Alvin Plantingas Warranted Christian Belief is without questionone of the central texts of the Reformed epistemology movement. Critiques of Plantingas defence have been both multiple and varied. As varied as these responses are, however, it is my contention that many of them amount to the same thing. It is the purpose of this paper to offer an overview of the main lines of attack that have been directed as Plantingas project, and thereafter to show how many, if not most, of (...) these objections can be understood as versions or aspects of the same criticism, what I call the Inadequacy Thesis. (shrink)

This is the text for a presentation I gave at the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, D.C. on December 28, 1998. It was written very quickly, and I haven't had time to go back and fix it up, but I probably won't have time to fix it up any time soon, and several people have requested copies, so I don't see any harm in making it available. Please remember that it is a draft, and don't (...) quote it without permission. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Perhaps the most influential proposal in the recent literature on the epis- temology of religious belief has been Alvin Plantinga’s anti-evidentialist contention that we should treat certain religious beliefs as properly basic. In order to support this anti-skeptical maneuver, Plantinga (along with other “reformed” epistemologists such as William Alston) has looked to the kind of anti-evidentialist model that is standardly offered as regards the epistemology of perceptual belief and has claimed that there are sufficient analogies between perceptual experience and (...) religious experience to moti- vate the use of such a model in religious epistemology. It is argued here, however, that while Plantinga et al. are right to draw our attention to these analogies, in doing so they have failed to pay due attention to important disanalogies that exist between religious and perceptual experience. Moreover, I contend that these disanalogies have epistemo- logical ramifications that require subtle modifications to the reformed epistemology thesis. In particular, following a suggestion made by Keith DeRose, I argue that re- formed epistemology would be better modelled along explicitly virtue-theoretic lines. (shrink)

There are parallels between certain responses to local epistemological scepticism about religious belief and an influential reply to radical epistemological scepticism. What ties both accounts together is that they utilise, either implicitly or explicitly, a “hinge” proposition thesis which maintains that the pivotal beliefs in question are immune to sceptical attack even though they lack sufficient epistemic grounds. It is argued that just as this strategy lacks any anti-sceptical efficacy in the context of the radical sceptical debate, so it offers (...) no defence against a localised scepticism regarding religious belief either. What the defender of religious belief should do, it is claimed, is re-examine the manner in which a commitment to the doctrine of epistemological internalism underlies the sceptical attack. (shrink)

In the present paper I address two significant and prevalent errors concerning to natural theology within the Reformed theological tradition. First, contrary to Alvin Plantinga, I argue that the idea of properly basic theistic belief has not motivated or otherwise grounded opposition to natural theology within the Reformed tradition. There is, in fact, a Reformed endorsement of natural theology grounded in the notion that theistic belief can be properly basic. Secondly, I argue that late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Reformed criticisms of (...) natural theology do not constitute an objection to natural theology as such but rather an objection to natural theology construed in a particular way. I explore the nature of this objection and its compatibility with an alternative understanding of natural theology. (shrink)

It is a widely held viewpoint in Christian apologetics that in addition to defending Christian theism against objections (negative apologetics), apologists should also present arguments in support of the truth of theism and Christianity (positive apologetics). In contemporary philosophy of religion, the Reformed epistemology movement has often been criticized on the grounds that it falls considerably short of satisfying the positive side of this two-tiered approach to Christian apologetics. Reformed epistemology is said to constitute or entail an inadequate apologetic methodology (...) since it rejects positive apologetics or at least favours negative over positive apologetics. In this paper I argue that this common objection fails on two grounds. First, while the arguments of Reformed epistemology are relevant and useful to apologetics, neither Reformed epistemology nor its epistemological project should be identified with a distinct school or method of apologetics. Secondly, while certain claims of Reformed epistemology seem to imply a rejection of positive apologetics, or at least a preference for negative or positive apologetics, I argue that no such conclusion follows. In fact, although unimpressed by particular versions of natural theology and positive apologetics, Reformed epistemologists have provided criticisms of each that can constructively shape future approaches to the apologetic employment of natural theology and Christian evidences. (shrink)