Ideas
Reformed epistemology aims to demonstrate the failure of objections that theistic belief—and in later works of the school, full-blown Christian belief—is unjustified, unreasonable, intellectually sub-par or otherwise epistemically challenged in some way, even where one believes it without supporting argument. By contrast, many modern foundationalists, and evidentialists claim that theistic belief is rational only where one's so believing is inferentially based in propositional and/or physical evidence, and a subset of these think further that no adequate evidence is available.
Reformed epistemology seeks to defend faith as rational by demonstrating that theistic belief can be properly basic — reasonable though it is not held as an inference from other truths. Reformed epistemology grew out of the parity argument presented by Alvin Plantinga in his book God and Other Minds (1967): if believing in other minds is rational though unsupported by argument, so might believing in God be rational, even if similarly unsupported. Plantinga (2000a) would later argue that theistic belief has "warrant". Roughly, in Plantinga's theory of knowledge, warrant is that property of true beliefs that makes them knowledge. What this turns out to be, says Plantinga, is the property of being "produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly (subject to no malfunctioning) in a cognitive environment congenial for those faculties, according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth" Because there is an epistemically possible model according to which theistic belief is properly basic—i.e. the one on which God has designed our cognitive faculties such as to be disposed to form belief in God—theistic belief is warranted apart from theistic argument. Plantinga contends that this model is likely true if theistic belief is true; and on the other hand, the model is unlikely to be true if theism is false. This connection between the truth-value of theism and its positive epistemic status suggests to some that the goal of showing theistic belief to be externally rational or warranted requires reasons for supposing that theism is true (Sudduth, 2000). It should be noted that though Reformed epistemology denies that theistic arguments are necessary to rational belief in God, many of its adherents see theistic arguments of various sorts as providing that belief with additional warrant.
Read more about this topic: Reformed Epistemology
Famous quotes containing the word ideas:
“These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas.... But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy;Mnor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)