Countering Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology & Randal Rauser's Apologetic

 

(Note: What follows is a transcription of the video)

In this video I’m going to be responding to both Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology as well as Randal Rauser’s wider apologetic effort, with particular emphasis on his new book ‘Jesus Loves Canaanites’. While these two topics seem disconnected, Randal is an ardent and capable defender of Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology and I believe his wider apologetic effort reveals a problem for both his apologetic and Plantinga’s properly basic belief system.

We will begin with Randal’s apologetic. Randal is far from your average internet apologist that merely knows the ins and outs of the various families of theistic philosophical arguments. What makes Randall so interesting is that I think he correctly identifies the key contemporary problems that are driving people away from the Christian church in the US, EU, and Canada.

Can testimony be the basis for a ‘properly basic belief?’

Christian apologist and theologian Randal Rauser has an idea regarding warranted Christian belief that I find particularly interesting, but ultimately wrong.  Randal’s idea is to take the Reformed Epistemology of Alvin Plantinga a little bit further, he wants to use testimony as a foundation for a properly basic belief in something like Christian theism.

This is something he has written on in his book with Justin Schieber “An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar” and a bit about on his blog. 

I should point out that Randal prefers using testimony as a basis for properly basic belief in Christianity compared to the traditional appeals to a Sensus Divinitatus, because he considers appealing to a SD to place the theist at a rhetorical disadvantage.

I think Randal’s intuition about being at a rhetorical disadvantage with the Sensus Divinitatus is correct. A mysterious Sensus Divinitatus providing justification for Christian belief in a pre-evidential way is going to sound outlandish to non-believers, and likely would come as a shock to many lay believers in the pews. It’s akin to saying that one’s “Jesus senses are tingling”

In short, I don’t think that this kind of appeal to testimony as a foundation for a properly basic belief in god is going to work.  I think if he is going to go this kind of Reformed Epistemology route, he’s going to have to appeal to a Sensus Divinitatus, ala Alvin Plantinga.

The Problem with Contemporary Christian Apologists

So the trend lately is for me to find something online which then prompts me into writing.  I suppose this is good because I've neglected my blog for too long.

This post was inspired by an old favorite, Randal Rauser, in his post Apologetics and the Problem of the William Lane Craig Clones.

For those who don't know Randal Rauser is a Progressive Evangelical Apologist and Theologian, so his take on the "problem" of WLC clones is from a very different perspective than my own.

What is telling is that we actually can agree that there certainly is a problem with contemporary apologetics and imitation of William Lane Craig.  Admittedly I also think there's a lot of problems with Craig himself, contra Randal, so my critique is going to be a bit harsher than his.

Peter Boghossian, Faith, and Religious Epistemology

I've recently finished Peter Boghossian's book "A Manual for Creating Atheists".  I listened to it on Audiobook, which helped immensely with being able to get through the book with the way my life is going right now between my work levels and trying to be a father and husband at home.  I can listen while doing mundane tasks at work and while doing chores/exercise/commuting.  If anyone can recommend good intellectual atheist books on Audible I'd be appreciative.

If you've been following my blog, you'll have seen my last post on Faith as "Belief without Evidence" where I engaged Tom Gilson of ThinkingChristian.net and his argument about that not being a valid definition of the word as Christians understand it.

I realize now that my post and approach was a mistake. There's no point in trying to show how the the Christian bible could be read to support Boghossian's definition.  You're playing the interpretation game which is going to be subjective and the Christians will almost always have a way to interpret their way out of hairy passages.

Eventually though, as I got through A Manual for Creating Atheists and thinking on the common thread of responses to it from Christian Apologists Tom and Phil Vischer, I realized something rather important.

The Definition of Faith is A Giant Red Herring

Quick and Dirty: A potential defeater for the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

I wanted to throw up a quick post about an idea I have to try and refute Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.  This isn’t intended as a full rebuttal, but more of an idea for an approach to refute it. 

I’m actually looking for feedback on whether or not this approach works or is fundamentally flawed.

The thrust of his argument is that since evolution only selects based on adaptability we can't necessarily trust the reliability of our cognitive faculties on naturalism (the assumption that there is no god).

An example he uses is that of a human and a lion, the truth value of a human's belief's about lions is separate from whether or not those beliefs produce adaptable behavior.  On naturalism we have no reason to suppose our beliefs about a lion being dangerous and wanting to eat us, therefore we should run and hide from it. 

We similarly could have evolved the belief that we should run from the tiger because in order to make tigers happy you should run and hide from them.  The thought is that through the eyes of evolution, both sets of beliefs produce equivalent adaptability and so either could have been selected for.

The Münchhausen trilemma entails Secularism

Not too long ago I had a nice discussion with Jonathan Pearce that lead to his posting about the Münchhausen trilemma.

This is an interesting thing I picked up on while debating with a (surprisingly nice) Presuppositional Apologist. 

The interesting thing that came about was that once both theists and atheists come to accept the Münchhausen trilemma as the major issue in epistemology that it is, I think that secularism in terms of governance follows as a result.  This post is to explain why I think that to be the case.

It should be said that if you haven't read up on the Münchhausen trilemma, follow the links above to check it out before continuing with this article.

Countering the Modal Ontological Argument

Note: What follows below is a transcription of the video

Ahh the Ontological Argument, where philosophers try to define god into existence. 

This video is going to be about the modern, Modal Ontological Argument put forward by apologists like Alvin Plantinga and defended by William Lane Craig. 

This is because the original Ontological Argument put forward by St. Anselm and philosophers like Rene Descartes was refuted by philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant since the original argument assumed that “existence” was a property.   You can Google that, but almost all modern apologists won’t attempt to defend that version of the argument.

So here’s the “Modal Ontological Argument” put forward by Plantinga: