Echoes of Al-Ghazali: Re-evaluating Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief through an Islamic Epistemological Lens — Epoche C2
What Plantinga's model claims, and about which beliefs Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief (2000) argues that a Christian may believe in God without holding any argument for the conclusion and still hold the belief with full positive epistemic status; al-Ghazali's al-Munqidh min al-Dalal , written around 1108, reports that its author recovered certainty after a sceptical collapse not by constructing a proof but by a light which God cast into his breast. The two are routinely paired, and the pairing is worth making exact, because the usual version of it sets the wrong terms opposite each other and draws a conclusion that Plantinga's own account forbids. Plantinga's position has a negative move and a positive one. The negative move, made in 'Reason and Belief in God' (1983), is directed against classical foundationalism: the thesis that a proposition may be believed without inference only if it is self-evident, or incorrigible, or evident to the senses. Plantinga's objection is self-referential. That criterion is not itself self-evident; it is not incorrigible; it is not evident to the senses; and nobody has derived it from propositions that are. By its own standard, therefore, it cannot be rationally accepted, and the evidentialist demand that religious belief produce arguments loses the engine that drove it. The positive account is set out in Warrant and Proper Function (1993). A belief has warrant — the property, whatever it is, that turns true belief into knowledge — when four conditions hold together: it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly; in a cognitive environment sufficiently like the one for which those faculties were designed; according to a segment of the design plan aimed at the production of true rather than merely useful beliefs; and where there is a high objective probability that a belief produced in those circumstances is true. The fourth condition is the one usually dropped in summary and the one that decides everything below: warrant is not merely a matter of the faculty working as intended but of its actually being reliable. The sensus divinitatis is Calvin's term, from the Institutes (1559), where he writes that an awareness of divinity is implanted in the human mind by natural instinct. Plantinga's Aquinas/Calvin model proposes that human beings possess such a faculty, triggered by occasions rather than premises — the night sky, a sense of guilt, danger, the beauty of a landscape — and producing beliefs about God in the way perception and memory produce theirs, without inference and without the believer's being able to cite grounds. Here the compressed version of this essay went wrong on a point that matters for the comparison. It said that Christian belief is warranted when it arises from properly functioning faculties guided by the sensus divinitatis . But on Plantinga's own division of labour the sensus divinitatis delivers bare theism. What he calls the great things of the gospel — incarnation, atonement, resurrection — require a second and separate model, the extended Aquinas/Calvin model, whose mechanism is a triad: Scripture, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, and the faith that results. The first model describes a standing faculty of every human being; the second describes a particular divine action. Conflating them collapses the very distinction that the comparison with al-Ghazali needs. One further result must be on the table before the comparison begins, since it constrains what any comparison can be used for. The conclusion of Warranted Christian Belief is that there is no good de jure objection to Christian belief — no objection to its rationality or warrant — that is independent of a de facto objection to its truth. The argument runs through the fourth condition. If the Christian story is true, then something very like the two models is true, and Christian belief is very probably warranted; if the story is false, the models are false and the belief lacks warrant. The critic therefore cannot grant the truth and attack the rationality; he must attack the truth. What the Munqidh actually reports, and a term that does not exist Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) taught at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad from 1091, abandoned the post in 1095 after a collapse he describes as both physical and intellectual, and wrote the Munqidh near the end of his life, around 1108. The compressed version of this essay called it a chronicle of the crisis, which invites the reader to treat it as a record. It is a retrospective apologia composed more than a decade after the events, in a polemical setting; Frank Griffel's study of his life and thought shows how far the narrative is shaped by the controversies al-Ghazali was answering when he wrote. Its epistemological claims are made for a purpose, which does not make them false but does mean they cannot be read as a diary. A second correction is needed at once. The compressed version attributed to al-Ghazali a method called al-shakk al-ghazali , glossed as 'the Ghazalian doubt or suspension of doubt'. No such term of art exists, either in al-Ghazali or in the scholarship on him; shakk is simply the ordinary Arabic word for doubt, and 'suspension of doubt' translates nothing in the text. His own vocabulary is different and more useful. Taqlid is unexamined acceptance on authority, which he says he resolved to escape after noticing that a person's creed tracks his parents'. Al-ilm al-yaqini is certain knowledge. Safsata — sophistry — is the condition into which he says the search drove him. What makes the account philosophically interesting is that he defines his target before pursuing it. Certain knowledge, he says, is knowledge in which the thing known is so disclosed that no doubt attaches to it, no possibility of error accompanies it, and the mind cannot even entertain such a possibility — so securely that if someone were to turn a stone into gold or a rod into a serpent in order to overt