RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
The contributors in this volume argue that given the inadequacies in epistemic evidentialism and classic foundationalism, the believer is warranted and rational in believing that God exists apart from evidence. I will summarize the key arguments, point out tensions and weaknesses, and conclude with some comments.
Wolterstorff's essays:
NW argues that foundationalism and evidentialism (particularly in the stronger Cliffordian case) cannot present a challenge to theism because said evidentialism is self-referentially incoherent (it's claim fails to live up to its own standards). NW's longer essay surveys the various options. He sometimes gets lost (or the reader does) in the many nuances, but there are some gems from Thomas Reid.
Plantinga:
AP gives his legendary essay on reason and belief in God. It's a fantastic essay, but in many ways the reader is urged to skip it and go to AP's larger trilogy (on the flip side, reading this essay serves as a nice intro to the larger trilogy). The essay's strength is in rebutting claims on how a Christian knows (or can't know) a certain thing.
“For any proposition A and person S, A is properly basic for S if and only if A is incorrigible for S or self-evident to S.”
Plantinga asks, “But how could one know a thing like that? What are its credentials? Clearly enough, it is not self-evidently true” (75),
Mavrodes, Alston, Holwerda
Mavrodes gave several short stories on religious belief. They were better than I expected. His essay "Turning," while fascinating as a story goes, is otherwise incoherent. Alston introduces what will be his later project on sense perception and religious belief. I will say no more. Holwerda responds to Wolfhart Pannenberg. I think he does a great job showing WP's criticism of dialectical theology, and gives some good problems to WP, but I would hesitate to recommend this essay because it came out before WP's publication of his systematic theology (which Holwerda himself acknowledges).
Marsden
George Marsden gives an amazing essay on American Religious Epistemology in history. He shows how Thomas Reid was received by 19th century theologians. The theologians interpreted Reid along empirical and inductive lines (which may or may not be what Reid himself intended). This proved disastrous when it met Darwinism and probably paved the way for Old Evangelicalism's demise.
Reflections:
Most of these contributors have since fine-tuned their arguments. The book itself cannot serve as a template. Further, I think the authors do a good job in showing Christian belief is warranted, but not that it is correct. And while Plantinga is correct that creating worldviews on the spot is a difficult endeavor (ala the Great Pumpkin), he didn't say it was impossible.
Still, a classic work in its own right.
Wolterstorff's essays:
NW argues that foundationalism and evidentialism (particularly in the stronger Cliffordian case) cannot present a challenge to theism because said evidentialism is self-referentially incoherent (it's claim fails to live up to its own standards). NW's longer essay surveys the various options. He sometimes gets lost (or the reader does) in the many nuances, but there are some gems from Thomas Reid.
- Belief-forming mechanisms
- Thomas Reid: “if we want to understand knowledge and rationality, we cannot talk only about the abstract relations holding among propositions” apart from how they are formed (149).
- belief dispositions: what accounts for our beliefs is the triggering of one or other such disposition.
- These dispositions produce their effects immediately. (such as we don’t infer someone is before based on another proposition, nor we do infer we have past memories based on previous inferences).
- reasoning disposition: produces mediate beliefs.
- conditioned dispositions:
- operant conditioning: credulity principle.
- belief dispositions: what accounts for our beliefs is the triggering of one or other such disposition.
- Thomas Reid: “if we want to understand knowledge and rationality, we cannot talk only about the abstract relations holding among propositions” apart from how they are formed (149).
- Criterion for rationally justified belief
- “Ought implies can?”
- Reid: we are prima facie justified in accepting the deliverances of the credulity disposition “until such a time as we have adequate reason in specific cases to believe the deliverances false” (163).
- “Ought implies can?”
- Conclusion: Per Reid, reasoning is simply one mode of belief formation.
Plantinga:
AP gives his legendary essay on reason and belief in God. It's a fantastic essay, but in many ways the reader is urged to skip it and go to AP's larger trilogy (on the flip side, reading this essay serves as a nice intro to the larger trilogy). The essay's strength is in rebutting claims on how a Christian knows (or can't know) a certain thing.
- How do we arrive at, or develop criteria for meaningfulness, or justified belief, or proper basicality?
“For any proposition A and person S, A is properly basic for S if and only if A is incorrigible for S or self-evident to S.”
Plantinga asks, “But how could one know a thing like that? What are its credentials? Clearly enough, it is not self-evidently true” (75),
Mavrodes, Alston, Holwerda
Mavrodes gave several short stories on religious belief. They were better than I expected. His essay "Turning," while fascinating as a story goes, is otherwise incoherent. Alston introduces what will be his later project on sense perception and religious belief. I will say no more. Holwerda responds to Wolfhart Pannenberg. I think he does a great job showing WP's criticism of dialectical theology, and gives some good problems to WP, but I would hesitate to recommend this essay because it came out before WP's publication of his systematic theology (which Holwerda himself acknowledges).
Marsden
George Marsden gives an amazing essay on American Religious Epistemology in history. He shows how Thomas Reid was received by 19th century theologians. The theologians interpreted Reid along empirical and inductive lines (which may or may not be what Reid himself intended). This proved disastrous when it met Darwinism and probably paved the way for Old Evangelicalism's demise.
Reflections:
Most of these contributors have since fine-tuned their arguments. The book itself cannot serve as a template. Further, I think the authors do a good job in showing Christian belief is warranted, but not that it is correct. And while Plantinga is correct that creating worldviews on the spot is a difficult endeavor (ala the Great Pumpkin), he didn't say it was impossible.
Still, a classic work in its own right.
