Reformed Epistemology
Platinga's Battle with De Jure Objections to Theistic Belief
On my morning drive to work, I contemplated how I would structure my thoughts in regards to this month's theme of epistemology. As James O’Reilly states in his introductory post, epistemology asks ‘how and why do we come to know what we know?’ From a Catholic perspective we naturally ask these same questions of our faith, especially in the arena of apologetics regarding our knowledge of God’s existence. As I drove to the office on a morning that most would call dreary, but that I found delightful, light rain pattered my windshield, the first fall leaves meandered to the ground, and a light mist hung around the blue ridges in the distance. In this moment, as in many similar moments before, my mind raised to God through finding such joy in his creation. Such a belief or experience is typically categorized as “wonder” and invites us to know God more deeply through appreciation of his creation. To wonder at created beauty naturally directs our thoughts towards a creator, so our sensory experience serves as a gateway not as its own end. However, the skeptic would say the ability to wonder at creation is not proof for God’s existence in itself. The apologist would respond with the assertion that “creation needs a creator.” To return to the opening question, what is the relation between my experience and knowledge? I aim to explore this and more by sharing the concept of “reformed epistemology”.
The concept of reformed epistemology is that our innate knowledge of God can be a proof that God exists without further argumentation. One of the clearer explanations I have found comes from Dr. Tyler McNabb, a professor of philosophy and an evangelist, in an interview with Word On Fire: “reformed epistemology is the thesis that religious belief can be justified or warranted apart from argumentation.”1 I like to think of this thesis as follows: if we were to put ourselves in a vacuum, without any other influences, theories, proofs, opinions etc., we would still know ourselves to be a created creature. This thesis was developed chiefly by Dr. Alvin Platinga, philosopher and professor emeritus of The University of Notre Dame. Platinga was motivated to show that “belief in God can be rational without requiring arguments or evidence” and claimed “that it is difficult to prove that belief in God is irrational and [that it is] possible to suggest ways in which belief meets the requirement of rationality.”2 The thesis was inspired in part by thinkers like John Calvin and others, hence the nomenclature “reformed.”
Platinga is fighting an epistemological battle that is very narrowly defined. In one of his texts, Platinga clarifies what he is not arguing against, namely what he calls de facto objections. These are “objections to the truth of Christian belief.”3 He says the most prominent objection goes as follows: “according to Christian belief, we human beings have been created by an all-powerful, all-knowing God who loves us enough to send his Son, the second person of the divine Trinity, to suffer and die on our account; but given the devastating amount and variety of human suffering and evil in our sad world, this simply can’t be true.”4 He goes on to say that we also encounter these objections to many other core tenets of our faith, such as the incarnation, the Trinity, Marian theology and so forth. Where Platinga actually focuses his efforts in the epistemological battle is on de jure objections. Platinga says de jure objections are much more prevalent. “These are arguments or claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable,…, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view.”5 These objections to the Christian faith are easily recognized in the talking points of modern atheists, agnostics, secularists, and others. It is the assertion, not that our moral viewpoint of a subject is incorrect, but that the moral system itself is irrational.
Platinga recognizes that de jure objections are not only more prevalent, but that they are less straightforward than de facto arguments. He states, “The conclusion of such an objection will be that there is something wrong with Christian belief—something other than falsehood—or else something wrong with the x Christian believer: [they are] unjustified, or irrational, or rationally unacceptable, in some way wanting. But what way, exactly? …This is ordinarily not made clear.”6 Platinga’s focus is to find a real de jure objection, one that specifically objects to Christian belief and can be treated as distinct from de facto objections. This takes Platinga on a journey from Kant to Nietzsche to Locke to Freud to Marx and others to find a real de jure objection and combat it.
To take on de jure objections, Platinga wants to show that belief can be accepted as knowledge and that the belief should then be considered as rational and justified. Platinga sees ‘warrant’ as the necessary bridge between belief and knowledge. In Warrant and Proper Function Platinga states this in regards to warrant and belief:
[A] belief has warrant for me only if (1) it has been produced in me by cognitive faculties that are working properly (functioning as they ought to, subject to no cognitive dysfunction) in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for my kinds of cognitive faculties, (2) the segment of the design plan governing the production of that belief is aimed at the production of true beliefs, and (3) there is a high statistical probability that a belief produced under those conditions will be true.7
This explanation provides more insight into Platinga’s conception especially warrant’s relation to proper functionalism.8 And I think it is suitable to say that if a belief is warranted, it is justified, at least in the scope of this essay on Plantinga's thought. Platinga sees the question of justification as more easily addressed, in that one can still be mistaken, while being justified, so it is unreasonable to think that belief overall is unjustifiable.
