Author: Jamie B. Turner
Category: Philosophy of Religion, Epistemology
Word Count: 1000
Suppose that one evening, you look to see whether your neighbors are home, notice that their car isn’t in the driveway and the lights are off, and so conclude that they’re out. It’s just because of such reasoning or argument that your belief is reasonable.[1]
While we believe many things on the basis of arguments, we also believe many more things without argument or reasoning, e.g., believing there’s a cup on our desk, that we ate cereal for breakfast, that we’re in pain, and that we hear a bird chirping. These are beliefs we form immediately, without any explicit reasoning, when we see, remember, feel, or hear these things. And these sorts of beliefs are reasonable for us to hold.
It’s often thought that religious beliefs—such as belief in God—require supporting arguments to be reasonable.[2] Some philosophers have argued, however, that arguments are not needed for belief in God to be reasonable.[3] This essay examines their case.
1. Evidence and Rationality
It’s commonly thought that being reasonable or rational is a matter of evidence: a belief is rational for someone only if they have sufficient evidence that supports their belief. Evidence, however, takes different forms. One form is arguments; another form is experiences and how things appear or seem to a person, such as our sensory perceptions.
Evidence isn’t limited to arguments: if we had to offer an argument for everything we believe, including the premises of that argument, and the premises of those arguments, and so on forever, then we arguably wouldn’t be rational in holding any beliefs since we don’t and can’t do that.[4] But we are rational in accepting many of our beliefs, so we don’t need an argument for everything we believe.[5]
2. Rationality and Belief in God
Many theists, people who believe there’s a God, believe because of an argument: they consider the origins of the cosmos, ponder its orderliness, and infer that God best explains its existence.[6] Arguing for God’s existence from these features of the natural world might make belief in God rational.
A different type of reason for belief, however, is based upon, e.g., encountering the beauty of the starry night sky or the joy of holding a newborn child: the person is simply overwhelmed by what they take to be God’s presence. This believer doesn’t argue or reason towards believing God exists: they simply find themselves believing because of these or similar experiences.
Some contemporary philosophers have defended the view that belief in God can be rational for theists who believe because of their immediate experiences, not arguments.[7] The most notable defender of this view is philosopher Alvin Plantinga (1932–).[8] He argues that belief in God can be “properly basic,” by which he means it is “basic”—it isn’t inferred from any other belief, and held “properly”—it’s rational.[9]
In Plantinga’s view, belief in God can have the same sort of intellectual status as our other more ordinary beliefs about the world such as what we perceive or remember.[10] Since evidence includes experiences—it’s not just arguments—then since beliefs in cups or chirping birds can be rational by way of such evidence, the same could extend to belief in God.[11] Thus, if someone has an experience that they take to be of God, then this experience counts as evidence and in favor of one’s belief in God being rational, in the same way as it does for our more ordinary beliefs. So, arguably, belief in God can be “properly basic.”
3. Objections
There are many objections raised against the case that belief in God can be properly basic.[12] One of the most common is that it seems to imply that almost any belief could be properly basic.
Imagine someone who takes themselves to have experiences of tooth fairies, goblins, or the Great Pumpkin at Halloween. If experiences can render belief in God properly basic, it seems that the experience of these bizarre entities could make belief in them properly basic also. But, the objector claims, belief in these bizarre entities is irrational and so can’t be properly basic; they conclude that experiences alone cannot make a belief properly basic, including belief in God.
In response, one might agree that belief in, say, the Great Pumpkin could potentially be rational without arguments, but argue that most people have good reasons to doubt that such a being exists: e.g., if there really were a Great Pumpkin, we’d expect many others to spot it or for science to reveal to us that such an entity exists; that hasn’t happened, so probably there’s no Great Pumpkin.
So, those who think that belief in God can be properly basic might argue that there are good reasons to doubt the existence of bizarre entities like the Great Pumpkin, but these doubts are not present for belief in God. This response involves proposing it’s not experiences alone that make beliefs properly basic but experiences combined with there being no adequate reason to doubt beliefs formed on their basis.
