philosophy last assignment

Religious belief without 6 evidence

We began this book by considering the evidentialist objection to reli- gious belief. The objection, as you will recall, insists that all beliefs – with religious beliefs as no exception – must enjoy the support of adequate evidence if we are to believe them rationally. Most eviden- tialists insist that one not only have evidence, but also that one see how and to what degree one’s evidence supports the target belief. In the light of this requirement, it is quite plain how the evidentialist’s demand is congruent with the natural theologian’s practice of form- ing arguments for God’s existence, whose premises and strength of conclusion are evident. In this chapter, we consider two positions that, for differing reasons, do not attempt to meet the evidential- ist demand, but reject it. Pascal is famous for thinking that, even if theism cannot be underwritten by so- called proofs for God’s exist- ence, belief in God is nevertheless rational on prudential grounds, because of the good ends religious belief brings about. Second, we shall explore a position most famously forwarded by Alvin Plant- inga, referred to frequently as “Reformed epistemology”, stemming from the fact that he, and fellow Reformed epistemologists follow John Calvin and Martin Luther’s rejection of natural theology. Belief in God, they argue, should be accepted as “properly basic”, without the need for argumentative support.

Pragmatic arguments Pascal, to whom the reader has already been introduced, was no stranger to the tradition of natural theology. From an early age, he

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met regularly with the leading intellectuals of the day, including Mersenne, Fermat and Gassendi, and he corresponded with René Descartes. Although he knew well the traditional arguments for God’s existence, he remained unconvinced by them. He recognized that humans are more than minds encased in bodies, pure centres of cerebration. “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of ” is among his most frequently quoted sayings. By “heart” he does not mean mere sentiment – such as romantic infatuation – but such cares, concerns and loves that he thinks orient one toward one’s true and ultimate well- being. Humans are complex beings who, if moved to embrace so potentially a life- changing belief as that God exists, will most likely do so for reasons that go beyond logic alone. “God”, says Pascal, “wishes to move the will rather than the mind” (1995: #234, 72).

In his famous Pensées, Pascal writes: “If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapa- ble of knowing either what he is or whether he is” (1995: #418, 122). The natural lights to which Pascal here refers are those of human reason, and he claims that the power and reach of our crea- turely intellect is insufficient to tell us definitively what God is like or even whether he exists. Reason’s failure, he says, turns on the infinite distance that separates humans reasoners, armed with 110 or so IQ points on average, and the God of theism, who is said to be omniscient and omnipotent. Trying to reason one’s way to God is like trying to dig the Panama Canal with a teaspoon; the wrong tool for the job. Pascal thus begins his famous wager by stating:

God is or is not. But toward which side shall we lean? Reason cannot decide anything. There is an infinite chaos separating us. At the far end of this infinite distance, a game is being played and a coin will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose one way or the other, reason cannot make you defend either of the two choices. (Ibid.)

Evidentialists would here council that when we are in a state of evi- dential equipoise, we suspend judgement. Are there an even number or an odd number of ducks in the world? There is a fifty–fifty

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chance that one or the other is correct but the interests of truth dictate that we commit to neither. Pascal considers and rejects this counsel in the case of religious belief. This is because nothing is at stake in the matter of ducks. A great deal is at stake, he believes, in the matter of God.

Although reason cannot tell you whether or not God exists, Pas- cal nevertheless says that we must wager one way or the other; it is not optional. This is because inaction, failure to choose regarding the question of God’s existence, is tantamount to deciding against God. To appreciate Pascal’s point, suppose you are a loan officer at a bank and I come to you on Monday seeking a home loan. Given my financial situation, you offer various rates depending on the amount and length of the loan, adding, “due to the market’s volatil- ity you must notify me by the week’s end if you want to secure these rates”. Tuesday and Wednesday find me still in the hunt for better rates. On Thursday I am having second thoughts about plunging into homeownership. Five o’clock Friday rolls around and I am still in the throes of indecision. My failure to contact you nets me precisely the same thing as if I had called you up to refuse your loan outright. My failure to act means I am in no position to benefit from your offer. So it is with God and the rewards he bestows on those who believe in him. If there are benefits to be had from religious belief, we shall not receive them by sitting on the fence. Fence sit- ting, along with outright denial, is just one more way of failing to be in the camp of believers and thus one more way to fail to position oneself to receive such rewards as God gives. In the light of rea- son’s limitations, and so as to secure any benefits that may accrue to believers in God, Pascal recommends that we wager on God for, as he sees it, we have got everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Pascal’s argument can be easily grasped in the following table:

God exists God does not exist Believe WIN TIE Not believe LOSE TIE

Either there is a God or there is no God, and we can either believe in God or fail to believe in God, as is the case with athe- ists and agnostics. Suppose we believe and it turns out God exists.

