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Mark Oppenheimer
Lingua Franca
February 2000

Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff look as you’d hope they would. Plantinga is tall and thin, with an Amish-style beard. Wolterstorff has thick, snow-white hair and intense eyes. If you were casting a movie about two Midwestern boys who grow up in farm towns, meet at a small Calvinist college, fall under the spell of a charismatic Christian scholar, leave to study philosophy at the finest secular universities (say, Yale and Harvard) but never forget their religious heritage, and then spend the few decades challenging the anti-Christian presumptions that have prevailed in their field since the Enlightenment—if that were the movie being cast, you would do well to let Plantinga and Wolterstorff play themselves.

With the publication this year of Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford), Plantinga completed a uniquely ambitious project: a three-volume work culminating with the argument that Christian belief is rational. Not some vague deism, or a carefully reasoned metaphysics like Kant’s, mind you, but the full-blooded confessional Christianity that unites “Calvin and Aquinas . . . Mother Teresa and St. Maximus the Confessor,” as Plantinga writes.

When Plantinga and Wolterstorff met as undergraduates at Michigan’s Calvin College, in the mid-1950s, such thinking about religion would have been ridiculed by most professional philosophers. Bertrand Russell had delivered his lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian” in 1927. In 1955, the philosopher John L. Mackie published the brief but devastating essay “Evil and Omnipotence,” which argued that the existence of evil rendered belief in a wholly good god irrational.

For the past thirty years, Plantinga and Wolterstorff, along with a small but vocal circle of Christian philosophers—including William Alston, Mark McLeod, George Mavrodes, and Dewey Hoitenga—have begged to differ with the prevailing orthodoxy. These “Reformed epistemologists,” as they are called, have endeavored to demonstrate that Christian faith, even lacking evidence, can be not merely forgivable, or permissible, or understandable, but rationally defensible. Put another way: A person may, without evidence, be just as entitled to the belief that Jesus is the Son of God as he is to the belief that he’s just been evicted from his apartment or that his bald spot is spreading.

While this line of argument may sound familiar to those who take an interest in Christian apologetics, the Reformed epistemologists are not theologians but philosophers. They work more often within philosophy departments than in divinity schools; they do not write for the faithful alone.

After graduating from Calvin, Wolterstorff began graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, and Plantinga at Michigan. Following stints at various schools, they met again at Calvin during the 1979–1980 academic year. There, in consultation with Plantinga’s old Michigan teacher William Alston, the two sketched the contours of an alternative to the regnant theory of knowledge known as evidentialism. In two thousand years, philosophers have hardly departed from the definition, suggested (though ultimately rejected) by Plato in Theaetetus, of knowledge as justified, true belief. From the Enlightenment on, philosophers wanted to justify their religion by the standards of other forms of knowledge, and they demanded evidence from outside the believer’s mind and experience.

Reformed epistemologists do not accept the evidentialist schema. In a paper he gave last year at Claremont College, Wolterstorff neatly summed up their central argument: “Rationality is not to be equated with rational grounding . . . . Some religious beliefs are rational even though they are held immediately. To say that a person holds some belief immediately is to say that the belief is not held on the basis of other propositions that the person believes.” Belief in God, in other words, may be taken as a first principle. Indeed, for those in the Reformed tradition, faith is the first principle.

But how did Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Alston, and others make the philosophical case for this theistic position? They went grave robbing. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid attacked Locke and Hume with a simple but powerful argument: We have any number of faculties—memory, reason, perception, intellection, and so forth. When it comes to justifying a belief, all of them are circular. Locke may argue that reason is our only guide, but he uses his reason to make that argument; thus, he is presuming the soundness of reason before he even starts. How is that any more reliable than using another faculty—say, perception—as one’s guide? I may believe in God only because I perceive a god, but that’s no worse than your believing in reason because your reason tells you to. Reid was enormously influential as recently as two hundred years ago and was favored reading for the Founding Fathers. But then he slowly fell into obscurity.

Yet his argument perfectly suited the Reformed epistemologists. The task left to them was to distinguish their skepticism about rational justification from both fideism, or unquestioning belief, and postmodern relativism. After all, is it the case that any beliefs can be first principles? Not at all, the philosophers say. In several collections of essays, in Plantinga’s three volumes on the notion of warrant, in Alston’s Perceiving God (Cornell, 1993), and in Wolterstorff’s forthcoming World, Mind, and Entitlement to Believe, the philosophers have suggested strategies for determining the entitlement to hold a belief in rigorous but non-evidentialist ways. Alston, for example, suggests that one may feel entitled to participate in “doxastic” activities, or practices of belief, if one stands in certain venerable traditions that have “defeaters,” that is, internal strategies for ferreting out false beliefs. The Catholic Church, for example, has exhaustive interrogative practices to determine if visions or miracles are real—and most claims are deemed false. For his part, Plantinga emphasizes that warranted beliefs must be held by sane people whose faculties are functioning properly; Wolterstorff and others offer their own caveats. What they all have in common is the premise that reasoning from evidence is but one valid way to form a belief via rational means.

This theory has sparked a lively debate in philosophical circles, particularly since Plantinga’s Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford, 1993) set forth the additional claim that it is actually irrational to believe in evolution without also believing in God. Unless they allow for divine guidance, Plantinga reasons, evolutionists generally assume that evolution selects not necessarily for true beliefs but for behaviors that facilitate the survival of the species. By these lights, it would seem that true beliefs evolve, should they evolve, merely as by-products of adaptive behavior. So what confidence should we have that any one of our beliefs, including our belief in evolution itself, is true? Critics have focused particular scrutiny on this argument. In International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, the Marquette University philosopher Anthony Peressini claims that Plantinga’s reasoning rebounds on itself: If we can’t trust our belief in evolution, he wonders, why should we trust our disbelief in evolution?

Still, for all the doubters and debunkers, the Reformed epistemologists believe they’ve established a place for themselves in the precincts of professional philosophy. “When I was a young philosopher,” says Plantinga, “some of my older colleagues used to taunt me about my Christian beliefs, claiming that no serious philosopher or even any intelligent person could be a Christian; they never seemed to be able to explain why they thought so, however.” He goes on: “But this sort of thing seldom happens to me now.”