Critics respond that there are at least some reasons to doubt that there’s a God: e.g., that the presence of so much evil in the world renders God unlikely, or that if God really exists, then we’d expect evidence of God to be more obvious—perhaps we’d even expect more people to have what they take to be experiences of God!—among other objections.[13]
Perhaps some theists haven’t seriously considered these reasons, though, and so they won’t give such theists good reason to doubt. For those theists who have considered them well enough, if they have a good response to them, then they won’t be good reasons for these theists to doubt either; but if they lack good responses, then these doubts might prevent their belief in God from being rational.[14]
4. Conclusion
In sum, perhaps belief in God could be “properly basic.” However, whether belief in God is in fact properly basic for a person depends on whether they have strong reasons to doubt, and how well they respond to those reasons.
Notes
[1] An argument is a set of reasons or propositions (i.e., premises) which provides reason or support to accept another proposition (i.e., a conclusion). For more on the notion of “argument” and ordinary case examples see Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf.
[2] Although this essay focuses on how specifically belief in God may or may not require arguments for such a belief to be reasonable, this is not the only kind of religious belief that might be appropriate for this form of consideration. For instance, some have considered whether specifically belief in aspects of God’s nature might be reasonably believed without argument (i.e., whether God is triune or wholly one) or whether a purported special revelation from God (e.g., the Bible, Qur’an, or Bhagavad Gita) may be reasonably believed without argument. See Plantinga (2000), Baldwin and McNabb (2018), Turner (2021), and Gupta (2022) regarding these latter kinds of religious belief and whether arguments are necessary in these cases for reasonable religious belief. Defenders of the view that religious beliefs can be reasonable without arguments have primarily focused on three kinds of religious belief: belief in God’s existence, belief in His specific nature, and belief in His special revelation.
[3] Consider the following argument against belief in God:
- If belief in God is reasonable, then there are good arguments for such a belief.
- There are no good arguments for belief in God.
- Therefore, belief in God is unreasonable.
Those who think that belief in God is reasonable have often responded to the sort of argument outlined above, by rejecting premise (2). They agree that arguments are needed for belief in God to be reasonable but attempt to show such a belief is reasonable by offering arguments in support of it. But those who uphold the sort of view we’re considering in this essay reject premise (1), and so, for them, whether premise (2) is true or not is less important. For if premise (1) is false, it implies that belief in God can be reasonable without arguments.
[4] Few contemporary philosophers defend the idea that inferences may in fact go back infinitely far. Indeed, according to a PhilPeople survey of academic philosophers only around 1% of philosophers today accept something like this view: see PhilPapers (n.d.). Nevertheless, it should be noted that the view is not quite the same as the idea that arguments need to go back infinitely far.
[5] The idea that we do not need an argument for everything we believe—principally because this implies an infinite regress of offering arguments to support our belief—is the basis of perhaps the central argument for “foundationalism.” This is, roughly, the view that there are at least some beliefs we hold that are reasonable without argument: these are beliefs that provide the “foundation” for our other reasonable beliefs. See “I think, therefore I am”: Descartes on the Foundations of Knowledge by Charles Miceli, and Poston (2014) for an introduction to this view.
It is important to note, however, that some philosophers deny that there are foundational or what’s later described in this essay as “basic” beliefs: they propose that our beliefs are part of a web or system of beliefs and that the extent to which they’re reasonable depends on how well they cohere together and provide mutual support. This view is known as “coherentism.” See Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge by Thomas Metcalf for an introduction to this view.
[6] For instance, some believers base their religious beliefs on versions of the cosmological or design arguments: see Cosmological Arguments for the Existence of God and Design Arguments for the Existence of God by Thomas Metcalf. There are many other arguments for theism: many are introduced in the Philosophy of Religion category of essays.
[7] As mentioned above in note 2, some philosophers think that arguments are needed for belief in God to be reasonable and others who think that such arguments are not needed for belief in God to be reasonable. In the philosophical literature, those who uphold the former view are often referred to as upholding “theistic evidentialism.” Whereas those who uphold the latter view are often referred to as upholding “reformed epistemology.” This latter view was coined by Alvin Plantinga due to the influence of Reformed theologians, particularly John Calvin (1509-1564), on this approach to religious epistemology. See Dougherty and Tweedt (2015) on the difference and overlap between these perspectives. For the paradigmatic cases of reformed epistemology see Alston (1991) and Plantinga (2000); for theistic evidentialism see Swinburne (2004). A different type of potential justification for religious beliefs appeals to mystical experiences, which are understood to be a different type of experience than the experiences that advocates of the “proper basicality” of religious beliefs typically appeal to; see Philosophy of Mysticism: Do Mystical Experiences Justify Religious Beliefs? by Matthew Sanderson.