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We are then in a position to receive such benefits as may accrue to those who believe. Importantly, Pascal thinks religious believ- ers win both this- worldly benefits – moral virtues such as honesty, humility and gratitude and freedom from the “corrupt pleasures of high living” – and other- worldly goods, such as “an infinitely happy infinity of life”. But suppose we believe and there is no God. We do not win anything. Neither do we lose anything – we are food for worms either way – so let us call it a tie. Suppose, however, we do not believe in God and it turns out that God exists. Owing to unbelief, we would then miss out on the benefits of belief. But if we do not believe and there is no God, once again we neither win nor lose. So, there is only one way to be a winner – by believing. And there is only one way to be a loser – by failing to believe. “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing” (Pascal 1995: #418, 123). So where is the smart money going?

We can appreciate Pascal’s thinking if we consider the way rational wagers are made in casinos or at the racetrack. Rational gamblers want to maximize their gains and minimize their losses over the long run. So they wager according to a simple formula: probability of winning x payoff – cost of wagering = the rational expected value of the wager. Suppose you are a regular at the race- track and want to know how to place your bets so as to maxi- mize your chance of winning and minimize your chance of losing. According to Pascal, you would adopt the strategy represented by the following table (adapted from Morris 1992: 113):

Bet Probability Payoff Cost expectation Horse A 2/3 based on past races £300 £60 = £140 Horse B 1/3 based on past races £900 £30 = £270

Even though horse A has a higher chance of winning the race, it is still more rational to bet on horse B given the cost of betting and the possible payoff.

Suppose you wander through a casino to figure out what sort of game you would like to play. You see games of roulette, various games with dice, poker, slot machines, and more. Off in one cor- ner of the casino, you observe a lone croupier flipping a coin. You

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approach and ask what game he oversees, whereupon he replies “heads or tails”. “Guess correctly,” he says, “and win a million pounds!” “How much does it cost to play?” you ask. “One hun- dred pounds,” comes the reply. Even though you have no more reason to think that heads or tails will turn up, if you were prac- tically rational, you would play that game all day long. Even if it cost £10,000 a toss, you would still be rational to play given your odds of winning and the size of the payout. Pascal thinks theism is an even better gamble. Given the fifty–fifty odds of winning, the negligible cost of wagering and an infinite reward (eternal felicity with God), it would be irrational not to bet on God. Even if the probability of atheism were high and that of theism low, theism’s infinite payout compared with atheism’s finite payout makes theism the more rational wager. Once infinity is factored into the formula, it trumps all other bets. Perhaps the bet Pascal holds before us could be better represented as follows:

God exists God does not exist Believe � GAIN FINITE LOSS Not believe – � LOSS FINITE GAIN

Pascal recommends that we bet on God based on considerations of prudential rather than epistemic reasoning. Prudential reasoning, or benefits- directed thinking, has as its goal securing some good for the agent. By contrast, epistemic or truth- directed reasoning has truth as its goal. A wife who detects the telltale signs that her hus- band is having an affair may, for her own good and the good of her children, discount the evidence as coincidental and continue believ- ing that her husband is faithful. This may be prudentially rational but we must deny that it is rational from a purely epistemic point of view. But how do we decide which of these goods, prudential or epistemic goods, should outweigh? Interestingly, Richard Feld- man and Earl Conee, defenders of evidentialism earlier referred to, think it possible that practical considerations lead one to yield to a prudential rather than an epistemic good, especially if one’s reasoning leads to a conclusion one deems immoral (Feldman & Conee 2004: 91). It is also consistent with the apologetic aims of the Pensées to suppose that Pascal’s goal in presenting the wager

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was but an intermediary strategy for moving indifferent persons to a place where they take religious claims seriously and, perhaps like Pascal himself, come to have a belief grounded in religious experi- ence rather than argument.

Evaluating Pascal’s wager Numerous objections confront Pascalian wagerers. (i) Obviously, natural theologians will deny that natural reason is powerless to tip the evidential scales toward theism. (ii) Critics also take issue with Pascal’s claim that by betting on God we have nothing to lose. If one believes, as Pascal does not, that reason can produce a preponder- ance of evidence in support of theism or atheism, then one obviously risks losing the truth. But even if one accepts Pascal’s assessment of reason’s limitations, one may suffer prudential losses in this life by believing in God. Was it in the prudential interests of early Chris- tians to suffer grisly deaths in the Roman Coliseum? Clearly, belief is not without potential costs, even in this life. (iii) Even if the wager moved you, you may find that summoning up genuine belief is not subject to your voluntary control. It is not as if you can, by sheer dint of effort, produce a belief in theism any more that you can voluntar- ily believe that your bank account contains a million more pounds than it does. (iv) What may be the most troubling objection to Pas- cal’s wager is not knowing which God to bet on. If, as Pascal claims, God’s nature and existence are obscure to natural reason, then how are we supposed to know on which God to wager? The God of Abraham, the Trinitarian God of Christianity, some form of Hindu monotheism, Ahura Mazda, or does eternal felicity depend on our believing in some little- known, deviant deity? Maybe we should hedge our bets still further and embrace polytheism. (v) Finally, crit- ics allege that belief grounded in prudential reasons warrants, at best, a tentative or provisional sort of endorsement, not the decisive belief adherents of the world’s religions insist is necessary to receive rewards. Let us consider these objections in turn.

