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‘Foolishness to Greeks’: Plantinga and the Epistemology of Christian Belief

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Abstract

A central theme in the Christian contemplative tradition is that knowing God is much more like ‘unknowing’ than it is like possessing rationally acceptable beliefs. Knowledge of God is expressed, in this tradition, in metaphors of woundedness, darkness, silence, suffering, and desire. Philosophers of religion, on the other hand, tend to explore the possibilities of knowing God in terms of rational acceptability, epistemic rights, cognitive responsibility, and propositional belief. These languages seem to point to very different accounts of how it is that we come to know God, and a very different range of critical concepts by which the truth of such knowledge can be assessed. In this paper, I begin to explore what might be at stake in these different languages of knowing God, drawing particularly on Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of Christian belief. I will argue that his is a distorted account of the epistemology of Christian belief, and that this has implications for his project of demonstrating the rational acceptability of Christian faith for the 21st century.

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Notes

  1. Williams (1991), p.205

  2. Plantinga (2000), p. vii

  3. Ibid., p.viii.

  4. Ibid., pp.247–48.

  5. Ibid., p.178. Similar language, and a similar concern to defend the rationality of belief in God, is evident in Davis (2006) and Clark (1990).

  6. This dissociation of the language of philosophy of religion from the language of faith has been noted by D.Z. Phillips in a number of works, including Phillips (2004), and also by Jantzen (1998).

  7. There is a vast range of works that could be cited here. In addition to Williams’ Wound of Knowledge, see for example works such as Augustine’s Confessions; the 14th-century anonymous work, The Cloud of Unknowing; and Davies and Turner (2002).

  8. For a summary criticism of the evidentialist approach to philosophy of religion, see Clark (1990).

  9. Plantinga (2000), p.xiii.

  10. I am aware that to speak of such a thing as ‘the Christian spiritual tradition’ is much too sweeping a category. However, my intention is to draw on what I hope are widely recognized and authoritative elements of the tradition in order to highlight weaknesses in Plantinga’s philosophical account of the epistemology of Christian belief.

  11. See the summary of Plantinga’s ‘Reason and Belief in God’ cited in Clark (1990), p.119.

  12. Plantinga (2000), p.174.

  13. Ibid., p.175.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid., p.184.

  16. Ibid., p.184. Stephen Davis makes this claim in a particularly strong, not to say judgemental, way in his Christian Philosophical Theology, pp.12ff. D.Z. Phillips points out the spiritual danger of such an epistemological ‘explanation’ for unbelief: ‘There is the danger of phariseeism: “I thank thee that my faculties, unlike those of others, are working properly”.’ See his Religion and Friendly Fire, p.17.

  17. Plantinga (2000), p.205.

  18. Ibid., p.206.

  19. Ibid., p.256.

  20. For discussion of the difficulty of pneumatology see, for example, Rogers (2005); McDonnell (1985); Williams (2000a).

  21. Plantinga (2000), p.256.

  22. Rogers (2005), p.14.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Plantinga (2000), p.256.

  25. Ibid., p.292.

  26. Ibid., pp.311–23, esp. p.321.

  27. Ibid., p.323.

  28. Ibid., p.293.

  29. Williams (1991), p.20.

  30. Plantinga (2000), p.256.

  31. See Plantinga (2000), p.248.

  32. Plantinga (2000), p.248, emphasis mine.

  33. Ibid., p.249.

  34. See, for example, Lorenzen (1995).

  35. ‘For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end… For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’ (1 Cor. 13: 9–10, 12).

  36. Plantinga (2000), p.206.

  37. Ibid., pp.258–62. The notion of ‘immediately’ here does not refer to a moment of time, but to the absence of any ‘intermediate’ process in the formation of belief such as the process of argument from evidence. My point does not turn on a criticism of the suggestion that belief could arise in an instant, but on the suggestion that belief arises complete and fixed.

  38. Plantinga (2000), p.264.

  39. Ibid., p.266.

  40. Wittgenstein (1980), p.33, cited in Phillips (2004), p.63.

  41. Cf. Phillips (2004), p.59.

  42. Plantinga (2000), p.247.

  43. Phillips (2004), p.59.

  44. See Williams (2000b), p.82.

  45. Plantinga (2000), p.347.

  46. Ibid., pp.169–70. By ‘warrant’ he means that which makes the difference between knowledge and ‘mere true belief’. In the context of Christian belief, Plantinga is trying to establish that not only does Christian belief ‘happen’ to be true, but that we can know it to be true, that we are warranted in having that belief.

  47. Ibid., p.325.

  48. Ibid., p.vii.

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Acknowledgement

My thanks to Nick Trakakis and Heather Thomson for their comments on this paper.

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Bachelard, S. ‘Foolishness to Greeks’: Plantinga and the Epistemology of Christian Belief. SOPHIA 48, 105–118 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0102-y

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