Online research in philosophy

In 'Belief-In and Belief in God' ("Religious Studies", 28, 1992), J. N. Williams suggests that belief in God cannot be rational unless one has rational beliefs that God exists. While agreeing with his conclusion (though not with his statement of it), I disagree at almost every step with his method of arriving at it. In particular I suggest that Williams goes astray concerning the dual aspect of belief in, the nature of performatives, the arousal of belief states, and the correct account of belief in God.

Starting with Job's reaction to evil, I identify three elements of Job-like belief. They are: (1) the recognition of evil in the world; (2) the conviction that God and God's creation are good; and (3) the sense of beholding God's goodness in the world. The interconnection of these three elements is examined along with a possible way of understanding Job-like believers beholding and becoming experientially aware of God's goodness. It is brought out why, given that they are as they understand themselves to be, Job-like believers properly do not see evil as evidence against God's goodness. Finally, Job-like belief is related to the different reactions to evil by Ivan and Aloysha in The Brothers Karamazov.

Plantinga famously argues against evidentialism that belief in God can be properly basic. But the epistemology of cognitive faculties such as perception and memory which produce psychologically non-inferential beliefs shows that various inferentially justified theoretical beliefs are epistemically prior to our memory and perceptual beliefs, preventing the latter from being epistemically basic. Plantinga's analogy between the sensus divinitatis and these cognitive faculties suggests that the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis cannot be properly basic either. Objections by and on behalf of Plantinga to this argument are considered.

Belief in God's being -- Belief in God's love -- Belief and God's phoenix church.

I would like to get this published somewhere; but who would publish it?

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.

Plantinga claims that, at least for some people, the belief that God exists is ‘properly basic,’ or rather that they have properly basic beliefs that entail the existence of God. I think the underlying idea here is that we all have a properly working sensus divinitatus. This guarantees the existence of God. But, of course, if God does not exist, then our sensus divinitatus is not working properly, i.e. is not, really a sensus divinitatus. The issue as to whether there is or is not a God does not, or should not, come to an end with a claim of proper basicality.

are properly basic for at least some believers in God; there are widely realized sets of conditions, I suggested, in which such propositions are indeed properly basic. And when I said that these beliefs are properly basic, I had in mind what Quinn calls the narrow conception of the basing relation.[1] I was taking it that a person S accepts a belief A on the basis of a belief B only if (roughly) S believes both A and B and could correctly claim (on reflection) that B is part of his evidence for A. S's belief that there is an error in some argument against p will not typically be a belief on the basis of which he accepts p and will not be a part of his evidence for p.

This paper compares the views and arguments of Alvin Plantinga and Søren Kierkegaard on the question of belief in God. Kierkegaard’s view of belief in God (which must be sharply distinguished from faith in the Absolute Paradox) is shown to be surprisinglysimilar to Plantinga’s claim that belief in God can be properly basic. Two of Plantinga’s arguments for taking belief in God as properly basic are shown to have analogues in Kierkegaard.Plantinga claims that though properly basic beliefs are not based on evidence they are nevertheless grounded. In the latter part of the paper I show how the Kierkegaardian notion of inwardness or subjectivity must be an essential element in any plausible account of the ground of such belief in God.