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World–Views and the Epistemic Foundations of Theism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Joseph Runzo
Joseph Runzo
Affiliation:
Chapman College, Orange, California
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Extract

Epistemological issues have inevitably been perennial issues for theism. For any claim to have insight into the nature and acts of the divine requires some sort of substantiation. And the appeal to faith typically made to meet this demand is often unconvincing. This raises a fundamental question: what could constitute proper grounds for theistic belief? In attempting to anwser this question, we will need to address the underlying epistemic issue of what justifies commitment to any world–view.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 1989 , pp. 31 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

page 31 note 2 Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning, Natural Religion, Pt. I.Google Scholar

page 33 note 1 Ambrose, Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.Google Scholar

page 33 note 2 An excellent account of evidentialism and its historical background is given by Nicholas Wolterstorff in his Introduction to Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Plantinga, Alvin and Wolterstorff, Nicholas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 5–7Google Scholar, and his article, ‘Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?’, in the same volume, pp. 136–40. However, Wolterstorff sometimes writes as if evidentialism inherently undermines theism, referring, e.g. to ‘the Evidentialist's Challenge to Theism’. But Locke, and contemporary philosophers like Richard Swinburne, defend theism precisely on evidentialist grounds.

page 34 note 1 See Plantinga, Alvin, Is Belief in God Rational?', in Rationality and Belief, ed. Delaney, C. F. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p. 25Google Scholar, and ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Faith and Rationality, p. 60.

page 34 note 2 In general, I do not think that coherentism is viable. But even taking coherentism as a basis for the evidentialist objection to regarding theistic beliefs as basic, I think Plantinga rightly suggests that ‘he question is whether the theist's belief in God can plausibly be thought to cohere with his corrected doxastic system. Could a theist be such that if he were an honest and careful truth seeker, unmoved by greed, fear, anger, lust, desire for comfort, and their like, he would still believe that there is such a person as God, and believe that this proposition has greater chance of being true than any of its competitors?… there seems … not the slightest reason to think that he could not’. (‘Coherentism and the Evidentialist Objection to Belief in God,’ Rationality, Religious Belief and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Audi, Robert and Wainwright, William J. [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986], p. 133.)Google Scholar

page 35 note 1 Plantinga, , ‘Is Belief in God Rational?’, p. 27.Google Scholar Sometimes Plantinga seems to be arguing, as here, that belief in God's existence is itself (properly) basic. As we shall see, he comes to hold the view that the belief that God exists rests on other theistic beliefs which are themselves properly basic.

page 35 note 2 Plantinga, , ‘Reason and Belief in God’, p. 81.Google Scholar Cf. ‘On Taking Belief in God as Basic’, Religious Experience and Religious Belief: Essays in the Epistemology of Religion, ed. Runzo, Joseph and Ihara, Craig K. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

page 35 note 3 Plantinga, , ‘On taking Belief in God as Basic’, pp. 10–14.Google Scholar.

page 36 note 1 Plantinga himself does not deny that there could not be adequate reasons for those theistic beliefs which an individual takes as basic, only that there need not be adequate (or any) reasons for fundamental theistic claims. He thinks that some version of the Ontological Argument provides adequate reasons for belief in God's existence. (See The Nature of Necessity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974], ch. X, especially pp. 213–17.)Google Scholar Against this, I argue below that the theist must have basic theistic beliefs which are based on faith and cannot be based on reasons.

page 36 note 2 See e.g. Plantinga, , ‘Reason and Belief in God’, pp. 78 ff.Google Scholar and ‘On Taking Belief in God as Basic,’ pp. 12 ff.

page 37 note 1 Plantinga, , ‘Is Belief in God Rational?’, p. 27.Google Scholar

page 37 note 2 Plantinga, , ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’, in Nous, (1981), 50.Google Scholar

page 37 note 3 Ibid. p. 46.

page 37 note 4 I will use the term ‘world–view’ to denote all the cognitive elements, including beliefs, but also concepts, laws of logic, and so on, which the mind brings to experience.

page 39 note 1 For instance, in ‘In Search of the Foundations of Theism’, (in Faith and Philosophy, II, 4 [1985], Philip Quinn points out that propositions like [God made all this] could start as properly basic, entailing that God exists, and then the theist's noetic structure evolve such that [God exists] becomes properly basic and propositions like [God created all this] are believed on the basis of entailment (pp. 478–9)

page 39 note 2 Sec e.g. Alston, , [Christian Experience and Christian Belief] in Faith and Rationality, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar Terrence Penelhum argues for a qualified version of this type of argument, which he calls a Parity Argument in God and Skepticism: A Study in Skepticism and Fideism (Dordrecht, Boston: D. Reidel, 1983), see esp. Ch. 7.Google Scholar

