Smorgasbord at the Junction of Faith and Reason

In our discussion today, we will cover six different areas in both classic and contemporary thought that concern the philosophy of religion. These will include the nature and validity of religious experience, the subject of miracles, a critique of Pascal’s famous wager, a discussion of Kierkegaard’s subjective truth, a look at basic beliefs and epistemic validity through the perspective of Plantinga, and John Hick’s perspective on religious pluralism. Throughout, the page numbers correspond to Steven M. Cahn’s Ten Essential Texts in the Philosophy of Religion, included for your convenience should you wish to secure a copy of the book and investigate further. The final thinker, David Basinger, who comments on Hick’s stance on pluralism and Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology is the single exception; the page numbers in this section correspond to Louis P. Pojman’s Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. Without wasting any more breath on formalities, let us roll up our sleeves and plunge in, taking a bit of this and a bit of that from our present smorgasbord at the junction of faith and reason.

C.B. Martin, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary, presents an open-ended account in “A Religious Way of Knowing” that seeks to explore the boundaries of what a religious claim means when a person reports having a direct encounter with God. He suggests that the statement “I can see a star” is making two claims about reality: the first is the obvious content which implies that there is such a heavenly body that exists and which can be empirically compared with the experiences of others (435). The second claim is an implicit statement about the visual apparatus or psychological interpretation of the subject. This claim amounts to “I seem to see a star,” which could never be verified or falsified either one by anyone external to the speaker. Whereas claiming “I can see a star” is open to empirical test, the statement “I have had a direct experience of God” admits to no such obvious means of verification. Yet the speaker does not generally mean “I seem to be having a direct experience of God”; the speaker is most often making a claim of objective reality: the speaker generally means that God is very real and has personally manifested Himself in some way. Yet even here, we run into difficulty, because how do we know what we do not know? How would we know what an experience with God is like if we have never had an experience of God: how would we know it was really God? A possible counterargument would be to suggest that there is presumably always a point at which we do not know what anything is and that we begin, over time, to learn to distinguish between things. Yet one could also argue that reality in this sense is much more collectively constructed and is demonstrable; one could argue in turn that faith communities offer demonstrable means of collectively negotiated standards for discerning the presence of God.

There seems to be an ambivalence that runs throughout Martin’s examination. It is apparent he is in search of some kind of objectivity to religious experiences which he notes are on the whole very much—though not “just like”—subjective experiences (440). His analysis may even be indicative of another class of truth claims, apart from the difficulties associated with aesthetics, sense perception, and normative statements in ethics. If he were to approach William James from the same tact he appears to be taking in this essay, he would probably not wish to affirm any interpretation of James which reduced the issue to mere subjective relativity. On the other hand, he clearly affirms that apprehension of God is necessarily individual and that while a trained theologian may greatly enhance our understanding of God, this observation is not automatically the same as saying that the theologian has ever experienced God anymore than an aesthetician who opens for us portals to beauty is always gripped by the sense of an actual aesthetic, however subjective such an awareness seems.

William Alston, Professor of Philosophy at Yale whom we met briefly in The Present King of France is Bald, enters the discussion in his essay entitled “Religious Experience as Perception of God” not by saying that he can or will even attempt to prove that God exists, but only that he will argue that if God does in fact exist there is no reason God could not present Himself to persons in non-sensory perception (that is, manifestations outside the range of normal sense perception). He speaks of a phenomenon that one may call givenness, appearance, or presentation, a formal way of speaking of the common-sense notion that an object exists independently of perception and that it must “present itself” to our awareness (442–443). Alston proposes, then, a “Theory of Appearing,” in which a person perceives a given thing because that thing has presented itself for perception: it was there to elicit a sensory response. Alston admits that our interpretation of the object may vary in a way not dependent upon it; for example, as we learn to recognize a new object, it no longer remains new, foreign, and perhaps disorienting but is now conceptualized under some kind of mental schema. That these processes occur in perception, Alston does not argue: his view seems to fit comfortably with Kant for whom “things in themselves” do exist (and thus confirm the “Theory of Appearing”) but in which perception is passive (“given”), understanding active (synthetic a priori), the two working in concert with reason to synthesize human experience (as per Kant’s Prolegomena). Alston is concerned to distinguish between what appears versus what it appears as (443).

