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:
“Unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that a dream is a mask for a meaning already known but deceitfully withheld from the conscious mind. In his view, dreams were communication, ideas expressed not always straightforwardly, but in the best way possible within the limits of the medium. Dreaming, in Jung’s psychology, is a constructive process.”
—Jeremy Campbell (b. 1931)
“A man of sense, though born without wit, often lives to have wit. His memory treasures up ideas and reflections; he compares them with new occurrences, and strikes out new lights from the collision. The consequence is sometimes bons mots, and sometimes apothegms.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)