Anyone who has read through the earlier chapters of this book will probably have formed some opinions about the ability of human reason to show either that God does or does not exist. And if one thinks reason is capable of establishing either theism or atheism, then one will have no inclination to view Pascal’s wager as

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anything more than an interesting thought experiment. Philosoph- ical history gives us good reason to think this disagreement will not be settled definitively any time soon. But even if one agrees with Pascal that the evidence for God’s existence is inconclusive, many philosophers deny that pragmatic arguments are an adequate basis for licensing belief. Indeed they think that accepting the wager is a blatant intellectual sin, a violation of one’s duty to believe all and only what the evidence allows. Here again, one faces the compet- ing demands of epistemic versus prudential (or moral) obligations, and it is reasonable to think there are circumstances where moral obligations outweigh. If my best intellectual efforts lead me to think that genocide is sometimes morally permissible and I am unable to see the errors in my reasoning, then I should defer to my moral or prudential judgement. “What does an epistemic peccadillo matter, compared with infinite joy or damnation?” (Lycan & Schlesinger 1996: 120).

What of Pascal’s claim that “if we lose, we lose nothing”. Let us grant for the sake of argument Pascal’s assumption that if God does not exist, there will be no afterlife. If this is correct, then it is not as though there will be some conscious moment after death where it occurs to us that we have been suckered by betting on God. We will be worm- bait, final, period, the end. This point does nothing, however, to answer the problem of the losses we stand to suffer on this side of the grave. Again, what about the disruption to family, to a long- standing way of life, or martyrdom, losses known histori- cally to accompany conversion to religion? Or, a little less lofty, what about my devotion to drugs, sex, rock and roll, and the life of hedonistic frenzy? Would I not be risking known pleasures for a merely possible good? Pascal’s reference to “corrupt pleasures” suggests he does not think hedonism a pathway to deep and abid- ing personal happiness. Most contemporary psychological studies support Pascal. He thinks that even the more serious losses we might suffer in this life are “negligible” when weighed against the possibility of infinite gain. Think about having to ante up £10,000 to play the heads or tails game. Even if you had to mortgage your home to do it, it would still be a good bet. Since Pascal thinks a prudent person might risk his life in exchange for three lives, he certainly would not think it imprudent to risk this life for infinite happiness and eternal life.

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Pascal himself raises the problem of the voluntariness of belief. One voice of Pascal’s interior dialogue protests: “I am being forced to wager and I am not free … I am made in such a way that I can- not believe”. In reply, Pascal anticipates the advice of many motiv- ational psychologists for dealing with self- doubts and fears. A sports psychologist counselling a losing team will often advise the players to act like winners – for example, to visualize the ball going into the net, to adopt a bit of swagger – if they want to play like winners. Similarly, Pascal counsels those who would like to take advantage of the wager but find themselves psychologically blocked, to start doing the sorts of things that believers do. Go to church, pray, per- form acts of charity, read Holy Scriptures and so on, and before too long, he thinks, we shall find that genuine heartfelt devotion wells up within us. Since the course of our lives will automatically be lived out as if God does or does not exist, Pascal recommends acting as if he does. We do not have direct voluntary control over what we believe, but Pascal is right to think we have a degree of indirect influence over what we believe. But is Pascal’s advice here not tantamount to self- deception? It would be if we had good rea- son for thinking that theism is false, but as we have noted, Pascal assumes that we have no more reason for thinking theism true than false. Our passions, not our reason, are what we need to manage, and a bit of behaviourist psychology is what Pascal prescribes.

To address the “many gods” objection, Pascalians ask us to recall that our deliberations about God’s existence and nature lie behind a veil that reason cannot penetrate. Can prudential considerations guide us on how to wager? Among the possible gods, some, such as the deistic God, do not dispense rewards even if believed in. From a prudential point of view, then, it is better to believe in a god who dispenses rewards. Among the gods that dispense rewards, some might do so only if believed in and others will dispense rewards even if not believed in. It makes sense to bet on the former, since we will suffer no loss by failing to believe in the latter. And among the gods who reward only when believed in, there are those that are limited in wisdom, power and goodness, and those that are not. Since nothing can frustrate the intention of an almighty God to dispense rewards, and something could potentially frustrate the will of a weaker deity, it makes sense to bet on an all- powerful God. And if one adds that there are independent a priori reasons

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for thinking that there cannot be more than one omnipotent being (as we shall consider in Chapter 8), then the God of monotheism looks like the best bet. If we further add, as Pascal does, that a life lived in devotion to God brings rewards in this life that non- belief fails to provide, then theism looks like the best bet.1

Finally, we consider the objection that we cannot commit our- selves wholeheartedly to beliefs grounded in prudential consid- erations alone. Gary Gutting distinguishes between “decisive” and “interim” assent. We give decisive assent to well- grounded beliefs for which it is appropriate to terminate the process of enquiry into the truth of the belief (Gutting 1982: 105).2 We believe decisively that the Earth is roughly round and we do not waste time search- ing out more evidence to support this fact. “The book” on the Earth’s shape is closed, we might say. Interim assent, by contrast, endorses a belief p while simultaneously being committed to the need for ongoing discussions of p’s truth. One might have reasons for thinking that our universe contains no other intelligent life, yet “the book” on extraterrestrial life is hardly closed. Rather, we remain alert to new evidence that might move our belief one way or the other.

