Plantinga’s Epistemology of Religious Belief

Abstract

I shall restrict this paper to a consideration of Plantinga’s explicit and developed epistemological views conccrning religious belief. Thus I will not be discussing his treatment of arguments for the existence of God or of the problem of evil. No doubt, his discussion of these matters can be seen as contributing to the development of an epistemology of religious belief. Thus the final upshot of God and Other Minds ¹ is that sincc the topological argument, the best argument for the existence of God, is subject to difficulties of just the same sort as the argument from analogy for the existence of other minds, the best argument for that conclusion, the two beliefs have a similar epistemological status; hence if the latter is rational so is the former. Nevertheless, prior to the recent essays that will be considered in this paper, Plantinga has not attempted an explicit account of the epistemological status of religious belief. I shall be concentrating on this recent attempt to do so. The essays in question are ‘Is Belief in God Rational?’ [4],² ‘The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology’ [5], and ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’ [6].