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Reformed Epistemology in a Jamesian Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Terrence W. Tilley
Terrence W. Tilley*
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Abstract

This essay argues that the reformed epistemologists (William Alston, Alvin Plantinga) have not (yet) sustained claims in religious epistemology significantly more extensive than William James did in the Varieties. It argues that even if reformed epistemologists show that religious belief can have a positive epistemic status, their approach may finally lead to relativism (given that religious traditions generate contradictory religious beliefs) because it offers no method for finding which, if any, concrete religious beliefs might be preferable to hold or in which religious practices one should engage, if any, and because it fails to distinguish between original and derived religious belief. I suggest that more attention must be paid to “social epistemology” if religious epistemology is to go significantly beyond James's accomplishments.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 84 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1992

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References

1 This and the following three quotations are from James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Collier, 1961), 331.Google Scholar What James applies here to mystical experience applies without qualification to what he elsewhere calls “original experience” (e.g., Varieties, 25, quoted below). For present purposes, the allegedly “unique” characteristics of “mystical experience” are irrelevant.

2 James, , Varieties, 335.Google Scholar

3 “Reformed Epistemology and Religious Fundamentalism: How Basic Are Our Basic Beliefs?” Modern Theology 6/3 (04 1990): 238ff.Google Scholar I am grateful to Alvin Plantinga for pointing out an ambiguity in that paper corrected here; I do not claim that he would endorse what follows.

4 In what follows I will focus on Plantinga and Alston, two of the most noted members of this group, as paradigmatic, and on their argument for the positive epistemic status of religious belief. While there are distinctive nuances to each position, and specific claims of one that the other might not accept, they share a basic perspective that is the core of reformed epistemology. Their position is a naturalistic, epistemic reliabilism, i.e., if a belief is reliably formed (formed by proper engagement in a reliable practice), then it has warrant. The most important difference is that Alston has distanced himself from Plantinga on the issue of whether a reliably formed belief is ipso facto a justified belief (Alston thinks not; see his Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989], 6Google Scholar).

5 Descriptively, there are two sorts of beliefs in an individual's noetic structure basic and non-basic. ‘Basic beliefs” are those not based on other beliefs an individual holds, but which an individual acquires in other ways. Non-basic beliefs are those which are derived from or based on other beliefs. Normatively, one's beliefs can be proper or improper. Properly basic beliefs are those beliefs which are warranted on grounds other than one's other beliefs, for example, because they were reliably formed in response to stimuli. Properly derived beliefs are those beliefs which are warranted on the basis of other properly formed (or derived) beliefs, for example by deduction of a conclusion from a premise.

6 Plantinga, Alvin, “Reason and Belief in God” in Plantinga, A. and NWolterstorff, , eds., Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 76.Google Scholar Compare Chisholm, Roderick M., The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 65.Google Scholar

7 Alston, William P., “Religious Experience as a Ground of Religious Belief” in Runzo, J. and Ihara, C. K., eds., Religious Experience and Religious Belief (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 33.Google Scholar

8 Compare Steuer, Axel D., “The Epistemic Status of Theistic Belief,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55/2 (Summer 1987): 254.Google Scholar

9 Plantinga, 77; also see Alston, William P., “Plantinga's Epistemology of Religious Belief” in Tomberlin, J. E. and van Inwagen, P., eds., Alvin Plantinga (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 301.Google Scholar

10 This is discussed in Tilley, “Reformed Epistemology,” 240-41.

11 I am not suggesting that Plantinga is a subjectivist here. But in cash value terms, is there any difference between measuring beliefs by criteria not fixed by our agreement and which are contested among cognizers and measuring beliefs by criteria fixed by those cognizers who do agree? I think this a distinction without a difference. Niether account prohibits further efforts to extend agreement on either the criteria or on recognizing who or what fixes them.

12 Perhaps his most accessible argument for this approach is in “A ‘Doxastic Practice’ Approach to Epistemology” in Clay, Marjorie and Lehrer, Keith, eds., Knowledge and Skepticism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989), 1–26.Google Scholar The present essay differs in its criticism from that of Swain, Marshall, “Alston's Internalistic Externalism” in Tomberlin, James, ed., Philosophical Perspectives (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1988), 466–67.Google Scholar Swain claims that the “mystic is not justified in the belief that there is a supreme being … because the (objective) adequacy of the grounds is completely obscure and hidden” (467). The obvious counterargument is that it is not at all clear on what grounds Swain could base his claim; another mystic (an epistemic peer of the mystic) might be in position to find Swain's claim simply false. Exactly what Swain's claim that justification requires anyone to have accessibility to anyone else's grounds is an unwarrantably stiff epistemic requirement.

13 Alston, , “Plantinga's Epistemology,” 303.Google Scholar

14 Alston, , “Religious Experience,” 33.Google Scholar

15 Alston, , “Plantinga's Epistemology,” 308Google Scholar, and “Religious Experience,” 47-48.

16 Of course, this would not settle the issue of which basic beliefs are proper. It may provide a reasonable way to delimit the relevant epistemic community which should be considered in settling the issue.