One might object to the pragmatic argument on the grounds that even if it licenses interim assent, this is inadequate to underwrite the decisive assent demanded by most religions. Gutting thinks that most religions demand decisive assent from their adherents (ibid.: 106–7). This is because religious belief marks the end of a quest for emotional and intellectual satisfaction – it functions for believers as a sort of “master passion”. Yet it would be odd to say one was still in the hunt for any evidence that might move one away from the very belief that functions as a master passion. Also, interim assent is at variance with the total commitment and decisive action that the religious life sometimes calls for. Decisive actions, such as giv- ing away all one’s possessions or dying a martyr’s death, call for decisive, not interim assent.

How might the Pascalian respond? First by noting that there are some prudential beliefs that demand decisive assent. Suppose a doctor tells you that you have only a fifty–fifty chance of recov- ering from some illness. Suppose too, that you know of research that supports the claim that people who believe wholeheartedly that they will recover have a higher likelihood of recovering from

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illness. Prudence dictates that we not be tentative about our recov- ery but that we believe fervently that we will recover. Moreover, by doing so, one may actually change the odds of recovery. Decisive assent to a prudential belief may in fact be the best way to position oneself to receive an epistemic benefit. Suppose a woman receives a marriage proposal but lacks clear evidence that her suitor will make a clearly superior husband. Worried that no other offers are imminent, she accepts. One way the woman will never find out the matrimonial merits of her spouse is by focusing on and giving voice to her doubts (“I was never too sure about you from the start”, “I hope you measure up to my expectations”). Rather, her decisive but prudential assent to her husband’s ability to be a superior husband is the best recipe for gaining intellectual grounds of his true merits. And this strategy seems to be at the heart of Pascal’s wager: move a person passionally so that she is ideally situated to have the sort of religiously authenticating experience of which Pascal himself was a beneficiary.

Reformed epistemology Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology is “reformed” in at least two senses: not only does he take cues from some leaders of the Reformation in rejecting the enterprise of natural theology, but he also wants to reform some of the thinking that has structured debates about the reasonability of theistic belief. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, evidentialists claim that the canons of good intellectual conduct require that religious beliefs be sup- ported by evidence whose probative force we see and appreciate. On this view, the onus falls on religious believers to supply evidence that establishes God’s existence as true or, failing that, highly likely to be true. Precisely this demand, that all beliefs gain their justifi- cation through evidential or argumentative support, is what must be rejected, according to Reformed epistemologists. To appreciate Plantinga’s argument and the way he would reform epistemological practice, we need to look very briefly at a debate within the larger discipline of epistemology: that between epistemological internal- ists and externalists.

The evidentialist’s demand that all justified beliefs receive their support through propositional evidence of whose force we are

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aware is expressive of a larger view in the discipline of epistemol- ogy called “internalism”. Although there are species of internalism, the core idea is that epistemic justification requires that agents, in principle at any rate, have access to the grounds of their belief.3 Typically, one has access to these grounds through introspection, by turning inward, as it were, and surveying the mind’s ideas. So if I were to ask you why you believe the stock market is going to rebound from recent losses, you might reflect momentarily and then cite a slight drop in the unemployment rate, a surge in orders for durable goods and a more favourable balance of trade over the last quarter with our economic competitors, and so on. In this way, you would show to anyone who enquired after or challenged your belief, that you have reasons that clearly support that belief. Since this requirement bears on religious beliefs, theists too must be able to advert to the grounds of their belief in God. And this requirement leads to arguments for God’s existence and the general enterprise of natural theology.

Yet the requirement that all rational beliefs enjoy the support of reasons and arguments whose force we see and appreciate is highly contentious.4 For one thing, it looks as though there is a welter of beliefs we take ourselves to be perfectly rational in accepting for which we lack argumentative support. Most of us believe that there is an external world and that this belief is not an illusion foisted upon us by some malign demonic force. What evidence could we muster in support of this belief that might not also have its origin in demonic deception? Most of us believe that our sensory facul- ties are reliable guides to truths about the external world, although we lack non- circular reasons for thinking this. We believe in the reliability of inductive inference and the uniformity of the laws of nature, although most persons cannot marshal arguments to sup- port these beliefs (and it is doubtful that philosophical efforts to do so have succeeded). We believe that if A = B and B = C, then A = C, but we do not believe this because we have an argument to support it. We think it is wrong to inflict unnecessary pain on others but not because we first had to adduce evidence or gather experimental data to support this belief. These are beliefs we take as “properly basic”, that is justifiably believed in the absence of reasons and arguments to back them up. In short, there look to be plenty of exceptions to internalism’s demand.

