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)
“We are told to maintain constitutions because they are constitutions, and what is laid down in those constitutions?... Certain great fundamental ideas of right are common to the world, and ... all laws of man’s making which trample on these ideas, are null and void—wrong to obey, right to disobey. The Constitution of the United States recognizes human slavery; and makes the souls of men articles of purchase and of sale.”
—Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932)
“Make-believe is the avenue to much of the young child’s early understanding. He sorts out impressions and tries out ideas that are foundational to his later realistic comprehension. This private world sometimes is a quiet, solitary
world. More often it is a noisy, busy, crowded place where language grows, and social skills develop, and where perseverance and attention-span expand.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)