I will start this review of Warranted Christian Belief, by Alvin Plantinga, by answering my questions from the preview:
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?
This isn't exactly how Plantinga put it. He was trying to see if the beliefs of others offer a defeater for properly basic Christian belief. I'm not sure I understand him perfectly, but I think his argument boils down to: "I can ought to believe what I perceive myself even though everyone else contradicts me." This is something that similarly convinced Muslims could say.
Do warranted Christian beliefs have anything to do with the fact of the matter whether God exists? If not, then why would we want them? If they do, then don't they furnish some sort of evidence that the Christian God exists? And then, Muslim perceptions of God also should furnish some sort of evidence.
Plantinga gives the example of a man who is mistakenly accused of a crime (p. 450). All the evidence points to his guilt. But the accused knows that he was taking a hike far from the crime scene at the time of the crime. Should he believe his own memory rather than the accusations? Well, it seems like he should. But maybe the reason why is because he has a superior reason to know his own whereabouts than those who accuse him. So then, do Christians have a superior reason to know the "whereabouts" of God than Muslims do? There might be a way to make that case, but it wouldn't be solely on the basis of properly basic belief. I think it would have to come from some kind of reason.
Trying to build off of Plantinga, what's going on when a Muslim and a Christian each talk about God? They each perceive Something. They both say that that Something is God. Maybe each of them perceives a different being who only claims to be God. One view (the occult scene's view, or something like one of their views:) --There are spiritual nations, nations of spiritual beings. The Christian nation, which has no superior claim to legitimacy, wars against the nation that includes the occult (and their fellow travelers). Christian prayers and Christian religious experiences are all part of the spiritual economy that fuels the war. Basically, there is a polytheism, and the Christian god is just one of many.-- From this, it's not so strange for the Muslim god and the Christian god to each appear before their followers. Perhaps also not strange for them to each claim to be "the" God. So which one of them, if any, is telling the truth? Plantinga helps to validate that gods can talk to humans, that when it seems like they do, some god is responsible. But I would say that God is not God because he is powerful and can communicate with individuals in a powerful way, but because he is legitimate. Given all of the warring spiritual armies, which one of them is really good? That's the question we should have, when confronted with the influence of spiritual beings. So then we would ask, is the Christian God plausibly the one telling the truth? Is the Christian God really morally better than the Muslim god?
A second possibility is that the Muslim and the Christian are both perceiving the same God. From a Christian perspective, the Muslim is really praying to and worshiping the Father, Son, and Spirit when he turns himself toward the God who speaks through the sensus divinitatis. He mistakenly thinks that that God is as described in the Quran, rather than the Bible. (The Quran, perhaps, was a product of a spiritual nation at war with the real God.) But he is actually worshiping the same God as the Christian.
In either case, why should the Christian think he is more likely to be the one worshiping the correct God, or having the correct understanding of God, any more than the Muslim? Maybe some kind of reason can be given, but I think it has to go beyond Plantinga's theory.
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?
I don't think that Plantinga addresses this at all (although I might have missed it). Maybe he could say something like "Well, when you see God, you perceive God. Suppose you see a city off in the distance. As you journey toward it, the fog obscures it. Now you're not sure you saw a city. Then the fog lifts and you see it again. The memory of seeing the city clearly should dominate the fact that the city disappears in the fog. Probably there's such a thing as object permanence, and the city was there the whole time, just covered with fog. Probably there is something like object permanence with God, and you were just in the fog when you didn't believe." If he were to say that, I would find that reasonably satisfying. God seems like the kind of being who would exist all the time. So if I saw God off in the distance, once, I should assume that he still exists. It might be difficult for me to have faith in my memory (in the phases when I don't believe), but not because that faith would be unjustified if I could have it.
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?)
I somewhat expected to see something in Warranted Christian Belief about this, based on a memory that Plantinga talked about it. Again, it's possible I missed it, but I don't think it was in this book. I may have gotten it from Faith and Rationality (by him and some other people), which I also read back in college.
This cuts to a possible criticism of WCB, that once you allow that God can speak his own existence to people directly, he can also command them to do anything. The Holy Spirit could move a person to do anything, and how could anyone object to them? It's like the man who was taking a hike but who seemed to everyone else to be committing a crime. Well, if their evidence overwhelmed his in court, he would have to go to jail or prison. But he would know that he was innocent. Likewise, someone led by God could consider themselves justified in what they did, no matter what the consequences were, as long as it seemed to them like it was God who was talking to them.
What I thought I remembered Plantinga having said before is that there's some kind of "popularity filter" for beliefs that seem to be from God. Christianity is certainly popular enough that its "great truths" are safely attested to. But still, would Abraham's be popular enough?
