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Warranted religion: answering objections to Alvin Plantinga's epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2014

TYLER DALTON MCNABB
TYLER DALTON MCNABB*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Alvin Plantinga over the decades has developed a particular theory of warrant that would allow certain beliefs to be warranted, even if one lacked propositional arguments or evidence for them. One such belief that Plantinga focuses on is belief in God. There have been, however, numerous objections both to Plantinga's theory of warrant and to the religious application that he makes of it. In this article I address an objection from both of these categories. I first tackle an objection that attempts to show that proper function isn't a necessary condition for warrant. After tackling this, I move on to interact with the Pandora's Box Objection. This objection argues that Plantinga's epistemology is weakened by the fact that all sorts of serious religious beliefs could be warranted by using his system.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 477 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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