17 What follows is closely based on Plantinga, “Epistemic Probability and Evil” in Olivetti, Marco, ed., Archivo di Filosofi (Rome: Cedam, 1988), 578.Google Scholar

18 See Alston, , Epistemic Justification, 11.Google Scholar

19 I have used “entitlement” rather than “justification” in that “justification can mark a delimitation of the social component of epistemology to the belief-forming process or method, whereas “entitlement” marks an extension of the social component to the belief-validation process (see Goldman, Alvin, Epistemology and Cognition [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986]).Google Scholar

20 See Tilley, , “Reformed Epistemology,” 242–44.Google Scholar

21 Alston, , “A ‘Doxastic Practice’ Approach,” 17.Google Scholar

22 Following Christian, William, Oppositions of Religious Doctrines (New York: Herder, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Doctrines of Religious Communities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, I presume that religious doctrines are incompatible or entail incompatible claims.

23 As Alston argues in “A ‘Doxastic Practice’ Approach,” 24-25.

24 James, , Varieties, 24–25.Google Scholar

25 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, ed. Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G., trans. Paul, Denis and Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969)Google Scholar, 16e. Wittgenstein's denial of the possibility of flight to the moon has, of course, been falsified.

26 Alston has noted that we need to examine concrete practices to see if participating in them is rational; but such examination has been carried out in various ways by religionists without achieving any conclusions (see “A ‘Doxastic Practice’ Approach, 23). However, until such an analysis is offered, I do not see how the reformed epistemologists can avoid taking the short step from epistemic pluralism to radical relativism.

Maser, Jack D. and Gallup, Gordon G. Jr., “Theism as a By-Product of Natural Selection,” Journal of Religion 70/4 (10 1990): 515–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, have argued that the propensity to believe in God (or, as I would prefer, supernatural/salvationist forms of religious belief) could be a by-product of natural selection. They offer a form of their hypothesis that is empirically testable. Their hypothesis provides an alternative explanation for the reliability of such belief, one which does not require the postulate of a supernatural realm. But it, too does not explain the diversity of religious belief; and if this is a byproduct of natural selection, it is unclear what someone who has or holds or desires such a belief ought to do about it.

27 For this distinction, see Goldman, , Epistemology and Cognition, esp. 93–95.Google Scholar

28 Alston also argues for a preference for established doxastic practices (“A ‘Doxastic Practice’ Approach,” 16-17). If religious innovators form new practices, then they would have to prove themselves. This seems a sensible rule of thumb, but the distinction is not relevant to the present argument which only requires showing real epistemic differences between novel and established practices.

29 My colleague, John Kelsay, has suggested that I overstate my point. The reformed epistemologists could say that a derivative believer is entitled to her belief unless that belief is defeated. I have not shown that any actual religious belief is defeated or unwarranted, but only that religious beliefs are in conflict. Hence, even the derivative believer is entitled to hold his believe because it is not undefeated.

Within the context of Plantinga's early approach, this objection seems entirely correct. If an individual has undefeated warrant for her belief, then she is entitled to hold it. However, if warrant is based in a reliable belief-forming process or doxastic practice (cited here from Alston; Plantinga seems to take a similar tack in “Epistemic Probability and Evil” and elsewhere), the objection does not hold. If two people form contrasting or contradictory beliefs by participating in the same doxastic practice, such as John and Jane did in the example above, then something has gone wrong. Both clearly have some warrant for their belief, but neither has clear entitlement to it. It is then incumbent on them to investigate the belief-forming practice, their participation in it, etc., to determine which person (if either) is entitled to his or her belief (and, I would add, to be entitled to act on it). If they are participating in different doxastic practices, then the question of the relative reliability of the practices emerges, as discussed earlier.

30 Alston, , “A ‘Doxastic Practice’ Approach,” 19.Google Scholar

31 James, , Varieties, 379.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 355.

33 If an account of warrant and entitlement tends to have the rhetorical effect of legitimating an individual who thinks he already has all the religious truth he needs or full entitlement to her religious beliefs in a religiously pluralistic world, that account would amount to a justification of religious and theological isolationism. A common effect of such an approach would be to legitimate individuals' propensity to ignore other voices in the ongoing conversation of humanity about religious belief. I cannot offer an argument here, but will simply state a position: such isolationism is as bad an approach in religion as it is in morals and politics. For if we cannot listen to and learn from each other in these areas where entitlement is insecure and where “judgment calls” and exercises of phronesis are the order of the epistemic day, we cannot learn at all in these areas. William Lad Sessions has convincingly argued that such interreligious dialogue may even be a duty for at least some Christians even those of a very conservative stripe. See his “Plantinga's Box,” Faith and Philosophy 8/1 (01 1991): 51–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

I am indebted to the comments and suggestions of Scott Davison who responded to an earlier version of this paper at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy of Religion, February 1991; and to numerous people who raised points in discussion there, and at a Colloquium sponsored by the Florida State University Philosophy Department in October 1990, where the first version of this material was read. A shortened form of the present version was read to the Philosophy of Religion Section at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Kansas City, November 1991. The usual disclaimers apply.