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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
At least since the Enlightenment, religious thinkers in the West have sought to meet the “evidentialist” challenge, that is, to demonstrate that there is sufficient evidence to warrant a rational affirmation of the existence of God. Alvin Plantinga holds that this challenge is rooted in a foundationalist approach to epistemology which is now intellectually bankrupt. He argues that the current critique of foundationalism clears the way for a fruitful reappropriation of the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition's assertion of the “basic” nature of belief in God and its concomitant relegation of the arguments of natural theology to marginal status. After critically assessing Plantinga's proposal—especially its dependence on a nonfoundationalist theory of knowledge—this essay shifts to an analysis of the transcendental Thomist understanding of the rational underpinnings of the theist's affirmation of God's existence, with particular emphasis on the thought of Joseph Maréchal. It is argued that the latter position is better equipped to fend off possible nontheistic counterarguments—even in our current nonfoundationalist atmosphere—and, in fact, can serve as a necessary complement to Calvin's claim of a natural tendency in human beings to believe in God.
1 As quoted in Fisch, Max H., ed., Classic American Philosophers (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), pp. 139–40.Google Scholar
2 The literature on this issue is already considerable. Among the most helpful works we recommend: Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar and Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)Google Scholar, Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism And Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).Google Scholar Fora critique of the nonfoundationalist approach see Davidson, Donald, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in Meiland, J. W. and Krausz, Michael, eds., Relativism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982)Google Scholar, Grayling, A. C., The Refutation of Scepticism (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1985)Google Scholar, and my “Grounding the Human Conversation,” The Thomist (forthcoming).
3 Plantinga, Alvin, “Reason and Belief in God” in Plantinga, Alvin and Wolterstorff, Nicholas, eds., Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 48.Google Scholar
4 For example, Flew, Anthony, The Presumption of Atheism (London: Pemberton, 1976)Google Scholar and Scriven, Michael, Primary Philosophy (New York: St. Martin's, 1958).Google Scholar
5 A 686 = B714. We are employing Smith's, Norman Kemp translation of the Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin's, 1958).Google Scholar
6 Recently Hans Küng has tried his hand at reviving Kant's practical justification of God's existence. He writes: “It is not by a theoretical proof of reason, but only by a practically recognized (but completely rationally justifiable) fundamental trust on the part of the whole person, that 1 become certain that the self, human freedom and perhaps also God are not merely ideas, but ‘realities.’ All these basic questions must be answered not on the basis of pure reason but on that of living and considered practice.” Does God Exist? (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 547.Google Scholar
In response, Hans Albert pointedly remarks: “He presents as Kant's ‘great idea’ that he sought to understand God ‘as the condition for the possibility of man's moral autonomy.’ God must be presupposed in so far as one wants at all to live an ethical life sensibly. … But there is no mention in this instance of the fact that with this thinker there is a misuse of reason in the service of human desires. To postulate that which one needs is an unacceptable in the domain of practical reason as it is in the theoretical domain. But our author … has every reason to come to Kant's aid against his critics in this context; for he will employ this method of postulation (Postulieren) in a much more frivolous manner than the sober thinker of Königsberg.” Das Elend der Theologie (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1979), p. 108.Google Scholar
7 Plantinga, p. 59.
8 On the “will to control” as the underlying motif of the Modern Western Mindset, see Smith, Huston, Beyond thePost-Modern Mind (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1982), esp. pp. 77–79 and 134–38.Google Scholar
9 Plantinga, p. 62.
10 Ibid., p. 64.
11 As quoted by Plantinga, p. 65.
12 Plantinga, p. 66.
13 “The Groundlessness of Belief” in Brown, Stuart C., ed., Religion and Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 148.Google Scholar
14 Plantinga, p. 80.
15 In this context Freud's comments are typical: “And so I disagree with you when you go on to argue that man cannot in general do without the consolation of the religious illusion. … Certainly this is true of the man into whom you have instilled the sweet—or bitter-sweet—poison from childhood on. But what of the other, who has been brought up soberly? Perhaps he, not suffering from neurosis, will need no intoxicant to deaden it.” The Future Of An Illusion (New York: Liveright, 1953), p. 85.Google Scholar
16 Plantinga, p. 90.
17 Ibid., p. 77.
18 For further argument that one cannot justify “open” conversation nonfoundationally see my “Grounding The Human Conversation.” Fora scathing critique of the debilitating effects of relativism on American higher education see Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).Google Scholar Apropos of the argument in our text he writes: “Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled” (p. 41).
