Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief: Warrant and Basic Belief

You remember eating breakfast without first constructing an argument that breakfast occurred. You see a tree without ordinarily inferring its existence from premises about your visual sensations. These familiar cases suggest a question: must every reasonable belief be the conclusion of an argument? Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief uses that question to examine whether Christian belief could amount to knowledge without resting on proofs of God's existence.

The answer depends on more than how confident a believer feels. A conviction might be immediate and mistaken. It might also be true merely by luck. Plantinga asks what makes the difference between those possibilities and a belief produced in a way that supplies knowledge. His proposal connects the answer to how our cognitive capacities work, and then develops a theological model of how religious belief could meet those conditions.

Plantinga distinguishes a de facto objection from a de jure objection. A de facto objection challenges the truth of Christian belief. For example, someone might argue that God does not exist. A de jure objection challenges the belief's epistemic standing: perhaps accepting it is irrational or unwarranted, independently of whether it happens to be true.

The distinction identifies different tasks. Showing that someone reached a conclusion by an unreliable method does not show that the conclusion is false. A lucky guess can be correct. Conversely, showing that a proposition is true does not establish that everyone who believes it knows it. Someone might accept a true proposition through manipulation or sheer accident.

Plantinga therefore needs more than the observation that Christianity might be true. He proposes a model in which its truth is connected with a suitable way of acquiring belief. If God exists and provides human beings with capacities directed toward knowing God, religious belief might arise through those capacities. The skeptic cannot rule out this possibility simply by observing that the believer lacks a philosophical proof.

This is a conditional strategy. Plantinga does not establish Christianity by assuming it for the purpose of examining its epistemic consequences. Nor does he require every critic to prove Christianity false before criticizing any believer's conduct. A particular person's dishonesty about evidence, or refusal to consider an objection, can be evaluated without deciding every theological question. His target is a general objection to Christian belief's warrant independent of its truth.

Plantinga uses warrant for the further quality or quantity that, in sufficient degree, distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief. The definition names what needs explaining. It does not imply that a belief acquires warrant simply because the person considers it important or sincere.

Suppose, as an illustration, that a person guesses tomorrow's weather by choosing the forecast she would most enjoy. If the weather matches her guess, truth alone does not turn the guess into knowledge. We would still ask how she arrived at it. Plantinga's account directs attention to the process that produced the belief and the circumstances in which it operated.

His initial account has several connected requirements. The relevant cognitive faculties must function properly. They must operate in an environment appropriate to them. The portion of the cognitive design plan responsible for the belief must aim at truth, and it must be successfully directed toward truth rather than simply producing comforting or useful beliefs.

These requirements distinguish different failures. A normally reliable perceptual capacity might malfunction. It might work as designed while encountering an environment that defeats its operation. Or a mechanism could fulfill a function whose aim is reassurance rather than truth. A belief's psychological usefulness would not by itself supply the warrant Plantinga is describing.

The book does not present these broad conditions as an exceptionless four-item checklist that settles every case. In chapter 5, Plantinga discusses accidentally true beliefs that require further attention to the particular cognitive situation. His distinction between larger environments and more specific settings is intended to refine the account. An explanation of warrant must address the circumstances of the actual exercise of a capacity, not merely its general reliability.

This is one reason to distinguish warrant from truth. The theory concerns a belief's epistemic quality and its degree. Knowledge additionally requires truth and sufficient warrant. Calling a false belief false does not, by itself, describe every feature of the process that generated it. Nor does a warranted process guarantee that every output is knowledge regardless of circumstances.

The expression design plan can sound as though Plantinga begins by assuming a divine designer. He explicitly says that the notion is not initially meant to entail conscious creation. It concerns how a system is supposed to function. Whether natural processes can adequately account for proper function is a further philosophical question.

His account can therefore be introduced before the specifically theological model. Consider the difference between a device operating according to its intended function and a device producing the same output through a fault. That comparison helps explain the distinction, though a manufactured device is not a full theory of human cognition. Plantinga's claim concerns cognitive faculties and the conditions for their epistemic success.

