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:
“The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“For later in the vast gloom of cities, only there you learn
How the ideas were good only because they had to die,
Leaving you alone and skinless, a drawing by Vesalius.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“[Film noir] experiences periodic rebirth and rediscovery. Whenever we have any moment of deep societal rift or disruption in America, one of the ways we can express it is through the ideas and behavior in film noir.”
—John Briley (b. 1925)