page 40 note 1 See Alston, , ‘Religious Experience as a Ground of Religious Belief’, in Religious Experience and Religious Belief p. 44Google Scholar, and ‘Plantinga's Epistemology of Religious Belief’, in Alvin Plantinga, ed. Tomberlin, James and Dordrecht, Peter Van Inwagen, Boston: D. Reidel, 1985) pp. 306–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 40 note 2 Hanson, NorwoodPatterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the conceptual Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958:, p. 19Google Scholar and Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1962) p. 115–16.Google Scholar

page 41 note 1 I give an extended argument for this analysis of perception in ‘The Propositional Structure of Perception’, American Philosophical Quarterly, XIV (07 1977) and ‘The Radical Conceptualization of Perceptual Experience’, American Philosophical Quarterly, XIX 07 1982).

page 41 note 2 Alston makes a similar point – but does not draw the general conclusion I do about the role of conceptual schemas – in ‘Religious Experience as a Ground of Religious Belief’, pp. 41–2, and ‘Christian Experience and Christian Belief’, pp. 117–18.

page 43 note 1 Phillips, D. Z., The Concept of Prayer (New York: Shocken, 1966), p. 60.Google Scholar See also Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York: Shocken, 1971), p. 29.

page 43 note 2 Phillips, , Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, p. 1Google Scholar and Religion Without Explanation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. 150.

page 43 note 3 Cupitt, Don, Taking Leave of God (New York: Crossroad, 1980), pp. 93, 96, and 164, respectively.Google Scholar

page 44 note 1 See Reason, Relativism and God (London: Macmillan Press; New York: St Martin's 1986) pp. 175–81, Ch. 7 and pp. 234–6. I argue specifically against Phillip's non–cognitivist view in ‘Religion, Relativism and Conceptual Schemas’, The Heythrop journalXXIV (1983). In the Hindu tradition, the great monotheist Ramanuja explicitly argues for a cognitivist view of religious language and Hindu scriptural tests. See Julius Lipner, The Face of Trutht (London: Macmillan Press; Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 16 ff.

page 44 note 2 Tillich, Paul, The Dynamics of Faith, p. 1.Google Scholar Cf. Tillich, , Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), Vol. 1, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

page 45 note 1 This is not to suggest that our beliefs are under our direct voluntary control. Rather, what we have in our power is the choice of actions or attitudes, such as studying information, getting a second opinion, or the willingness to listen to opposing ideas, which then contribute causally to our acquisition of beliefs. Thus, we have the ability to assume an attitude of trust, and to take an ultimate concern in, matters involving certain fundamental beliefs which come to form the foundational beliefs of the new world-view which we adopt.

page 45 note 2 On the distinction between internal and external questions see Carnap, Rudolf, ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’, in Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, ed. Linsky, Leonard (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1952), p. 209.Google Scholar

page 46 note 1 While questions about whether some state of affairs obtains are internal to a world-view, different world–views can share some of the same conceptual resources, and if there is sufficient overlap, the same internal question of truth and falsity, or of possibility or probability, can be asked and assessed within those different but related world–views. See note 2 below.

page 46 note 2 This does not mean that an argument for (or against) theism can only be applicable within one world–view. Many world–views will overlap, sharing certain conceptual resources. So a given theistic argument might be coherent within a number of sufficiently related world–views. But it will have no force with respect to world–views not sharing the requisite concepts and presuppositions. This applies to probabilistic arguments for or against theism. y, J. L. argues in The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)Google Scholar, that the balance of probability lies against theism. And Swinburne, Richard argues in The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)Google Scholar, that the truth of theism is more probable than not. But truth–claims are only probable vis–à–vis some assumed world–view or relevantly similar world–views. Hence probabilistic arguments also have limited force, since assessing the probability of theistic truth–claims is useless against criticism external to the world–views which are presupposed.

page 46 note 3 Anselm, , Proslogium in St Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. Deane, S. N. (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1966), p. 7.Google Scholar

page 47 note 1 James, William, ‘The Will to Believe‘, in Essays on Faith and Morals (New York: Meridian, 1974), p. 48.Google Scholar

page 47 note 2 For Alston's view, see ‘Religious Experience As a Ground of Religious Belief’, pp. 35–43. On this view as taken by Thomas Reid and the parallel view of Nicholas Wolterstorff, see Wolterstorff, , ‘Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?’, pp. 163 and 168.Google Scholar

page 47 note 3 James, , ‘The Will to Believe’, p. 42.Google Scholar

page 49 note 1 Phillips, D. Z., Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, p. 46.Google Scholar Cf. Religion Without Explanation, p. 181.Google Scholar

page 51 note 1 An extended argument for this is given in Chapter 7 of Reason, Relativism and God.