“Warranted Belief” Objections

Warranted Belief Objections to Natural Theology

While the expression “warranted belief” was made popular by Alvin Plantinga and the Reformed Epistemology (RE hereafter) school of thought, it is a fitting description of a more general emphasis that seeks to guard faith against the demands of reason. It has a broader context in the history of modern philosophy. Here our only concern will be its application to natural theology. If we could boil it down to a singular concern it might be expressed in this way: Demonstrative natural theology sets up a barrier of reason at the front door of faith.

Such an argument may be framed in one of two forms.

Form 1. If one must justify (by logic or evidence) all beliefs foundational to those which are articles of faith, then the faith of most believers is unwarranted.

Form 2. If premises must generally be more known than conclusions, and if most believers lack the time or ability to attend to such arguments, then natural theology is both logically and spiritually unfitting as a ground to Christian faith and understanding.

If anyone should wonder why these two forms are being grouped under this word associated with an idea more specific to Plantinga’s project of RE, it is simply that these are species of a larger phenomenon in modern theological writing. It is something more specific than fideism that I have in mind. There is a frequent and subtle claim often made by authors as diverse as Barthians to adherents to RE to Evangelicals more neutral to matters of apologetic method.

The common thread is this: Apologetics, prolegomena, or any arguments or commitments seen to come “at the foundation” of Christian thought are all conceived as a kind of modern anxiety, a defense mechanism, a kind of insecurity that is in reaction-mode to the demands made upon the Christian faith by its detractors. Natural theology falls under this criticism because its demonstrative form (its classical form), well, naturally comes in the form of rational demonstrations.

Classical Natural Theology Rules God Out as Properly Basic

There are two relevant causes of the intellectual project known as Reformed Epistemology. Those were classical foundationalism1 and the so-called ethics of belief.

To the first, this foundationalism holds that the only rational starting points are beliefs that do not have to resort to being justified by still other more foundational beliefs. We have to stop, or start, somewhere. The only beliefs that qualify are those which are incorrigible, self-evident, or evident to the senses.

These came to be called basic beliefs—any beliefs not based upon others2—as opposed to non-basic beliefs—any beliefs based upon those more properly basic. What Plantinga wanted to start to challenge was this: “Why shouldn’t the existence of God be in the foundations of my noetic structure?”3

As to that second cause of RE’s project—the ethics of belief—the concept of justification of belief began to be defined as a convergence of two elements: namely, sufficient evidence and moral duty. Given this pairing, we may be forgiven if we are confused as to what is being justified and in what sense. A moral duty is something a person owes and performs. This then begins to condition what is meant by “sufficient evidence” as well. Sufficient for what, or is it for a whom? The latter is the deontological question.

Epistemology morphs into ethics. It becomes one more chapter in the aforementioned story of Western philosophy’s subjective turn because, if we treat sufficient evidence and moral duty as epistemological equals, then we are really only talking about “whether one” (i.e. a person) is “justified” in believing a thing. That may be an important question that RE has raised, but it is a distinct question from objective truth justification.

Clearly, Plantinga was motivated by negative implications such as that, “someone who believes that there is such a person as God but who doesn’t know of evidence for that belief”4 is unjustified. While Locke may have initiated this emphasis,5 an 1877 essay by W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” especially brought it to the forefront. He delivered what became a maxim of late modern epistemology: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”6

Stated positively and more fully, “A belief is acceptable for a person if (and only if) it is either properly basic (i.e., self-evident, incorrigible, or evidential to the senses for that person), or believed on the evidential basis of propositions that are acceptable and that support it deductively, inductively, or abductively.”7

For Plantinga, most of the things human beings believe—things much more obvious than the case for theism—have no compelling argument in their favor. If such were needed, then no one should be considered rationally justified. He puts the case of theistic belief in the extreme: “I think it must be conceded that the theist has no very good answer to the request that he explain his reasons for believing in the existence of God.”8

In light of this, attention turned toward justifying Christian believers for believing rather than justifying truth claims as objects independent of our minds.