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Internalism faces additional difficulties. Most persons – certainly not children – are not up to the task of supplying reasons and argu- ments for what they believe. This means that most people are unjus- tified in most of what they believe. Perhaps only a few philosophers – and this is a matter on which reasonable minds differ – can meet internalism’s demands for all they believe. This grates against our common sense conviction that most people are justified in most of what they believe. If most believers are not capable of summon- ing evidence and arguments for the elementary beliefs about the natural world, how much more difficult will summoning such evi- dence be when treating things supernatural? Even the pre- eminent natural theologian Aquinas thought that most persons lacked the time, training and aptitude to provide arguments for God’s exist- ence. Indeed, as quoted earlier, he remarked: “If the only way open to us for the knowledge of God were solely that of the reason, the human race would remain in the blackest shadows of ignorance” (Summa contra Gentiles I.4.4; 1975: 67).

The problems besetting epistemological internalism have prompted many thinkers to embrace epistemological externalism, a view of epistemic justification that waives the access requirement characteristic of internalist views. Externalists think a belief ’s jus- tification depends on its causal ancestry, on the “reliability” or “proper functioning” or “virtuous functioning” of the cognitive faculties causally responsible for producing a belief.5 If our cogni- tive faculties are functioning properly in a non- deceptive environ- ment for which they are suited, then they have a high statistical likelihood of conveying to us truths relevant to the scope of their reach. Consider, for example, the simple perceptual experiences one might have of an apple. Upon seeing, smelling or tasting the apple, you immediately, spontaneously and non- inferentially form the belief that you perceive an apple. You do not reason to the belief in anything like the following manner: I am being appeared to in red, round, firm, sweet and aromatic way characteristic of apples I have eaten in the past; I have no reason to think this is a clever imitation apple; I have no reason to think I have ingested drugs that would induce apple hallucinations, nor do I have any reason to think I am the unhappy victim of a post- hypnotic suggestion or any form of trickery or deception; therefore, I believe there is an apple before me. One does not adduce reasons for most perceptual

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beliefs; one simply forms a belief in response to the appropriate sort of experiential stimulus. Suppose you ask me where I left the keys to my car, and without hesitation I reply, “they are at home on my dresser”. This memorial belief is not formed on the basis of my first having collected evidence and arguments. Instead it is simply trig- gered by an experiential stimulus, in this case, your question about the whereabouts of my keys and my vivid memorial impression. If my memory is functioning properly, then I am justified in my belief about my keys. Nor do externalists require that we be aware of or have justified beliefs about our faculties functioning reliably. Just as my internal organs can function properly to make me healthy without my awareness, so too can my cognitive faculties function properly to produce justified belief without my awareness. It need only be the case that they function reliably, not that I have beliefs about this.6

We are now in a position to consider Plantinga’s objections to the evidentialist’s demand that theists support their belief in God with arguments or propositional evidence. If externalists are correct, then all of us accept many of our beliefs without the benefit of first having gathered supporting propositional evidence for them. It is sufficient for their justification that they have been produced by our cognitive powers in suitable environments in a truth- conducive way. We take the outputs of these faculties as properly basic, as justified without argumentative support. But if perceptual and memorial beliefs, among others, can be accepted as properly basic, then why can’t belief in God’s existence be accepted in the same way? At the heart of Plantinga’s rejection of evidentialism is his defence of the idea that one’s theistic beliefs – beliefs such as God is comforting me or God has created all this – are properly basic in the right cir- cumstances (Plantinga 1983: 73ff.).

If properly basic visual beliefs are produced by the underlying faculty of vision, and if properly basic memory beliefs produced by the underlying faculty of memory, then what faculty produces theistic beliefs? When Reformers such as John Calvin claimed that belief in God is not justified through argument, they did not mean that it popped into being out of thin air, that there were no jus- tifying circumstances for it. Calvin, and Plantinga following him, believes that a part of our overall repertoire of cognitive powers is what Calvin called a “sensus divinitatis”, a natural part of our noetic

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endowment with which all humans are endowed. This divine sense, when triggered by various circumstances in appropriate environ- ments, leads us to accept theistic beliefs in the properly basic way.

God has so created us that that we have a tendency or disposi- tion to see his hand in the world around us. More precisely, there is in us a disposition to believe propositions of the sort this flower was created by God or this vast and intricate uni- verse was created by God when we contemplate the flower and behold the starry heaven or think about the vast reaches of the universe. (Ibid.: 80)

So to say that belief in God is properly basic is not to say that it is groundless, that its production is independent of experiential triggers and the cognitive powers they act upon. In the same way that sensory and memorial beliefs arise out of experiential trig- gers acting upon noetic faculties, so too is properly basic belief in God produced. Triggers leading to awareness of God also include, says Plantinga, experiences such as “feeling the presence of God” or “being frightened, feeling grateful, delighted, foolish, angry, pleased, and the like” (2000: 183).