An unknown object of some sort may present itself to my perception (that is, to use the example of vision, when I turn my eyes upon it and my eyes are functioning properly I cannot help but see it), yet I may find what I see disorienting or confusing. Over time, however, I may learn to recognize what was once foreign to me, conceptualizing it according to some kind of categorical framework: a tree, a woman, a mandala, a thurible of incense, the ouroboros symbol. Perception, then, involves not only an external world presenting itself to us (such that if our senses are functioning properly we will passively perceive it), but it also involves the construction of knowledge: sorting, sifting, and making sense of the objects of sight, the flavors of taste, the textures of touch, the odors of smell, and so on. For if sense perception were only passive reception on our parts, a tree could never be seen as a tree, but would rather be a confused conglomerate of textures, lines, hues, contours, colors, and whatever else constitutes the raw sensory input: that glob of something or other “out there” would hold little to no meaning for me without the interpretative aspect of perception to give it meaning. While Alston acknowledges this aspect of perception, he is not as concerned with this recognition as he is with the realization that there are “things in themselves”—Kant’s noumenal category—or, as we said before, he is concerned with what appears and not what it appears as.

There are three basic assumptions build into Alston’s “Theory of Appearing.” The first is that a given object, Y, must exist. Second, Y must evoke in me an awareness of itself. Third, the result of Y’s existence and the causal connection of its appearing to me tend to result in my formation of a doxastic condition, or beliefs I form about Y (443–444). Of these three assumptions, the last is the most flexible, for it would theoretically be possible for Y to exist and to present itself to my perception without me forming any beliefs about it.

Because all sense perception, according to the “Theory of Appearing,” necessarily involves that Y exist and makes itself available for perception, we cannot know a priori how that mode of perception can or ought to take place. Until we have first seen, touched, or tasted X, Y, and Z, we cannot establish how they will effect their causal contribution and thus form a standard of measurement by which legitimate perception is separated from hallucination or other delusion (448). If God does not exist and does not present Himself for appearance at least some of the time, we have no means of establishing any proper criteria for mystical experience. Unless God presents Himself to us at least some of the time, we can neither know that He does nor does not exist: we cannot say that such experience is invalid for the only way for invalidity to be established is to be perceived in contrast to validity. Alston, then, only claims that if God exists and presents Himself to our awareness, mystical experience would genuinely be mystical perception.

Without claiming to know whether mystical experience actually corresponds to any ultimate reality, Alston sets it side by side with sense perception, suggesting that if God exists, then it would share the same “generic sense” as ordinary sense perception, in that Y actually exists and presents itself to our awareness giving rise to doxastic considerations. The mode of perception might differ, as does sound waves perceptible to the ear versus light waves perceptible to the eye, yet there would be an actual “reality encounter” and genuine perception would have taken place. However the modes of perception might differ, sense perception and mystical perception can be dealt with in a conceptually identical or parallel fashion, at least insofar that in both cases, if Y exists and presents itself to our sensorium, we naturally will form beliefs and impressions whose validity or invalidity can be measured by establishing the nature of Y and the usual mode(s) of its presentation. (An allowance made for “modes” in the plural, because theoretically a range of modes may be deemed an acceptable means of validating sensory experience: sound, for example, is both aural and in some instances tactile, flavor, gustatory and olfactory.)

For the famous skeptic David Hume (1711–1776) from the chapter “Of Miracles” from his influential 1748 work An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, there are different levels of evidence by which reason determines whether something is true or false. The more evidence that we have to believe something, the more credence we should give it as a likely or perhaps even certain truth claim. Further, the evidence of one’s own immediate experience is stronger than the evidence of eyewitnesses who have told others who have in turn written these accounts down in sacred Scripture, and the weaker evidence cannot rationally win out over the stronger (171). When it comes to the laws of nature, these are the series of constant conjunction that we observe in the world around us and to the degree that these have been confirmed over and over again in experience, we may find them most probable. Some experiences, however, such as weather patterns, are more variable and we can expect a lesser degree of certainty; others may not accord with our own previous experience but nevertheless be perfectly natural, such as the Indian prince Hume mentions who was predisposed to disbelieve the reports about frost and its effects, for he had never seen the like in his country (173). A miracle then is a violation of the laws of nature, else it would not be called by that name. In the footnote, Hume elaborates further, suggesting that even things which might otherwise occur in nature under different circumstances nevertheless might be deemed miraculous in particular circumstances, such as a man who tells the wind and sea to be calm and the wind and sea become calm (183). This leads Hume to further identify a miracle as a natural law violated by the will of a divine being or by the agency of some unseen agent.

