Alvin Plantinga’s Properly Basic Beliefs
Alvin Plantinga contends that Christianity is a basic belief, a foundational presupposition. He says that Christians like himself “may start with Christian beliefs and theorize on the basis of them.”[1] He compares our awareness of God to our awareness when we “see a tree.”[2] Religion thus stands, according to Plantinga, on equal footing epistemically with our vision, hearing, and other senses.
I beg to differ. Everyone with a normal brain trusts his or her senses. Granted, a person might exclaim, “I couldn’t believe my eyes!” But that remark, even if meant literally, which it rarely is, doesn’t reflect a general mistrust of our senses. If we saw something so shocking that we questioned whether we really saw it, our first reaction would be to take a second look. That recourse shows the depth of trust we place in our senses. We might ask other potential witnesses what they saw, which shows that we continue to trust human vision, even if our own is in doubt.
The credence humans place in religious faith is comparatively weak. Surveys in Sweden, for instance, show that nearly 80 percent of citizens reject religious faith.[3] That’s a statistic you will never find with respect to vision or hearing. If someone distrusted his vision so thoroughly that he had his eyes surgically removed, we’d deem him insane—and handicapped. In contrast, hundreds of millions of people worldwide have no religion, yet they’re among the most intellectually acute and socially adept people on the planet.[4]
Prudent thinkers, despite trusting their senses and cognition, do not trust them uncritically. Yet, Plantinga feels entitled to forgo critical precautions when embracing religious beliefs. He assures us that if someone experiences the presence of the divine, perhaps in a vision of Christ while gazing at a starry sky, that experience can be accepted as basic. Plantinga holds that even without visions or any trace of empirical evidence, relying solely on an inner conviction, belief in God can legitimately overrule contrary evidence and arguments.
According to Plantinga, if we are justified in believing that other people have minds, then we are justified in believing in God.[5] That’s wrong. The belief in other minds has the principle of parsimony working strongly for it, whereas belief in the supernatural is highly unparsimonious. The empirical case for other minds is compelling. In contrast, the God hypothesis is empirically unwarranted and, in some iterations, logically incoherent.
Plantinga subsequently abandoned his so-called parity argument, but only because he realized that he was offering an ostensibly evidentialist argument, whereas his thesis is that a basic belief in God requires no argument. Note, however, that Plantinga still relies on reason to promote his claim that religious belief is basic, so he is—as surely as are the evidentialists—providing arguments to warrant belief in God.
Most Christians I meet are quick to offer one or more evidential defenses for their beliefs, and the more literate among them recommend apologetic books. That is not the behavior of someone expressing a basic belief. The moment a Christian even so much as silently contemplates an inferential defense of her belief in God, she implicitly undermines her claim that her belief is basic.
Plantinga calls his defense of religion reformed epistemology in honor of Calvinist reformers, adding, “What the Reformers meant to hold is that it is entirely right, rational, reasonable, and proper to believe in God without any evidence or argument at all.”[6] This is also Plantinga’s position.
Plantinga acknowledges that a basic belief in God is potentially defeasible. That is, the belief in God could, in principle, be revised or discarded in the face of contrary evidence. Yet, one is warranted to believe in God, he says, unless compelling evidence against belief is presented: “To be successful, a potential defeater for [a basic belief] must have as much or more warrant as [the basic belief] does.”[7]+
On Plantinga’s view, the degree of warrant for a basic belief does not depend on objective evidence. If it did, it would not be a basic belief. It would instead be an inferential (non-basic) belief. According to Plantinga, the stronger one’s commitment to a basic, non-evidentialist belief in God, the stronger one would require the anti-God evidence to be before abandoning belief.
Plantinga pins a special label on the mechanism by which we acquire belief in God. He calls it sensus divinitatis (“divine sense”), a Latin term borrowed from the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin. Even if we can’t see, hear, touch, or smell God, this divine sense allegedly lets us psychically detect him.
Hmm. Well, alright then, perhaps atheism could be a basic belief acquired from a hypothetical cognitive faculty called the sensus atheos. Theologian Glenn Peoples nixes that notion. He says the sensus divinitatis is a gift from God, but if there is no god, there could be no counterpart, no sensus atheos: “Atheism doesn’t get to help itself to the notion of a properly basic belief about God’s nonexistence. Any claim that something is a properly basic belief hould be followed up with a plausible account of how, if it’s a properly basic belief, it managed to obtain that status.” [8]
I agree. Yet the burden of proof falls on the believer as surely as it falls on the nonbeliever. We need a convincing account of the sensus divinitatis. What precisely is it? By what process did we acquire it? How can we test its reliability? We need more than a “just-so” story.
