Alvin Plantinga's much heralded religious epistemology is a many-faceted thing. In simplest terms, it is an attempt to free would-be rational theists from the evidentialist requirement for religious belief and to show that they are well within their ‘ epistemic rights ’ in taking certain beliefs about God as ‘ properly basic ’. In an early version of his programme, Plantinga sought to achieve both these objectives through a single strategem, namely via the overthrow of ‘classical foundationalism’, an historically wide-ranging (...) approach to epistemology he judges to be, even today, preeminent. Plantinga's frontal attack on his self-styled opposition, however, soon proved inadequate to his task, largely because it exposed his own position to criticism and left pressing questions unanswered. By this time, of course, Plantinga has done much to reply to his critics and to address fundamental questions; yet in so doing, he has adopted argumentative manoeuvres, some quite surprising, that take him considerably beyond his original position. These developments in his proposal are central to the discussion that follows. If we are to comprehend them, however, we must begin where he did, with a critique of classical foundationalism, for in the case of Plantinga's religious epistemology, to trace genesis is to elucidate growth. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga Warranted Christian Belief (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000). In the two previous volumes of his trilogy on ‘warrant’, Alvin Plantinga developed his general theory of warrant, defined as that characteristic enough of which terms a true belief into knowledge. A belief B has warrant if and only if: (1) it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly, (2) in a cognitive environment sufficiently similar to that for which the faculties were designed, (3) according to a design (...) plan aimed at the production of true beliefs, when (4) there is a high statistical probability of such beliefs being true. Thus my belief that there is a table in front of me has warrant if in the first place, in producing it, my cognitive faculties were functioning properly, the way they were meant to function. Plantinga holds that just as our heart or liver may function properly or not, so may our cognitive faculties. And he also holds that if God made us, our faculties function properly if they function in the way God designed them to function; whereas if evolution (uncaused by God) made us, then our faculties function properly if they function in the way that (in some sense) evolution designed them to function. (shrink)

A critical examination of Alvin Plantinga's attempted defense against the dreaded "Great Pumpkin Objection" to his theistic-belief-as-properly-basic religious epistemology.