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The Crucial Disanalogies Between Properly Basic Belief and Belief in God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Richard Grigg
Richard Grigg
Affiliation:
Sacred Heart University, Connecticut, U.S.A.
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Extract

The antifoundationalist defence of belief in God set forth by Alvin Plantinga has been widely discussed in recent years. Classical foundationalism assumes that there are two kinds of beliefs that we are justified in holding: beliefs supported by evidence, and basic beliefs. Our basic beliefs are those bedrock beliefs that need no evidence to support them and upon which our other beliefs must rest. For the foundationalist, the only beliefs that can be properly basic are either self-evident, or incorrigible, or evident to the senses. Belief in God is none of these. Thus, says the foundationalist, belief in God is justified only if there is sufficient evidence to back it up.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 389 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 My summary of Plantinga's position is based upon his ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’, Nous, XV (1981), 41–51Google Scholar, and ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Faith and Rationality, pp. 16–93, ed. Plantinga, Alvin and Wolterstorff, Nicholas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).Google Scholar

2 Grigg, Richard, ‘Theism and Proper Basicality: a Response to Plantinga’, International journal for Philosophy of Religion, XIV (1983), 123–7.Google Scholar

3 McLeod, Mark, ‘The Analogy Argument for the Proper Basicality of Belief in God’, International journal for Philosophy of Religion, XXI (1987), 3–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Can Belief in God Be Confirmed?’, Religious Studies, XXIV (1988), 311–23.Google Scholar

4 McLeod's first essay treats each of the three disanalogies, while his second essay treats only the third disanalogy. Hence, I will discuss only his first essay in Sections I and II, and both essays in Section III.

5 Plantinga, , ‘Basic’, p. 45.Google Scholar

6 McLeod, , ‘Analogy’, p. 5.Google Scholar

7 See Plantinga, , ‘Reason’, pp. 17 and 81.Google Scholar

8 On noetic structure, see Ibid. pp. 48–55.

9 McLeod, , ‘Analogy’, p. 13.Google Scholar

10 Ibid. p. 81.

11 McLeod confuses matters when, in his second essay, he equates outside confirmation of a belief (and, by extension, of a belief-forming mechanism) with the ill-fated quest to prove that our epistemic equipment puts us in touch with an external world. In the case of the outside confirmation under discussion here, I confirm a memory belief by stepping outside of my memory in order to consult other epistemic mechanisms. Whether one of these mechanisms, or all of them together, i.e. my whole human epistemic apparatus, genuinely puts me in touch with an external world, is a wholly different question. In addition, McLeod incorrectly identifies the kind of beliefs under discussion as those which are either self-evident, or incorrigible, or evident to the senses. But Plantinga's whole point is that, contrary to foundationalism, other kinds of beliefs – beliefs (2) and (3) are examples – can be properly basic. See McLeod, , ‘Belief’, p. 313.Google Scholar

12 McLeod, , ‘Analogy’, p. 8.Google Scholar

13 Ibid. p. 10.

14 Quoted in McLeod, , ‘Belief’, p. 319.Google Scholar

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid. p. 320.

17 Ibid. (my emphasis).

18 Ibid. p. 322.

19 Ibid. p. 320.

20 Plantinga, , ‘Reason’, p. 76.Google Scholar

21 Ibid. p. 77.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid. p.78.

24 It is worth noting that, by the time of his second essay, McLeod holds that the claim that there is an analogy between belief in God and certain examples of properly basic belief is a ‘basic thrust’ of Plantinga's argument. See McLeod, , ‘Belief’, p. 311.Google Scholar