He asserts that the real de jure objection is more closely related to the question of whether belief is rational. To jump ahead, Platinga does not ultimately think the real de jure objection lies in rationality. This is for a few reasons. First, he says that the rationality of a belief must be based on the aims and goals of a person forming a belief. If a person forms a belief with the goal of psychological comfort (as opposed to the goal of knowing a truth) surely that belief would be irrational. However, since our Christian beliefs do not have such aims, and our beliefs do not bring so readily “psychological comfort”, our aims and goals are likely pure, and so rational.9 Second, Plantinga says the question of rationality asks what a person with a properly functioning reason would do in a set of circumstances. But when we extend this conception to the idea of forming beliefs it leaves the realm of practical rationality and the question is then whether it is “sensible” to have a belief. Ultimately, Platinga does not think the de jure objection lies solely in the question of rationality.
Platinga believed the most formidable de jure objections stem from the thought of Freud and Marx.
[Freud’s and Marx’s] complaint is really the claim that Christian and other theistic belief is irrational in the sense that it originates in cognitive malfunction (Marx) or in cognitive proper function that is aimed at something other than the truth (Freud)—comfort, perhaps, or the ability to soldier on in this appalling world in which we find ourselves. … To put it in still another way, the charge is that theistic and Christian belief lacks warrant.10
With the F&M complaint in mind, Platinga is ready to provide his model for the way that theistic belief could have warrant. It brings together an unlikely pairing - Aquinas and Calvin - which Platinga names the A/C Model. Platinga begins with Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Calvin describes this concept in his Institutes, “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy… Men of sound judgment will always be sure that a sense of divinity which can never be effaced is engraved upon men’s minds.”11 Platinga states that beliefs about God well up within us from a variety of circumstances and that these beliefs are natural and innate. Of course, it is not enough to say that the sensus divinitatis or our belief simply wells up within us, as if from nowhere. He describes our belief as being triggered by our perception and ingestion of the world and our experience - from grandeur and majesty - but also in danger when we feel a desire for God. And although this belief is described as innate, he compares it to “the capacity for arithmetical knowledge” which is available to us from a very young age, but requires maturity.12 Aquinas would describe it as a “natural knowledge of God.”
In his outline for the A/C Model, Platinga identifies a few key features of his model, there are more to be explored but I’ll focus on the most prescient.13 The first is “basicality,” meaning that ‘natural knowledge of God’ does not need “inference or argument", but is arrived at much more immediately, like an a priori belief. To explain, Platinga provides a quick example of his backyard experience. His knowledge that his lilies are in bloom is not the result of a complicated set of circumstances that require him to infer based on all available evidence that his lilies are indeed in bloom, but rather his perception and prior experience immediately allow him to know it, without inference.
The second is “proper basicality with respect to justification.” Platinga calls a belief basic in that one does need to accept it based on other propositions but can hold that belief on its own. The Christian belief can be held as such, so one can be justified in holding the belief in that way. This feature counters the idea that it would be “epistemically irresponsible” to believe in God, aka philosophically illogical.
The third is related, “proper basicality with respect to warrant.” As likely the most important feature of his model, Platinga connects here that a belief produced from the sensus divinitatis should be considered knowledge. This is because beliefs produced by the sensus divinitatis “are not evidentially based on other beliefs”. (see feature 1) Plantinga states, “On this model, our cognitive faculties have been designed and created by God; the design plan, therefore, is a design plan in the literal and paradigmatic sense. It is a blueprint or plan for our ways of functioning, and it has been developed and instituted by a conscious, intelligent agent.”14 It is clear then that the purpose of the sensus divinitatis is to enable us to have true beliefs about God, and that if these beliefs are produced in the context of a properly functioning reason, with proper aims, these beliefs have warrant (they are rational and justified). Our experience is that the beliefs produced are indeed true, and that as an a priori belief it can be accepted alone, and it can be accepted as knowledge.
Platinga’s A/C Model demonstrates that our belief can be considered as knowledge, allowing us to hold fast to the truth that our belief has warrant and we do not need to feel defenseless against de jure objections that come at us from every angle - which deem the faith irrational or unjustifiable. Platinga’s conception of warrant gives a powerful grounding for Christian apologetics. It enables one to begin a faith journey with the basic human experience and bring that into a context of warranted belief. It also provides a beautiful context to our belief that those who never know Christ, meaning they have never had the Gospel shared with them, have a path to not only theistic belief, but knowledge of God and eventual communion with Him.
We must continually build up arguments, as Platinga does, to show that Christian belief is warranted. For me, the light rain pattering my windshield, the first fall leaves meandering to the ground, and the light mist hanging on the blue ridges is not just my yearning for comfort in a cruel world. This wonder is the trigger of a sensus divinitatis, a knowledge that there is a God and in the beauty of our faith, the knowledge that he loves us and yearns for us to be joined with him. For “God has put eternity into the mind of man.”
https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/fellows/from-gundam-to-god-tyler-mcnabb-and-reformed-epistemology/
https://www.nd.edu/stories/plantinga/
Alvin Platinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2000), 4
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 5
Alvin Platinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), 46-47
https://iep.utm.edu/prop-fun/
WCB, 121
Ibid., 140
Ibid., 143
Ibid., 144
If you are interested in exploring deeper Platinga’s A/C Model, he describe six of its features in pages 146-154 of Warranted Christian Belief. Although he ultimately completes the model in Chapter 8 of the same work.
WCB, 149