Warrant and religious belief › The question about truth and the question about believing

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.