Peoples replies that the sensus divinitatis is reliable because God made it so, and we know that through our sensus divinitatis. This reminds me of the old affirmation, “I know God exists because the Bible tells me so, and I know the Bible is true because God inspired it.” Peoples’s just-so story, which is the same as Plantinga’s, is viciously circular reasoning. Merely stipulating that God gave us a sensus divinitatis carries no more weight than merely stipulating that God exists. It just takes longer to say.
No neuro-cognitive evidence substantiates the claim that humans are equipped with a sensus divinitatis or sensus atheos or any specialized brain module for cranking out metaphysical insights. Even if we had such a brain module, any propositions it induced us to believe would not be immune to evidentiary evaluation. Theists or atheists who willfully neglect to evaluate the evidence are irrational.
Plantinga, when challenged to provide evidence for our alleged divine sense, proposes that we survey the general population. The more common a belief in God is, he suggests, the more likely it is to be a product of the sensus divinitatis. One wonders whether Plantinga’s “majority rules” solution was motivated by his living in a society where believers constitute 90 percent of the population.
Here’s the kicker. We already know that Plantinga would never trust the survey results if they contradicted his conclusion. He declared that all humans have a sensus divinitatis, even if they insist otherwise. He attributes atheism to a corruption of the sensus divinitatis by sin. Because sin, in the Christian worldview, represents a corruption of one’s whole being, atheism is associated with moral as well as cognitive defects. The philosopher Matt McCormick denounces Plantinga’s maneuver as ad hominem, a “dirty trick.”[9]
It’s no wonder that Time magazine described Plantinga as “America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God.”[10] He presents a dolled-up version of the same tiresome tripe that fundamentalist preachers have long bellowed from their pulpits.
Plantinga’s epistemology is couched in sophisticated philosophical jargon. It’s delivered with academic urbanity and is taken seriously by bright people. But at its core lies an appeal to the ever-present human impulse to shield oneself from counterarguments, claim special faculties, and denigrate adversaries. Reformed epistemology, in practice, encourages contending sects to hunker down and neglect philosophical due diligence. As philosopher Michael Martin predicted, it will have a balkanizing effect on what should ideally be open-minded discussions.
Plantinga hoped to show that belief in God is rational even without supporting arguments. If you lived in a cave fifty thousand years ago, belief in supernatural beings without supporting arguments would not be diagnostic of irrationality. But in our modern interconnected world, where information is available at our fingertips, belief in God without rational supporting arguments is symptomatic of, at best, intellectual laziness or, at worst, ideological hackery.
[1] Quoted in: Kelly James Clark, “Philosophers Who Believe,” Calvin College, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20120205182856/http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/writings/pwbintro.htm.
[2] Plantinga, “Intellectual Sophistication and Basic Belief in God,” Faith and Philosophy 3 (1986): 306–12.
[3] “Sweden ‘Least Religious’ Nation in Western World,” The Local, April 13, 2015, https://www.thelocal.se/20150413/swedes-least-religious-in-western-world.
[4] “Worldwide there may be as many as a billion atheists, although social stigma, political pressure, and intolerance make accurate polling difficult.” Matt McCormick, “Atheism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/atheism/.
[5] Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 187.
[6] Quoted in: James F. Sennet, ed., The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1998), 103.
[7] Plantinga referred in this statement to a defeater. A defeater is a counterargument against a claim. Defeaters come in two varieties. An undercutting defeater removes evidential support offered for a claim, whereas a rebutting defeater provides evidential support for an opposing claim. ♣
Source of Plantinga quotation: Plantinga, “Intellectual Sophistication and Basic Belief in God,” 306–12.
[8] Glenn Peoples, “Could Atheism Be a Properly Basic Belief?” Right Reason, May 17, 2011, http://rightreason.org/2011/could-atheism-be-a-properly-basic-belief/.
[9] Matt McCormick, Professor in Philosophy, CSUS, “Objections to Taking God as Basic, Reformed Epistemology pt. 3,” April 14, 2014, YouTube video, 26:56, https://youtu.be/wh04l7nJ3GI.
[10] “Modernizing the Case for God” Time, April 7, 1980, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,921990,00.html.
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