The Rationality of Faith in Plantinga's View (original) (raw)

In Schreiber Gerhard (ed.), Interesse am Anderen: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Religion und Rationalität. De Gruyter. pp. 335-366 , 2019

Abstract

This paper offers an evaluation of Plantinga’s perspective regarding the knowledge of the truth of Christianity: the philosopher's intention is to oppose the de jure objection to Christianity (which suggests that one does not even need to know if the Christian religion is true in order to dismiss it; such a dismissal merely requires to prove that Christianity is irrational). By contrast, he argues that if Christianity is true, then very probably it is also rational and warranted. Moreover, he suggests that for a believer faith has warrant, because God bequeathed such passion to her; thus, in principle, faith is a special kind of knowledge whose content is known through a cognitive process in which the Holy Spirit induces in a person the belief in the statements of gospel. The beliefs constituting faith are thus taken as basic and are legitimate from both an internalist and an externalist perspective: from an internalist perspective they are justified and internally rational, while from an externalist perspective they are externally rational and warranted. Plantinga also argues that these beliefs are warranted even if one cannot make a good historical case for the truth of the state- ments of the gospel – by his light, what’s important here is only the fact that the faith is well grounded (in an externalist sense). The paper then deals critically with various objections against this Plantingian model: that it is irrational because here faith seems nothing more than “a blind leap over a crevasse in the night,” that many bizarre religions might be considered rational on this basis, that it does not prove that faith has warrant, that the atheists are – contrary to Plantinga’s preoccupations – primarily interested in whether Christian theism is (given the available evidence) true and that faith requires historical arguments in order to count as real knowledge. Plantinga’s rebuttals to each of these arguments are in the end suggested.

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