[8] Alvin Plantinga famously began articulating this idea in his book God and Other Minds (1967). Plantinga later developed the view in his article “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?” (1981) and then further still in his chapter “Reason and Belief in God” (1983). This set of works is often referred to as the “earlier Plantinga” with respect to reformed epistemology. The work on reformed epistemology of the “later Plantinga” is fleshed out in his Warranted Christian Belief (2000). This book comprises the final element of his “warrant trilogy”, with the two previous works in the trilogy Warrant: The Current Debate (1993) and Warrant and Proper Function (1993) being on epistemology or the theory of knowledge, but not applied to religious beliefs. Plantinga applied the insights of these two books on epistemology to religious epistemology in Warranted Christian Belief (2000).
[9] More specifically, Plantinga argues that belief in God can be “warranted” to a degree sufficient for one to know that God exists. His argument is grounded in the idea that “warrant” (i.e., that property enough of which turns a true belief into knowledge: “warrant” is a proposed improvement on the idea that “epistemic justification” is necessary for knowledge: see The Gettier Problem & the Definition of Knowledge by Andrew Chapman and Epistemic Justification: What is Rational Belief? by Todd R. Long) just so long as one’s belief is the product of truth-aimed properly functioning faculties in congenial environments for those faculties. Plantinga proposes that if God exists then God would have probably made knowledge of Himself available to us by giving us an ability of faculty to know Him which, in following John Calvin, he calls a sensus divinitatis (i.e., “sense of divinity”). If that faculty works properly in the right circumstances, he argues belief in God can be warranted without argument to a degree sufficient for knowledge. Plantinga goes on to extend his argument for specifically Christian theistic belief, which includes belief in God as triune and the Bible as God’s revelation: see Plantinga (2000).
More recently, Turner (2021) has argued the same for Islamic theism, primarily based on the concept of fiṭra as developed by the Muslim medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), which partially resembles the idea of a sensus divinitatis. Baldwin and McNabb (2018) have also considered the extent to which this might be possible across a variety of religious traditions.
[10] This discussion here differs from Plantinga’s original way of making his point. He originally claimed that belief in God could be rational “without evidence.” But by “without evidence” he meant “without argument.” Since experiences and how things seem to be a person can be evidence, it was misleading for him to put his view this way: e.g., when someone believes there’s a God based on an experience of the night sky, that experience is their evidence. In his later work, however, Plantinga acknowledges that experiences and seemings are evidence: see Plantinga (1993), especially chapter 10.
[11] The theory of rationality appealed to in this essay is closer to what’s called a “phenomenal conservative” approach to reformed epistemology than the traditional Plantingian approach developed in his (2000). According to phenomenal conservatism, a person is justified in believing that p, if it seems to them that p and they have no sufficient defeater for (or reason to doubt) the belief that p, see Huemer (2007).
It is important to understand here what is meant by a “seeming” and what we mean by a “defeater.” A “seeming” is a mental state or experience in which a certain proposition “appears” to a subject to be true e.g., it appears (seems) to me <that there is a tree> before me. A “defeater” for a given belief is a form of “counterevidence.” It can either be “rebutting,” i.e., something that gives us reason for thinking that a belief is false, or “undercutting,” i.e., something that undermines or takes away our reason for taking the belief to be true.
The point being developed here is roughly the thought that belief in God could be justified or rational along the lines of phenomenal conservatism’s theory of justification, absent any sufficient defeater. See Sudduth (2008) on the notion of “defeaters.” For more on the phenomenal conservative approach to reformed epistemology see Tucker (2011), and Gage Paul and McAllister (2020).
[12] Some of the most important objections to the idea that belief in God can be properly basic are: (1) the Great Pumpkin objection, (2) the religious diversity objection, and (3) the disanalogy objection. (1) is the sort of objection under consideration in this essay. For more detail on this objection see Scott (2014).