The theological model then supplies a particular account of those capacities. On that model, God creates human beings capable of knowing aspects of reality, including God. The model's theological commitments do substantive work. They are not a conclusion established merely by defining proper function.

Plantinga's theory is externalist in an important sense: warrant can depend on facts about how a belief was produced that the believer need not first establish by argument. A person can know through perception without possessing a philosophical theory of perception. This does not remove reflection from epistemic life. It distinguishes possessing knowledge from being able to defend a general account of how knowledge is possible.

A basic belief is one a person does not hold on the evidential basis of other beliefs. A properly basic belief is appropriately held in that way with respect to the epistemic property under discussion. Plantinga distinguishes questions about justification, rationality, and warrant; the phrase needs that qualification.

The breakfast example illustrates the difference between a ground and an inference. Remembering can occasion a belief without the person first accepting premises about the reliability of memory. Likewise, a visual experience can give rise to belief in a nearby tree without a silently rehearsed argument. Being noninferential does not mean arising in a psychological vacuum.

The same distinction applies to the proposed religious case. Plantinga does not argue that beliefs become warranted whenever someone declares them basic. A belief could be basic and produced by wishful thinking. Its classification as basic tells us about its relation to other beliefs; it does not establish proper function, a suitable environment, or truth-directed success.

Nor does Plantinga's argument require saying that arguments for God have no value. An argument could support a believer's understanding, answer an objection, or convince someone else. The issue is whether that kind of argument is a necessary source of warrant for every believer. The model proposes that it is not.

Plantinga names his initial proposal the Aquinas/Calvin model. It concerns belief in God and draws on the idea of a sensus divinitatis, a disposition or capacity through which circumstances can elicit awareness of God. The Latin expression means a sense of divinity. It belongs to the model's account of religious cognition, rather than naming an experimentally established organ.

On this proposal, contemplation of the world, gratitude, guilt, or danger can occasion theistic beliefs. The circumstances need not function as premises from which the believer infers God. Plantinga explicitly distinguishes seeing the night sky and forming a belief about God from constructing an argument that a grand sky must have a divine maker.

That distinction helps explain the opening comparison. Someone's response to the sky could be immediate without therefore being a poor version of a design argument. But calling it immediate still does not settle whether it has warrant. On Plantinga's account, that depends on the relevant capacity's existence and operation under the conditions of warrant.

The model also includes the effects of sin on cognition. Plantinga proposes that our relation to God can involve intellectual and affective disorder. This is a theological component of the account. It should not be turned into a diagnosis that a particular atheist is mentally ill, dishonest, or incapable of good reasoning.

A critic can ask whether appealing to sin explains disagreement or protects the model against criticism. A defender must address the model's credibility and coherence. Merely redescribing dissent as malfunction supplies no independent reason for a critic who rejects the model's theological premises to accept them. The conditional nature of the proposal remains relevant at precisely this point.

General awareness of God would not by itself yield beliefs about the Trinity, incarnation, atonement, or resurrection. Plantinga therefore develops an extended model for specifically Christian belief. Distinguishing the two models prevents an unexplained jump from theism to Christianity.

The extended model includes Scripture and the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit. Within its theological account, the Spirit enables people to recognize the truth of the gospel and changes their affections. The model concerns both belief and the orientation of the person, rather than the acquisition of religious information alone.

This is not an argument that any reader must accept Scripture's divine authority because Christians believe it. It is an account of how Christian belief could be warranted if the Christian picture is true. Someone who rejects that picture can still understand the proposed connection between the truth of the religion and the way belief in it might be produced.

In chapter 10, Plantinga distinguishes progressively stronger conclusions. The extended model depicts a way Christian belief could have warrant. He also argues that, given its truth, there are no cogent objections to its having warrant in this way. Finally, he argues that, given its truth, it very likely has warrant through this model or something similar.