Note Clifford’s moral and personal words: “it is wrong … for anyone.” Rather than justifying the unit of knowledge as true in itself, Plantinga accepted the post-Kantian shift to subjectivism that redefined justification as a person believing certain things “without flouting any epistemic duties or obligations.”9 So a believer is “within his epistemic right … even if he has no argument at all.”10

Warranted belief becomes the alternative to classical foundationalism’s “truth justification.” Plantinga defines warrant as “a name of the property that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief.”11 This is comprised of four elements: (1) properly functioning cognitive faculties, (2) in a correct environment, (3) aimed at true belief, and (4) successfully so.12 One immediate criticism cannot help but come to mind. It becomes problematic to speak of cognitive faculties successfully aimed at truth and properly functioning toward that end if we cannot first know the truth on the bases of some other set of criteria.

For Scott Oliphint, the problem with Plantinga is that he still leaves us with competitors to God or Scripture as the ultimate presupposition. He explains,

“Plantinga argues against classical foundationalism’s three conditions for proper basicality (i.e., that a belief must be self-evident, incorrigible, and evident to the senses). But his argument is not that such conditions do not obtain; he is not arguing that foundationalism includes the wrong categories of properly basic beliefs. Rather, the problem with classical foundationalism is that there should be additional properly basic categories.”13

From a classical perspective, the real problem with Plantinga’s focus is twofold. First, its assessment of natural theological arguments and concept of warrant both collapse the entire epistemological field into the ethics of belief. Second, following from that point, even if we allow that Plantinga’s concept of warrant is useful in showing the reasonableness of the Christian who does not think about natural theology or evidence, his burden of proof against classical demonstrations has not been met. They were never designed to establish subjective “warrant” for the believer (including someone who would be made a believer in part by them), nor to establish that form of justification that Plantinga’s warrant was designed to replace. Demonstrating that God must exist is simply not identical with demanding that someone must follow the demonstration in order to have a reasonable faith.    

Classical Natural Theology Forces Us to Choose Between God and His Effects

What are we more familiar with—God or His effects? This question was an undercurrent of John Baillie’s book Our Knowledge of God (1939).14 Recall the second form of the “warranted belief” objection to natural theological demonstration: If premises must generally be more known than conclusions, and if most believers lack the time or ability to attend to such arguments, then natural theology is both logically and spiritually unfitting as a ground to Christian faith and understanding.

The particular way that Baillie argued for this begins with the less popular assumption that God is “more known” than other things.

He wrote that,

“all proof or argument moves from what is more evident to what is less evident, and all demonstration must eventually terminate in some proper starting point of knowledge. Since there is nothing more evident than God’s existence, it is fundamentally wrong-headed to employ a method that assumes that there is something better known than God.”15

Baillie also anticipated Plantinga by a few decades in drawing an “analogy between belief in God and belief in other minds.”16 In a sense, this second form of “warranted belief” objection goes further that the RE concern that the Christian have epistemic warrant to believe even without demonstration. This now strikes at the root of Aquinas’s contention that a thing believed without such arguments is still fit to be demonstrated.

The connection between greater intellectual familiarity with premises and greater spiritual familiarity with God is simply that natural theology seems to be dividing the interests of the soul. The mind is challenged to know God in truth by this rigorous exercise from natural knowledge to theology, yet something about this seems contrary to the simple and sudden call of Jesus to follow Him.

The last thing I will say about Baillie’s brand of this argument is that there is a kind of moral judgment of the man who would stand at a distance from our most simple knowledge of God. Baillie uses the argument from the universality of theistic belief in antiquity—the commandments against idolatry had to forbid having more than one God, not that it forbade belief in no god at all—to suggest that persuasion toward theism was a foreign concept.17 He cites the example of some “murderous criminals” in passages like Psalm 10 who say there is no God.

Baillie is aware of and agrees with the many commentators that speak of a practical atheism on display here, but it is his inference that concerns us: “It seems clear that in all these passages we have to do not with intellectual perplexity but with sinful evasion.”18 Here we see a convergence between Baillie and the more explicit Barthians. If the absence of questioning the existence of God or the gods was a sign of ancient man’s theism, then it is a short step to conclude that the presence of demonstrative natural theology in the modern world is a sign of our atheism—the absence of a kind of virtue that plagues both speaker and audience in the modern scene.