Regarding (2), this is the objection that theists of different types each claim to experience God but they differ in their beliefs about the God being experienced. For instance, Christian theists claim to have had an experience of Christ as God, Hindu theists an experience of Brahman, and Muslim theists an experience of Allah. The objection is that theists who claim to have had an experience of God as Christ, Brahman, or Allah, and are aware of such disagreement cannot reasonably trust their tradition-specific experiences of God without recourse to an argument. This means that their beliefs in God cannot be properly basic because they must be based on an argument that gives the relevant theist good reason for taking their own experience as trustworthy.
Concerning (3), this objection contends that there are important disanalogies between ordinary perceptual beliefs and belief in God, such that the former can be properly basic but not the latter.
See Bolos and Scott (2015) for a discussion of these three objections. Also see Moon (2016) for an overview of recent work on these and other objections.
[13] For introductions to these arguments given to believe there is not, or probably is not, a God, see The Problem of Evil by Thomas Metcalf and Divine Hiddenness by David Bayless. A case against trusting religious beliefs formed and held on the basis of religious experiences can be developed from observations about the diversity of religious experiences: many people do not have religious experiences and, when people have religious experiences, their experiences vary widely and so there are good reasons to doubt beliefs formed from religious experiences: see The Epistemology of Disagreement by Jonathan Matheson for the basis of this type of argument.
[14] As such, it may well be the case that arguments are needed for some believers in God to dispel objections raised against their belief in God. However, this needn’t be the case for every kind of believer. For instance, the average believer in God among ordinary folk might not be very well aware of the objections to belief in God or may lack the proper tools needed to respond to them. For these believers, it’s plausible to think that they’re acting reasonably in trusting others in their community who can and perhaps have responded to these objections. See Sennett (1993) and Ruloff (2003) concerning this distinction between ordinary and reflective believers, and the epistemic duties that may apply to one but not the other.
References
Alston, W. (1991). Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. New York: Cornell University Press.
Baldwin, E. and McNabb, T. (2018). Plantingian Religious Epistemology and World Religions: Problems and Perspectives. London: Lexington Books.
Bolos, A. and Scott, K. (2015). Reformed Epistemology. In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Dougherty, T. and Tweedt, C. (2015). “Religious Epistemology,” Philosophy Compass 10(8):547-559.
Gage Paul, L. and McAllister, B. (2020). “Phenomenal Conservatism.” In J. DePoe and T. McNabb (eds.), Debating Christian Religious Epistemology (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 61-81.
Gupta, A. “Are There De Jure Objections to Mādhvic belief?,” Religious Studies 58(4):732-744.
Huemer, M. (2007). “Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74(1):30-55.
Moon, A. (2016). “Recent Work in Reformed Epistemology,” Philosophy Compass 11(12):879-891.
PhilPapers. (N.d.). Survey Results: Justification: Reliabilism, Nonreliabilist Foundationalism, Infinitism, or Coherentism? Philpeople.org.
Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plantinga, A. (2000). Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press.
Poston, T. (2014). Foundationalism. In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Ruloff, C.P. (2003). “Evidentialism, Warrant, and The Division of Epistemic Labor,” Philosophia 31(1-2):185-203.
Scott, K. (2014). “Return of The Great Pumpkin,” Religious Studies 50(3):297-308.
Sennet, James. (1993). “Reformed Epistemology and Epistemic Duty.” In E.S. Radcliffe and C.J. White (eds.), Faith and Practice: Essays on Justifying Religious Belief (Chicago, Open Court Publishing), pp. 196-207.
Sudduth, M. (2008). Defeaters in Epistemology. In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Swinburne, R. (2004). The Existence of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tucker, C. (2011). “Phenomenal Conservatism and Evidentialism in Religious Epistemology.” In K.J. Clark and R. VanArragon (eds.), Evidence and Religious Belief (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 52-74.
Turner, J.B. (2021). “An Islamic Account of Reformed Epistemology,” Philosophy East and West 71(3):767-792.
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About the Author
Jamie B. Turner is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Philosophy of Religion, University of Birmingham. His main philosophical interests are in religious epistemology and Islamic analytic philosophy of religion. bham.academia.edu/JamieBTurner
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