The final qualification matters. The claim is not that Christianity's truth logically entails every detail of Plantinga's particular model. Nor is it that every person who assents to a Christian proposition therefore knows it. The account concerns suitable processes and circumstances, sufficient degree of warrant, and the challenge posed by defeaters.

A defeater is, roughly, something that undermines a belief's epistemic standing for a person. A reason can challenge the belief itself, or it can undermine confidence in the process by which the person formed it. This distinction gives us a way to understand how immediate belief remains answerable to criticism.

Suppose you believe a book is still on the table because you remember leaving it there. Someone then shows you a reliable recording of your moving it to a shelf afterward, and you have no reason to think it has been moved back. The memory's arising without an argument does not make the recording irrelevant to your belief about the book's present location. Alternatively, learning that you were confusing yesterday's actions with today's could undermine the reliability of that particular memory.

These are hypothetical illustrations of defeat, not cases attributed to Plantinga. They show why proper basicality does not mean immunity. A noninferential belief can supply an initial epistemic position while later information changes what the person can reasonably maintain.

Plantinga devotes the book's final part to proposed defeaters for Christian belief. At the opening of chapter 11, he explicitly says that establishing how belief could have warrant does not settle whether it has warrant in the circumstances readers actually face. The argument must consider objections rather than simply invoke the model again.

The distinction also qualifies what the book offers a believer. Lacking a philosophical proof need not disqualify belief from knowledge on Plantinga's account. But this does not provide a general exemption from examining counterevidence. Whether an objection defeats a particular belief requires evaluating its force and the person's epistemic situation.

The possibility of warranted basic religious belief invites a natural objection. If Christians can propose a belief-forming capacity, why could someone not propose one for any desired belief? Plantinga addresses versions of this challenge, including the familiar Great Pumpkin objection. The issue is whether his account supplies constraints beyond a person's insistence that a conviction is basic.

The conditions of warrant supply part of his answer. A capacity must actually operate appropriately and be successfully aimed at truth. Inventing a name for a supposed faculty does not make it exist or make its outputs warranted. The model is intended to describe epistemic conditions, rather than issue a license to insulate any conviction.

Nevertheless, a conditional account alone does not provide a neutral method for deciding among rival religious pictures. Two communities might each offer an internally intelligible story about reliable religious cognition. Their stories can conflict about what is true. Describing how each could be warranted under its own assumptions would not show that both incompatible claims are knowledge.

The problem is therefore partly comparative. What reasons support or challenge the accounts? Does disagreement supply a defeater? How should a believer respond to informed people who reject the belief? These questions require more than noting that basic belief is possible. A model of warrant and an argument resolving religious disagreement are different philosophical achievements.

The analogy with perception has a similar limit. Showing that perception can yield knowledge without inference explains a possible epistemic structure. It does not independently establish that the sensus divinitatis exists or functions like perception. Treating the analogy as such a proof would assume what the constructive model leaves conditional.

The central challenge is to specify what is supposedly wrong with religious belief. Is the objection that it is false, that its grounds are inadequate, that its production is unreliable, or that the believer has ignored a defeater? Those complaints can overlap, but they require different support. Calling a conviction irrational without explaining the charge obscures the argument.

Plantinga's account makes the connection between epistemology and a wider picture of reality explicit. If there is a God who provides a way of knowing God, the absence of an inference need not be an epistemic defect. If that proposed capacity does not exist, giving it a theological name cannot create warrant. The conditions under which a belief arises matter, as do the world's actual features.

Return to remembering breakfast. Most people do not need a theory of memory before knowing what they ate. Yet a memory can be mistaken, challenged, or accidentally correct. Plantinga proposes that religious belief could likewise be basic without being arbitrary or beyond criticism. Whether the proposal describes religious knowledge is the question the model opens, rather than a conclusion established by the analogy alone.

• Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (2000), chapter 5 for warrant, chapter 6 for the Aquinas/Calvin model, chapters 8–10 for its extension, and part IV for defeaters.
• Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (1993), for the earlier development of the proper-function account that the later book summarizes and refines.
• Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), for the companion examination of competing accounts of warrant.