Notice that the experience of seeing the starry heavens above is not being used as a premise for the construction of a design argu- ment (although it can and has been used this way); that would be to duplicate the inferential reasoning of the natural theologian. Instead the experience is being invoked for its emotive and psycho- logical power to trigger a basic belief through the intellectual fac- ulty of the sensus divinitatis, the purpose of which is to enable us to have true beliefs about God. Even Immanuel Kant, who denied rea- son’s power to prove God’s existence, nevertheless acknowledged the psychological force of experiences such as beholding the starry firmament. To recall the passage cited in Chapter 1, Kant writes:

This knowledge [of nature] again reacts on its cause, namely, upon the idea which has led to it, and so strengthens the belief in a supreme Author [of nature] that the belief acquires the force of an irresistible conviction. It would therefore not only be uncomforting but utterly vain to attempt to diminish in any way the authority of this argument. Reason, constantly upheld

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by this ever- increasing evidence, which, though empirical, is yet so powerful, cannot be so depressed through doubts sug- gested by subtle and abstruse speculations, that it is not at once aroused from the indecision of all melancholy reflection, as from a dream, by one glance at the wonder of nature and the majesty of the universe – ascending from height to height up to the all- highest, from the conditioned to its conditions, up to the supreme and unconditioned Author [of all conditioned being]. (Critique A624/B652; 1961: 520)

Although Kant still speaks of the heavens as offering evidence, he also seems aware of the power of such experiences to produce belief that is spontaneous, immediate and non- inferential – what Plantinga dubs a properly basic belief. The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce appears to share a view similar to Kant’s. Compare the following quotation with Kant’s:

A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty, and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of God. He does not see the Divinity, nor does nature prove to him the existence of that Being, but it does excite his mind and imagination until the idea becomes rooted in his heart. (Quoted in Plantinga 2000: 174 n.10)

Both Kant and Peirce, then, appear to affirm Calvin’s (and Plant- inga’s) claim that we have a native disposition for our thinking to take a “God- ward” turn in response to appropriate triggering cir- cumstances, rather than in response to an argument.

It is also important to mention that the justification conferring conditions for perceptual, memorial and theistic beliefs is a prima facie justification. My justifiably accepting in the properly basic way that my car keys are at home on my dresser, can be overrid- den, for example by my wife calling me on the phone to say she is staring at the top of my dresser and the keys are not there. (It could also happen that my wife’s defeater for my memorial belief could itself be defeated. Perhaps my keys are on my dresser but, unbeknown to my wife, are hidden by a pair of socks.) Religious beliefs that are taken as properly basic are also capable of being overridden, perhaps by a powerful argument from the problem of

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suffering. Plantinga also admits that just as one’s vision or memory can be damaged or malfunction, so too might the sensus divinitatis malfunction, perhaps as a result of being in a cultural setting that suppresses or extinguishes it (2000: 173 n.9).

In his magisterial trilogy on warrant, Plantinga refines his account of belief in God as properly basic. He clarifies the chief term of pos- itive epistemic appraisal possessed by properly basic beliefs as “war- rant”, not justification. Warrant is that quality, enough of which, when added to a true belief, makes that true belief an instance of knowledge. Plantinga refines the conditions a basic belief must sat- isfy to be warranted. It must (i) be produced by properly function- ing cognitive faculties whose function is to produce true beliefs, which they reliably do; (ii) in a non- deceptive, congenial epistemic environment for which one’s cognitive faculties are suited; (iii) where the degree of warrant is a function of one’s felt inclination to believe the proposition in question when produced by prop- erly functioning faculties (Plantinga 1993: 46–7). Plantinga even devises a model for warranted religious belief called “The Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model”, that attempts to show how warrant could attach to specifically Christian, as opposed to merely theistic beliefs, such as that God is reconciling the world to himself through Christ. This model is more controversial still to non- believers as it incor- porates the role of the Bible and the Holy Spirit in coming to war- ranted Christian belief.

Evaluating Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology Among the first objections likely to be posed to Plantinga’s claim that belief in God can be warranted as properly basic, is that there is no consensus in the philosophical community about the sensus divinitatis being part of our standard issue cognitive faculties. In fact, atheists and agnostics would undoubtedly take the stronger position that no such faculty exists. As we have seen, just what intellectual faculties humans have is a perennial topic of philo- sophical disagreement. There is virtually no dispute about our perceptual faculties as they are associated with prominent organs on the face. But what about introspection and a priori intuition? These commonly acknowledged intellectual faculties not only fail to be correlated with obvious organs on the face, it is not clear

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that they are identical to or even causally linked to the activity in some specific region of the brain. As noted in the Introduction, what cognitive powers we possess, and the degree to which they are truth- conducive, is contested. Plato and Descartes eschewed perception as a source of knowledge; British empiricists took the opposite view. John Locke was leery of testimony as a reliable source of knowledge, yet Thomas Reid thought all normal humans were endowed with a credulity disposition that inclined us to accept testimony. Reid also thought we possess a native aesthetic sense whereby we detect and appreciate beauty. Others stoutly reject any such faculty. Aquinas thought humans possess a moral conscience, Bertrand Russell thought otherwise. And so on. For Plantinga to be told that other philosophers disagree with the claim that we have a sensus divinitatis puts in him some pretty good company, and by itself does not constitute a compelling objection to his views.

