Rational Religious Beliefs Without Natural Reason?
A Critical Study of Alvin Plantinga Position
Abstract
According to an intuition highly popular in Western world, beliefs, including religious beliefs, must be supported by sufficient evidence in order to be held in a rational (or justified) way (evidentialism). Plantinga formulates his own view about the rationality of religious beliefs, which he considers as opposite to the traditional view. The central thesis of his position is that religious beliefs are perfectly rational when believed in the basic way, that is without any evidence or argument and even without the use of natural reason at all. According to Plantinga people could have acquired their religious beliefs via extraordinary cognitive faculty, which he calls, after Calvin, sensus divinitatis. In this paper I ask a question whether Plantinga successfully rejects traditional intuition about the need of natural reason for religious beliefs. For this purpose, I first refer to Plantinga’s understanding of the traditional concept of the rationality of religious beliefs. I then summarize Plantinga’s views on the third condition of knowledge and his account of the rationality of religious beliefs.
Next, I turn to the critical part of the article. I point out the inadequacy of Plantinga’s position. To do so I first analyze and criticize Plantinga’s argument for the view that possessing sufficient evidence for religious beliefs is not an epistemic duty. I argue that Plantinga rejects only one understanding of that requirement and this is not enough to reject the whole idea of evidentialism. Then, I criticize Plantinga’s position on the third condition of knowledge, which he calls warrant. To this end I recall Laurence BonJour’s argument against externalism, since my critique of Plantinga’s position is analogous to BonJour’s argument. If my critique is successful then it is not that religious belief could be held in rational way without the use of natural reason, because in this case subject would be epistemically irresponsible.
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