the church that has learned that faith is superior to reason in producing belief in God, is there a danger that that attitude produces ineffective, unproductive Christians? Perhaps also Christians who can no longer relate to the people who don't have that faith that's superior to reason. Do we trust reason less when our assurance of salvation no longer comes through it, and thus fail to follow the law of reason which normally forces us to interact with the world?

Can we become intellectually lazy about the nature of God? If belief is something that we can directly access and which suffices for us, do we assume too easily that we understand God, and do not correct our understanding through natural theology or even Scripture study (which are both based in reason)?

I don't think Plantinga would say that reason doesn't matter at all, since he went to the trouble to write a 500 page book that is based in reason, to try to justify taking faith as properly basic. But I think there's something semi-fideist if not fideist about the idea that "it's rational to just have faith through the belief that you have", more so than something like "it's rational to have faith because of [MSLN or something like it, a chain of reasons, reasons like "there's a high likelihood that all that exists is consciousness"]".