More worrisome than whether we have a sensus divinitatis is the question over the conditions of its properly functioning. Central to Plantinga’s epistemology is the claim that a basic belief is war- ranted if, among the other conditions, it arises from the activity of a properly functioning faculty. But what are the conditions for the sensus divinitatis functioning properly? Neither Plantinga, nor Calvin before him, provides a lot of specifics. We are told, as we have already noted, that the sensus divinitatis is subject to malfunc- tion. But what exactly causes it to go awry? The short answer, says Plantinga, is a wayward will, a corrupt heart – in a word, “sin”. But this answer will likely find favour only with people antecedently convinced of Judaeo- Christian religion and thus is not of much polemical use. We are also told that the proper function of the sensus divinitatis is subject to having been properly nurtured and is moreover susceptible to dysfunction due to one’s living amid a culture that stifles the development of the sensus divinitatis. Even with these qualifications, the parameters of a properly functioning sensus divinitatis remain unclear. Suppose, for instance, that one gazes up into the starry heavens above and immediately, sponta- neously and non- inferentially finds oneself believing that Gaia or Brahman created all this. Would these beliefs be the output of a properly functioning sensus divinitatis? It is hard to say.

Plantinga admits that, although the activity of the sensus divini- tatis may prompt us to take belief in God in the basic way, its doing

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so depends on a lot of other factors: the culture we are a part of, the training and nurture we have received from parents, the com- munities in which we were reared, the contribution of churches. The proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis also depends on the absence of factors that suppress its proper functioning, such as an orientation of the will opposed to God and the things of God. Given all these other factors, one might wonder how “basic” this properly basic belief in God really is. If all these factors were contributing to the production of one’s belief in God, would it not be accurate to attribute it more to teaching and acculturation rather than to the mysterious operation of some divine sense? Is one’s belief in God still properly basic if subject to these and other influences, or is it instead a belief reached, not through overtly rehearsed inferential reasoning, but through some sort of implicit synthetic reasoning occurring over a period of time? Here, I think Plantinga could respond by pointing out that in this regard the sen- sus divinitatis is not different in kind (although perhaps in degree) to the rest of our cognitive powers. Our perceptual and memo- rial cognitive powers are, like the sensus divinitatis, also subject to training, acculturation, and nurture. Numerous studies confirm, for instance, the power of training and expectation to shape vision. Memory too is susceptible to “interrogative suggestibility”, as hap- pens when, say, police question witnesses with questions such as “and was the black man you saw in the store tall?” (see Schacter 2001, esp. chs 5, 6). False memories can also be induced as attested by the infamous “guided imagery exercises” of a few years ago that resulted in people falsely accusing their parents of having sexually molested them as young children. The deliverances of memory are susceptible to being shaped by some of the same forces that shape the sensus divinitatis, yet many of its outputs are no less properly basic for that.

A related objection addresses Plantinga’s admission that the war- rant conferred by the sensus divinitatis is defeasible. This can hap- pen in two ways. One’s belief in God can be undermined if one has reasons to think that one’s sensus divinitatis was not working properly in a congenial epistemic environment. One’s belief in God can potentially also be refuted by a philosophical argument, such as the problem of suffering. To each of these types of objections, the theist will try to offer defeaters of the potential defeaters, that is,

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arguments that nullify the force of both sorts of criticisms. These arguments are often very technical and elaborate, as we will see in the next chapter.

One might object that by making use of an elaborate defence against an argument such as the problem of suffering, my belief in God is no longer held as basic; it now rests on all the reasons I put forward to defend my belief against this and other charges. According to Philip Quinn, this is precisely the predicament of most sophisticated adult believers in our culture; they are all too pain- fully aware of a raft of potential defeaters of theism, among them the problem of evil, Marxist critiques of religion, objections stem- ming from some evolutionary theorists and so on. Quinn doubts that any theists are so favourably situated as to defeat all the objec- tions arrayed against theism. Even if they were, however, their defensive efforts would show that the status of their belief in God would have shifted; instead of being taken as basic, it would now be based on the host of arguments and defenses used to defend theism.

I would insist … that many, perhaps most, intellectually sophis- ticated adult theists in our culture must, if their belief in God is to be rational, have a total case for the rationality of theistic belief which includes defenses against defeaters which have very substantial support. (Quinn 1985: 484)7

Does it follow, however, that if I offer reasons to counter the objec- tions posed against my belief in God that it is no longer basic for me? As Plantinga points out, parrying criticisms against one’s faith is not the same thing as offering evidence for the faith. One could engage in the task of negative apologetics, as it is sometimes called, the task of defeating objections posed against the justifiability of religious belief, and still not base one’s own belief on argument.

