Book Review: Warranted Christian Belief

After reading Why I Am Not A Christian I wanted to balance it out with the other side, though the intent of the books are very different. I had read Warranted a few years ago, but a second pass through helped me retain a whole lot more of Platinga’s idea. As barely an amateur philosopher that I was appreciative of that fact, and this review is more of a summarization than an analysis of Plantinga’s work in this book.

Warranted Christian Belief caps off the Plantinga’s trilogy series on the idea of warrant and is kind of the culmination of his work in epistemology (the study of beliefs and knowledge). Plantinga, a Notre Dame professor, recently retired but is well-known in philosophical circles — so much so that Time did a story in the 80’s on the growing influence of his work.

Plantinga sought to answer the question (rather, the implicit complaint of skeptics) of whether belief in God is irrational or lacking warrant. He cites Freud and Marx as the dual originating sources of this question that is asked . What Plantinga proposes in WBC is a model by which theistic belief, particularly Christian belief, enjoys epistemic (relating to epistemology) warrant because it is properly basic and can qualify as knowledge, like how we come to know things through sense perception or memory and not on the basis of other propositions.

I will explain this a little bit because epistemology sometimes isn’t the most intuitive subject. Memory beliefs are probably the easiest to explain. Let’s say that you remember at what time you woke up this morning, say 7:05. You have strong confidence in this memory because you have a nice bright clock that you always look at the moment you wake up and you know yourself to wake up at around the same time every morning. For you, this belief is incorrigible, meaning that you have knowledge of this based on your memory alone and not on the basis of propositions (facts or evidence that you can present to other as reasons), assuming there are no defeaters (evidence or reasons to the contrary) for your memory belief and you know your memory to be rather reliable. Your memory says you saw the clock at 7:05 and you have no reason to think otherwise, even if someone (very creepily) presented you a photograph of you waking up with the clock at 7:10. You are warranted in maintaining your original belief — Plantinga phrases it as “not flouting your epistemic duty” — and not accepting the photograph as enough of a defeater for that belief.

Plantinga proposes that Christians can hold their beliefs about God in the same way, this “properly basic” way, and he appropriates ideas from Calvin and Aquinas as that basis for this model, called the “A/C model”, wherein our seemingly natural sense of the divine, Aquinas’ sensus divinitatis, can confer this properly basic belief in God. From pg. 175:

According to the A/C model, this natural knowledge of God is not arrived at by inference or argument (for example, the famous theistic proofs of natural theology), but in a much more immediate way. …It isn’t that one beholds the night sky, notes that it is grand, and concludes that there must be such a person as God; an argument like that would be ridiculously weak. It’s rather that, upon the perception of the night sky or the mountain vista or the tiny flower, these beliefs just arise within us. They are occasioned by the circumstances; they are not conclusions from them. …In this regard, the sensus divinitatis resembles perception, memory, and a priori belief.

The basic idea (pardon the pun) is that believers can be justified, in the epistemic sense of the word, in believing in God yet unable to produce the reasons or evidence that skepticism consistently demands. There’s may be no way you can prove to someone that you woke up at 7:05 that morning; indeed, with that pesky photograph there may be all the reason in the world for others to believe that you in fact are wrong. Yet your persistently reliable memory maintains your belief even in the face of external, propositional evidence.

This is certainly a heady claim to make, especially to our post-Enlightenment minds, where we tend to tailor our beliefs, especially important ones as to whether God exists or not, against what we know for sure, via “the facts” and propositional truths. Incorrigible knowledge that we get via the senses and our memory are not received this way and Plantinga places Christian belief in the same realm as these ways of attaining knowledge.

This idea is not without its criticisms and I have nowhere near the working framework of philosophy to affirm or deny the strength of this claim. Here’s a good review contradicting it, for instance, and you can read the entire text here, at Google books. According to the sundry experts in the field that I’ve read, even the ones that disagree with him, Plantinga made a case worth considering.