19 “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in Meiland, and Krausz, , p. 79.Google Scholar In a similar vein A. C. Grayling writes: “The very idea of an alternative scheme depends on a shared range of concepts and these … will be central and basic concepts at that. It follows that ‘alternative’ in ‘alternative scheme’ can only refer to superstructural rather than basic features, and accordingly that all experience recognizable as such by us has certain basic and pervasive features on which our recognition of that experience as experience turns.” The Refutation of Scepticism, p. 90.
20 “In What Sense Are Religions Conceptual Frameworks?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52/2 (June 1984), 303.Google Scholar
21 “The Epistemic Status Of Theistic Belief,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55/2 (Summer 1987), 249.Google Scholar
22 Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), p. 18.Google Scholar
23 In this context Michael Novak asserts: “The drive to understand is like a source of light rather than like a cluster of undeniable, self-evident premises or ‘pinned-down’ statements; premises and statements are its instruments, not its substance.” Belief and Unbelief (New York: Mentor, 1965), pp. 87–88.Google Scholar
24 “The concept of ‘God’ is not a grasp of God by which a person masters the mystery, but it is letting oneself be grasped by the mystery which is present yet ever distant.” Rahner, Karl, Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Seabury, 1978), p. 54.Google Scholar
25 Rahner, p. 52.
26 See the “Transcendental Dialectic” of the Critique of Pure Reason especially Book II, Ch. II. A 406 = B 433.
27 A 679 = B 707.
28 Kant tries to accomplish this task in the Critique of Practical Reason.
29 In Maréchal's own words: “Every particular volition is inspired by the natural volition of the last end. Hence no activity of our intellect, no intellectual assimilation is possible but in virtue of the deep yearning whose saturating end would be the intuition of the absolute real.” “Le dynamisme intéllectuel dans la connaissance objective,” Mélanges Maréchal I (Bruxelles: Desclée, 1950), p. 89.Google Scholar English translation in Donceel, Joseph, ed., A Maréchal Reader (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), p. 248.Google Scholar
30 Maréchal, Joseph, Le point de départ de la métaphysique V (Paris: Desclée, 1964): 412.Google ScholarE. T., Maréchal Header, p. 172.Google Scholar
31 On this issue Maréchal clearly states: “From the strictly critical point of view, a dynamic exigency, however ineluctable, establishes only, by itself alone, a subjective certitude. Therefore we must still show that the ‘reality in themselves’ of these ends, which are necessarily intended in the very existence of discursive thought, is for the knowing subject not only a dynamic exigency but a logical necessity.” Le point de départ V: 447.Google ScholarMaréchal Reader, p. 182.
32 Donceel, Joseph, The Searching Mind (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p. 69.Google Scholar
33 Maréchal argues as follows: “But when the object is God, when the objective end is identical with the Being which is necessary by itself (Pure Act) which has no other mode of reality than absolute existence, the dialectical exigency implied by the desire assumes a new scope, not merely on account of the natural desire, but on account of the nature of the desire's object. To affirm of God that he is possible is the same as to affirm that he exists, since his existence is the condition of every possibility.” Le point de départ V: 449–50.Google ScholarMaréchal Reader, p. 185.
34 The Searching Mind, p. 82.
35 Etudes sur la psychologie de mystiques I (Paris: Desclée, 1938): 120–21.Google Scholar
36 Plantinga, p. 78.
37 Contra Freud one could argue, from the transcendental Thomist perspective, that the affirmation of God's existence is not dependent on a neurotic flight from reality; on the contrary, it is the result of a desire to comprehend reality in all its mystery. It is not a projection of infantile fantasies but a consequence of a dogged determination to follow the desire to know with unflinching fidelity. Why, then, are there those who fail to feel, or at least acknowledge, the attraction of the “absolute” energizing their cognitive operations at the most basic level? The reasons are no doubt myriad, and range over a complex terrain of personal and cultural experience; however Michael Novak offers this interesting speculation: “It sometimes seems as if unbelief represents a failure of nerve. One wonders what psychological pressures, what loves, what prior decisions, induce one toward unbelief, and away from fidelity to understanding, at the very moment when understanding makes its most basic claim.” Belief and Unbelief, p. 127. In essence, Novak turns the Freudian argument on its head: unbelief, rather than belief, is attributed to a flight from the quintessential human characteristic, the pure desire to know.
38 See note 11.
39 “A11 knowing things implicitly know God in everything they know.” De Veritate 22, 2, ad, I. See also Summo Theologica I, 84, 5 and 88, 3.Google Scholar