It might have already occurred to readers to wonder if Plant- inga’s strategy of taking theistic belief as properly basic might not be adaptable to other religious contexts. If theists are warranted in taking belief in God as the properly basic output of the sensus divinitatis, then why is this not the basic model for securing epis- temic warrant available to practitioners of other religions? And might not these other religions be incompatible with theism? For instance, why couldn’t a Hindu polytheist develop an account of

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warranted religious belief that appealed to “Brahman divinitatis”? What is to prevent a pantheist from taking belief in Gaia as prop- erly basic based on sublime experiences of the powers of nature? Michael Martin poses just this objection to Plantinga’s position. He argues that Plantinga’s model for justifying Christian beliefs would seem to allow any belief at all to become basic from the point of view of some intellectual community. Although Reformed epistemologists would not have to accept voodoo beliefs as rational, voodoo followers would be able to claim that in so far as they are basic in the voodoo community they are rational and, moreover, that Reformed thought was irrational in this community. Indeed, Plantinga’s proposal would generate many different communities that could legitimately claim that their basic belief are rational and that these belief conflict with basic beliefs of other communities (Martin 1990: 272).

Plantinga’s reply requires that he first disambiguate Martin’s terms. Plantinga is concerned with that form of positive epistemic appraisal he calls “warrant”, not rationality. If rationality is simply a matter of living within one’s intellectual lights as best one can, or being within one’s intellectual rights in believing as one does, or some similar weak term of epistemic appraisal, then there is no argument, since Plantinga agrees that voodooists could be rational in these weak senses. Warrant, however, is accorded to those beliefs that arise from properly functioning faculties, in other words, from truth- conducive faculties functioning in an appropriate environ- ment, and Plantinga denies that voodooists satisfy this condition. For Martin’s objection to have force, says Plantinga, it would have to be put more like this:

If the claim made by a Reformed epistemologist – namely that belief in God is properly basic with respect to warrant – has warrant, then for any proposition p (no matter how bizarre) accepted by some community, if the epistemologists of that community were to claim that p is properly basic with respect to warrant, their claim would itself have warrant. (2000: 347)

Warrant, as we have seen, is a much stronger term of epistemic appraisal, requiring that the beliefs which have it be formed by properly functioning, truth- conducive faculties, in an appropriate

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environment. But clearly voodoo beliefs, worshippers of the gods of Mount Olympus, the Heaven’s Gate worshippers (the commu- nity who committed mass suicide in order to board a spaceship trailing the Hale- Bopp comet), are not warrant- basic. But what about other theistic religions: what is to prevent them from claim- ing that their core beliefs are properly basic and warranted? Here Plantinga concedes that his model for securing warrant for theism (and other Christian beliefs) might be applied to Judaism, Islam and some theistic forms of Hinduism, even some forms of American Indian religion.

But how does Plantinga know that his religion is warranted? What arguments does he offer to support the claim that his theistic beliefs have been formed by properly functioning, truth- conducive faculties in a suitable environment for those faculties? The short answer is: no arguments at all. Recall, that externalist accounts of justification deny that in order for beliefs to be justified, one must be able to access the grounds of one’s beliefs and see how they bear on the truth of the target belief. It is sufficient for justification that they are in fact reliably produced, not that one be aware of this, and still less that one be able to offer an argument that they are so produced. Plantinga openly admits that he has not shown his model for properly basic religious beliefs to be true and thus has not shown that his theistic beliefs are warranted. His claim is conditional and thus more modest: If theistic belief is true, then the model involv- ing the sensus divinitatis (or something closely approximating it) is true and theistic beliefs have warrant (Plantinga 2000: 168–9). If this is correct, then it follows, says Plantinga, that there are no de jure objections to theism (objections that accuse theism of lacking all epistemic support) that are independent of de facto objections (objections that purport to show that theism is false.) If you want to show that theism is without warrant, says Plantinga, you must show that it is false and that, he thinks, no one has done.

Many readers (particularly theists) may find it unsatisfying to be told that their belief in God is warranted if it is true. Surely the chief question participants to this debate want answered is just this: “Is it or is it not the case that God exists?” And the model for securing warrant for theistic belief that relies on the sensus divinitatis does not attempt to establish by argument that God exists. Curiously, in a footnote, Plantinga writes: “it doesn’t follow that theistic belief

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can’t get warrant by way of argument from other beliefs; nor does it follow that natural theology and more informal theistic argument is of no worth in the believer’s intellectual and spiritual life” (2000: 179 n.16). Yet if natural theologians such as Aquinas are correct in claiming that most people cannot produce such arguments, then if they are to be justified or warranted in their beliefs, they must secure it some other way. Plantinga’s account of properly theistic belief is one such alternative.

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