Empirical Evidence in Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology — Epoche C1
Alvin Plantinga holds that a person can know that God exists without having any argument for it — no cosmological argument, no design argument, no evidence of any kind offered in support. That claim, developed across his three volumes on warrant, is usually taken to place his position outside the reach of empirical considerations altogether. This note argues that the placement is wrong, but that the popular correction of it is wrong too. Empirical matters do enter Plantinga's system, at two identifiable points, and neither of them is the point at which the individual believer's belief acquires its standing. Getting the location right requires setting out the machinery, since the whole question is which condition of a four-part definition the evidence is supposed to satisfy. The target: classical foundationalism, and Plantinga's objection to it The position Plantinga was attacking must be stated first, because his own view is defined against it. A basic belief is one a person holds without inferring it from any other belief: that one is in pain, that one sees a tree, that $2 + 2 = 4$. A non-basic belief is accepted on the evidential basis of others. Classical foundationalism, the dominant modern picture, holds that a belief is rationally acceptable only if it is either properly basic or supported by beliefs that are, and it supplies a criterion for proper basicality: a belief is properly basic only if it is self-evident (obvious on merely understanding it), incorrigible (such that one cannot be mistaken about it, as with one's own current sensations), or evident to the senses. Belief in God fails all three tests, so on this picture it needs an argument or it is irrational. That demand — call it evidentialism about religious belief — is the thing Reformed epistemology was built to refuse. Plantinga's central objection, in "Reason and Belief in God" (1983), is a self-referential one, and it is worth following exactly because its form determines what he is entitled to conclude. Consider the criterion itself: the proposition that a belief is properly basic only if it is self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the senses. Is that proposition self-evident? Plainly not; philosophers have disputed it for a century. Is it incorrigible? No: it is not a report of one's own mental state. Is it evident to the senses? No: it is not the sort of thing one can see or hear. Can it be inferred from beliefs that are? No one has produced such an inference. So by its own standard the criterion is not rationally acceptable, and anyone who holds it holds it in violation of it. The argument is decisive against that particular criterion. Notice, though, what it does not establish: it does not show that there is no correct criterion, and it does not by itself show that belief in God satisfies whatever the correct criterion turns out to be. Proper basicality, and the faculty that is supposed to deliver it Plantinga's positive proposal is that belief in God can be properly basic — held without inference and yet perfectly in order — in something like the way that one's belief that another person is angry, or that the world existed before one woke, is properly basic. Such beliefs are not conclusions; they arise in one on the appropriate occasion, and demanding an argument for them misdescribes how they work. The mechanism he invokes is borrowed, with the name, from John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), where Calvin claims that an awareness of divinity has been implanted in all people, so that knowledge of God is not the achievement of argument but a natural endowment obscured by sin. Plantinga takes over this sensus divinitatis as a cognitive faculty which, triggered by circumstances — the night sky, guilt, danger, beauty — produces belief in God in the way that vision, triggered by light, produces belief about one's surroundings. On this model the belief has whatever standing it has because of how it was produced, not because of what supports it. The obvious retort, which Plantinga anticipated and named after the Great Pumpkin, is that this licenses anything: if belief in God can be properly basic, so can belief in a pumpkin deity who returns each Hallowe'en. His reply is that abandoning one criterion is not abandoning all criteria, and that criteria for proper basicality are themselves arrived at from below — by assembling clear cases of beliefs that are and are not properly basic and framing hypotheses that fit them. That reply is honest but it is a promissory note, and it leaves the burden on the account of what makes a belief-producing process a good one. That account is the theory of warrant. What warrant is, and why it is not an internalist notion Here the earlier version of this note went wrong, and the correction is what makes the rest of the argument possible. It described Reformed epistemology as commonly interpreted as "solely an internalist justification" and presented the empirical dimension as a hidden qualification. In fact Plantinga's account is explicitly and emphatically externalist, and he says so. The distinction is this. An internalist account makes the epistemic standing of a belief depend only on factors accessible to the believer by reflection — her other beliefs, her experiences, her sense that things hang together. An externalist account makes it depend on facts about the believer's relation to the world which she may be entirely unable to check: whether the process that produced the belief is in fact reliable, for instance. In Warrant and Proper Function (1993) Plantinga defines warrant — the quality, whatever it is, that turns true belief into knowledge — as follows. A belief has warrant for a person when four conditions hold together: the belief is produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly, free of malfunction; they are operating in a cognitive environment sufficiently like the one for which they were designed; the part of the design plan governin