Warrant and religious belief › Rival beliefs and the limits of the analogy

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.