A few things may be said in evaluation of Baillie’s rationale.

First, there is the matter of intellectual procedure. That God’s existence is “most evident” hardly seems self-evident, and if this state of possessing a maximally evident idea is not itself self-evident, then it too must be demonstrated, which will land Baillie in contradiction. Of course, Baillie could opt out by merely asserting that it is “most evident,” and offering moral denouncement upon anyone demanding further evidence in a similar manner to how Jesus condemned those who asked for more signs. However, we might then just as well ask why Baillie bothered to write a book about it. For such a book is aimed at persuasion, involving demonstrations of sorts.

The second critique I will raise moves from procedure to the heart of the claim.

Baillie wrote that,

“Not all our thinking can be discursive; it must contain some element of immediacy ... There must be some reality by which we are directly confronted—some reality which we know, not because we know something else first, but rather as itself the ground of our knowledge of other things.”19

Aquinas would have agreed, yet he would have offered the sensory objects of the world (God's effects) as that which qualifies as these first realities known. Baillie senses the problem of calling that first acquaintance “knowledge” in the relevant sense. So he adds, “This does not mean that this prime reality either originally was or conceivable could be known to us in isolation from all other realities.”20 From this he constructs an integrated model in which “no one of the four subjects of our knowledge—ourselves, our fellows, the corporeal world, and God—is ever presented to us except in conjunction with all three of the others.”21

This should prompt us to ask: Is Thomas’s empirical starting point really meant to communicate the knowledge of a thing in the world “in isolation from all other realities”? I would think not. But if we allow that, then it is not clear how starting a natural theological demonstration from one of God’s effects necessarily denies some kind of prior knowledge of God (that is, prior in the mind of the one advancing the proof and of the mind receiving it).

He adds that, “We do not know God through the world, but we know Him with the world; and in knowing Him with the world, we know Him as its ground.”22 Baillie’s “through” as opposed to “with” is a distinction without a difference until proven otherwise. For instance, what makes the difference between the way in which God is known with the world as opposed to Thomas’s ways of God known through the world?

Whatever his answer, I will then ask: This attribute or set of attributes that relate God to the world—how do you know that this is true of the world versus false, or true about this world versus another, and so forth? He will either give me no reason or some reason. Now, if he gives no reason, his emperor has no clothes; and if he gives some reason, then his conclusion is derived from premises constructed of the knowledge of nature. We must then ask why and how Thomas has not offered a different species of the same genus. In short, Baillie was guilty of either special pleading or a smokescreen.

As to Baillie’s appeal to the analogy between God and other minds, both the analogy itself and the universal belief in God seem to involve some acts of inference, and to the degree that they do not make inferences, such concepts wind up minimalistic, rather than greater.23

The final critique of Baillie I will make regards his use of biblical theology to show that demonstrative natural theology is a kind of modern anxiety, one which the ancients (and thus the biblical authors) would never have countenanced. Baillie’s focus even begins to reduce natural theology to something of an account of the origin of the idea that God exists. A subtle shift can be discerned in his use of one Rabbi Davidson’s work Theology of the Old Testament (1904), namely, that “the Old Testament naturally has no occasion to speculate on how this knowledge that God is arises in the mind ... it nowhere depicts the rise or dawn of the idea of God's existence on men’s minds.” He then makes the connection:

“How should men think of arguing that God could be known, when they are persuaded they knew Him?”24 He later adds that “clearly it cannot be claimed that the Thomistic arguments for God per ea quae facta sunt bear any relation to the process by which the knowledge of God actually came into the world.”25

My first answer to this is quite simple. Such arguments are legitimate whenever people deny God’s existence. It is a simple refutation or contradiction to an error or lie; and that is reason enough. Errors and lies should be corrected, however pretentious they may be. We grant that the pretender really does know God’s reality and is suppressing it (Rom. 1:18-20); and thus my second answer is that this “problem” is really only a non-sequitur fallacy and begging of the question rolled into one. First, it does not follow that natural theological arguments only make sense if the ignorance of God’s existence is genuine, or, secondly, if someone wants to raise that proposition, they must at least know that a classical position denies it, and one has begged the whole question by not settling that first.

