This chapter moves from the imaginative inhabitation of the world in general to the question of religious faith in particular. Religious faith concerns both the objects of perception and their frame: God is both an object of (partly imaginative) apprehension and a frame for our perception of the world at large. Drawing on both anthropological and psychological scholarship and on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, the chapter examines the inalienable role of imagination in the perception of God and the necessary limits of such imaginative engagement. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of acknowledging experiences that do not make sense.

The key idea of Reformed Epistemology is that religious beliefs can be rational even if they are held noninferentially, without being based on arguments. The first part of this chapter clarifies in more detail what Reformed Epistemology says and how the view has evolved in three stages over the past forty years. The first stage was concerned with ground-clearing and initially characterizing the view; the second stage included book-length definitive statements of the view by William Alston and Alvin Plantinga. The third stage consists of twenty-first-century developments of the view, connecting it with, among other things, the cognitive science of religion, cognitively impacted experiences, epistemic intuition, and religious testimony. The second part of the chapter briefly presents three important objections to Reformed Epistemology – having to do with the need for independent confirmation, belief in the Great Pumpkin, and religious disagreement – and considers what can be said in response to them.