One could raise the point that if I think I have something from the Spirit, then what if everyone else thinks they have something contradictory from the Spirit? I can't just be sure that I'm right and they're wrong. But then why not ask if maybe the Muslims are right and the Christians are wrong? We're all trying to figure out what God is saying to us. Maybe a kind of libertarianism is called for. The Muslims and the fanatical Christians can pursue their non-mainstream-Christian beliefs, as though they have been spoken to by the Spirit to that effect, and unless they sufficiently harm or hinder each other or mainstream Christians, they let each other be themselves. This seems like a reasonable social or political solution.
On the other hand, maybe it's possible to filter out Muslim beliefs or certain Christian beliefs. We might be able to say, for instance, that some leadings just couldn't come from God, could not be things that the Spirit would say, based on what we know about God. That filter would probably come from some form of reason, other than the reason given by Plantinga. Maybe we would accept the Bible or Quran as authorities, for some reason, and apply what they suggest using reason. Or we might turn to some kind of natural theology.
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"]".
Plantinga did not address any of that, as expected. In theory, a Christian should care about secular reality because it has something to do with the temporal, and even eternal, well-being of people. This would follow from truly warranted Christian belief. An evangelical Christian ("little-e" evangelical) would care as much about secular reality, in principle, as a rationalist Christian. A Reformed, "semi-Reformed", or fideistic Christian would, if they were evangelical. But if they weren't evangelical, they wouldn't. Or they might care, but only coincidentally.
A person (that's all we are, personal beings) is responsible to another spiritual reality, or to none at all. This responsibility is awakening, and produces reality in a person. If we are responsible to God, or to reason, or to the lost, then we care about something, and that includes secular reality. Some people care, and some people don't. Some people respond to responsibility and accept it, while others turn away from responsibility. Some people care but don't want to care, and deep down, they don't. Does it matter what we believe intellectually? I think that Reformed epistemology, by itself, does not incline me to care, not as much as more rationalist takes on belief. So I find it suspicious, dubious, even if its reasoning is valid. Perhaps it causes some people to care who wouldn't have, otherwise. Is fideism an excuse to take things easy? Is that what trust in God really means? I think a fideist who recognizes this danger can run from the temptation, while still being a fideist. A Christian fideist, if truly a Christian, still recognizes reason, for Christian reasons.
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How can we form or hold beliefs that have some connection to reality outside ourselves? I think this is the real question of epistemology, not "what is justification?" or "what is warrant?". Those questions ought really to be about trying to answer the question "how can we form or hold beliefs that have some connection to reality outside ourselves?"
After reading Plantinga (though not necessarily because of what he said), it seems like "good epistemology is a case of 'you know it when you see it'". You know when you have a good criterion for how to believe when you see it, feel it, understand it. There are certain things that everyone feels to be valid, and some other things that you can hold even when other people don't think they're valid (like if you have a better angle on something). But there are some things that you can't hold if other people don't think they're valid. You just can't. We are all subject to a big "is", which is "what good believing feels like it ought to be". But we take this "is" to be an "ought".
The epistemology I like best (I think) is one of love, or of altruism. So then we should be concerned about the threats to things, and reach out to know things. This leads us into evangelism and altruism, and to reason. I think something like this is probably what God would want us to believe, if he existed.
Also I think about the ought-nature of "ought" (what ought ought to be, and thus is). What we are allowed to know, whatever restriction that says we can't know, is a law imposed on us as personal beings, as is all of reality. So what can make reality valid enough to have a claim on us? I think only one which is made by or is an extension of a legitimacy which is personal and which bears the burdens of its laws to the full extent possible, and this implies God who is Father and Son (in legitimist terms. I think this is something that many people would not accept, but which I think they could if they practiced more simantist-style thinking, which I think is in keeping with what we actually observe, as personal beings.
The world can best be improved if we believe that the ideal is the foundation of reality, even of non-ideal reality. "Ought" enables us to believe as we ought to, not pinned down by "is". (In fact, there could be a characteristically "ought"-style believing, and I think probably we ought to believe that way.) I see "is" thinking in Plantinga, which I suppose is to be expected, since that's the default for knowers. But I want to say that "ought" is the more fundamental reality than "is" -- and somehow we smuggle "ought" in to help us avoid the worst skepticism, even in the middle of our soberly "is"-oriented epistemology.
I've looked more at epistemology over the last two months or so, and that's my tentative conclusion about it: reality is "ought", so believe what is in accordance with "ought". That is how you will be in tune with reality.
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