Concluding Thoughts on the Unwarranted Fixation on Subjective Warrant

Plantinga summarizes what may be the practical upshot of both forms of the warranted belief objection. He does so in the context of Calvin’s view that “the Christian ought not to believe on the basis of argument; if he does, his faith is likely to be unstable and wavering.” Moreover, it “is like believing in the existence of your spouse on the basis of the analogical argument for other minds—whimsical at best and not at all likely to delight the person concerned.”26

Baillie winds up making the same argument, drawing an analogy from merely “inferred friends” to an “inferred God.”27 This all seems to involve a part to whole fallacy. If we take the reasons for “believing in” a person in the most holistic sense, then the truth is that one comes to believe in the existence of their spouse in many less than “delightful” ways, to use Plantinga’s word. Whatever the initial means, inferences were made and the total stock of knowledge grew. Plantinga’s analogy also seems to imply a straw man in which the classical natural theologian continues relating his mind to God by means of strict demonstrations alone, and urging his hearers to do the same.

Love and trust and shared experiences always grow to make the whole, but the ground-consequent steps of the mind are nonetheless a part: especially the introductory parts. This is as true for the healthiest of marriage relationships as it is for the purest of worshipers of God. The former may have arisen from word of mouth from a mutual friend, a wider conversation or fellowship that narrowed down, or even something as impersonal as an online dating service. But things proved out, a posteriori, from the less known to the more known—always more than discursive reasoning building that knowledge, but never less.

I should say one more thing about the general mood of this warranted belief category. It is something of an irony. For all of its talk about the “anxiety” of the modern apologist, the modern author of a rational prolegomena, the modern defender of inerrancy, and the modern this and the modern that—it seems to me that what we have is a case of projection. With respect to the RE brand of warrant, the epistemic obligation that natural theological demonstrations were designed to elicit was not an obligation in the believer. The “demand” was not coming from the unbelieving world. They were not the intellectual colonizers. We were. It was the Christian apologist, or (I should say) the Christian philosopher and theologian, who uttered his natural theological reasoning laying an epistemological obligation to assent to what was necessarily the case. If there was any “anxiety” to speak of, the traffic was running entirely in the other direction.

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1. The label classical foundationalism is unfortunate, as it has led to occasional confusion concerning the differences between traditional (otherwise labeled “classical”) modes of grounding truth and the modern brand. I will use the label here because it is the label consistently used within analytical philosophy in general and in discussions about Reformed Epistemology in particular.

2. More specifically, a properly basic belief, says William Lane Craig, is “a belief which is not derived inferentially from any more foundational belief but which is rationally justified by being formed in appropriate circumstances”; “Classical Apologetics: Responses,” Five Views on Apologetics, ed., Steven B. Cowan, ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 32.

3. Alvin Plantinga, The Analytical Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, James F. Sennett, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 98.

4. Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 13.

5. Plantinga is especially insistent upon this account: “Locke’s thought initiates the classical package: evidentialism, deontologism, and classical foundationalism.” Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 88.

6. William Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in Michael Peterson, ed. Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 80.

7. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 84-85

8. Plantinga, The Analytical Theist, 97.

9. Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 36.

10. Plantinga, “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 54 (1980): 50.

11. Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 25

12. Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 26-28, 46.

13. Oliphint, Forward to Van Til, Christian Theistic Evidences, xxvi.

14. John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God (London: Oxford University Press, 1939).

15. Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 78-79.

16. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 80.

17. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 119.

18. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 120.

19. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 148.

20. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 148.

21. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 178.

22. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 178.

23. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 80-81.

24. Davidson quoted in Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 123.

25. Davidson quoted in Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 142.

26. Plantinga, “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology,” 53.

27. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 207.