Warranted Christian Belief

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 2002 by Groothius, Douglas

Warranted Christian Belief. By Alvin Plantings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xx + 499 pages, $24.95 paper.

A strong case can be made that no other Christian philosopher has done more to defend the rationality of Christianity in the twentieth century than Alvin Plantings. For over thirty-five years, he has written voluminously in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Plantings was one of the first Christian philosophers to employ analytical philosophy instead of allowing it to be turned against Christian faith (as happened at the onset of the movement). Many Christian philosophers followed his wise lead. He has published in the most eminent academic journals, given the presidential address of the American Philosophical Association, and delivered the prestigious Gifford lecture in Scotland. He co-founded the Society of Christian Philosophers in the early 1980s, an organization contributing significantly to the resurgence of Christians in philosophy in the past two decades or so, and which publishes the respected journal Faith and Philosophy.

The book completes a trilogy of works on general and religious epistemology. The first two volumes, Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function, were released in 1993 by Oxford University Press. The first assessed contemporary options in epistemology and developed the notion of "warranted belief" against alternative accounts of the positive epistemic status of belief. Warrant and Proper Function developed the idea that one's beliefs receive warrant on the basis of their functioning properly in an environment divinely designed to be conducive to cognitive success. This is a theistic version of externalist epistemology. Plantings argued that the Christian worldview provides the metaphysic required for this epistemology. He then contrasted this theistic framework with that of naturalism (where nothing is intelligently designed) and found the latter philosophically defective when contrasted with the former. How can we have knowledge when all our cognitive equipment is the result of a mindless process of natural law and pure chance? Plantings argued that the odds are very much against it, despite what the naturalistic, evolutionary establishment might say. (In this way, he has been a friend of the Intelligent Design movement.)

Warranted Christian Belief is the much-awaited defense of the possibility that specifically Christian belief satisfies the conditions necessary for warrant as Plantings laid out in the first two volumes. Warrant and Proper Function defended a theistic epistemology but did not apply the account of warrant to specifically Christian belief. This long tome (longer than the first two volumes combined) is a formidable piece of philosophy, but Plantings does not assume the reader has mastered the first two books. He summarizes positions argued at length in the previous works and refers to them in footnotes. A book of this size, scope, and depth cannot easily be summarized or critiqued, and I cannot begin to do it justice. Nevertheless, the basic themes can be set forth and a few questions raised. These should be of note to philosophers as well as theologians and biblical scholars who wish to fathom the implications of current epistemology for their disciplines.

Plantings is the leading thinker in a movement known as Reformed epistemology, although not all Reformed philosophers or theologians endorse his views on religious knowledge. Plantings, however, takes his cue from comments in Calvin and other Reformed thinkers to the effect that the knowledge of God does not require support from other beliefs that we hold because it is directly given by the Holy Spirit. Since his first book God and Other Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), Plantings has argued, roughly put, that belief in God is epistemologically acceptable even apart from the success or failure of natural theology. One may legitimately believe in God apart from any specific positive arguments-whether inductive, deductive, or abductive-- that establish the existence of God on the basis of certain features of the natural world. Theistic arguments may not be wrong in principle or entirely unsuccessful (as some, such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Barth have claimed), but they are not required for rational assent. A book he co-edited with Nicholas Wolterstorff (another formidable Reformed epistemologist) entitled Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983) set out this perspective in great detail.

This volume continues Plantinga's philosophical project of articulating a Christian epistemology that lends warrant to Christian belief. Before explaining what Plantings means by "warrant" (a technical term for him), several preliminary points need to be made.

First, one should understand that Plantings is concerned with de jure objections to Christian belief. A de jure objection claims that Christian belief is somehow epistemically irrational or otherwise illegitimate, whether or not it is true. That is, someone violates some epistemic standard or fails to fulfill some epistemic duty or is not warranted in holding Christian belief. This is to be compared with de facto objections that argue that Christianity is false. If the de jure kind of objection succeeds, the truth or falsity of Christianity never comes to the table, because it is deemed epistemically improper at the outset. One of the burdens of this volume is to argue that all the de jure objections to Christian belief fail, for if Christian belief is true, it is very likely warranted. However, some may be disappointed that Plantings never tries to make a compelling case that Christianity is true. He believes that it is true and that no de jure objection against it succeeds. Proving the latter is no small accomplishment philosophically. He also argues that he knows of no other way for Christian belief to be warranted than by something like the way described in his model (more on his model below). In the closing paragraph of the book he says: "But is it true? This is the really important question. And here we pass beyond the competence of philosophy, whose main competence, in the area, is to clear away certain objections, impedances, and obstacles to Christian belief. Speaking for myself, and of course not in the name of philosophy, I can say only that it does, indeed, seem to me to be true, and to be the maximally important truth" (p. 499).