The testimony of persons is generally deemed reliable, all things being equal: it is a perfectly reasonable thing to trust human testimony in many everyday affairs (172). The fact that most men are shamed when caught in a lie also attests to the notion that human beings value truth and human testimony can be considered more or less reliable, depending on the credibility of the witness(es). The testimony of human beings is predicated on the testimony of experience; we even believe human testimony because of our previous experience and evaluate the credibility of the testifier also based on experience. The problem with the testimony of a miracle, however, is that a miracle is by its very nature a violation of the laws of nature and thus the credibility we normally give a testimony has its own “defeater,” as Plantinga and friends might say referring to anything that would count as counter-evidence against something. The very fact that the miraculous goes against natural laws means that any such claim is already weakened by the clear and evident testimony of the natural laws we observe in our everyday experience. The only real way to reduce the level of the defeater is if we deem it even less probable that the miracle did not happen than that it did (174): if a man we have known for a long time is blind and is suddenly made to see again by some holy man spitting in his eyes, we may very well regard the testimony of our own eyeballs as just such a defeater, combined with continued interaction with the man over the following days and weeks who has shown clear evidence that he can now see when before he had shown clear evidence that he could not.

Hume, then, does not outright reject miracles. For the most part, however, reason can tell us very little about them, for by their very essence they are anomalies of nature and the odds are always against them from the very start. Certainly when it comes to the testimonies in an ancient book of Scriptures such as the Bible, our reason tells us that these are fallacious, the product of fancies or lies. But the Christian faith was never one of reason but rather one of faith. Thus, it is entirely possible that others—though not likely Hume himself—find within themselves some ongoing miracle allowing them to accept such a book on faith; it is itself a miracle that they believe in miracles (183).

Richard Swinburne, the Oxford philosopher whom we met in our recent discussion of the teleological argument, accepts Hume’s notion of a miracle as supplied in the footnote of the latter’s chapter as we have defined it above: a miracle is “a violation of Nature by a god, that is, a very powerful being who is not a material object” (186–187). However, there is some slippage in our defining exactly what a “law of nature” might be: such laws can and at times do change as unexplained anomalies crop up or persist, for laws of nature are empirical inductions outfitted for human apprehension, generally in the guise of formulae (188). And formulae are the systems we derive to best explain all the observed phenomena, though these are provisional and may occasionally need to be tweaked to accommodate other unexpected events and the process is ongoing, for a virtually infinite number of formulae could be used to explain any finite set of data (188). This observation is especially true with laws that are statistical (rather than deterministic) in nature (189).

Swinburne believes that Hume’s standards are too strict, though he wonders if Hume did not have a deeper point in mind, like the contemporary philosopher Anthony Flew who maintains that historical events “are particular, often singular, and in the past tense” whereas the laws of nature are general, repeatable, and available for immediate observation such that we justly term them laws (190). Swinburne rejects this argument, for he points out that both empirical and historical truth is induced from particular examples and that there is no limit to the testing that can be constructed in either case. Swinburne appears to conceive of historical truth as admitting to forensic evidence in which the effects of the help infer the events that led up to the event in question: otherwise it is not clear how this assertion could be the case, particularly as Swinburne goes on to suggest that Hume was mistaken to argue that only testimony—and an investigation into the testifier’s credibility—could bear witness to a historic event (191). In using these means of evidence for which Swinburne has argued, we may soon enough conclude in a given instance that a law of nature, at least as presently understood, has been violated. But is it a miracle? Did it happen through the agency of a god? What kind of criteria would we need to establish such a claim?

A god is not an embodied agent that we can observe, though if violations of laws of nature happen in ways that closely parallel that of human agents, we may have reason to suspect a god is behind it, for arguments from analogy are a valid form of argumentation (192). These reasons would be exacerbated considerably if an audible voice spoke, or if the prayers of a devotee were answered immediately. Since this is not often the case, however, we are left with the consideration that if the analogy is strong enough, we are justified in believing that a god may have been the cause, though exactly under what conditions or at what point the analogy is strong enough is an argument Swinburne is not concerned with here. Also, if there was other evidence that a god existed, the violation of natural law could also be seen as reasonable explanation for the occurrence—or at the least count as potential evidence to the same (193).

Pascal’s wager, that well-known idea presented by French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), assumes a gambler’s approach to faith, positing that on the one side, we have infinity to gain and on the other, even if we have nothing to lose, between nothing and infinity is still an infinite distance (363). With those kinds of odds, Pascal implores us to risk, to take the Kierkegaardian leap (if not in so many words) for we have nothing to lose and we will be “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, doing good, a sincere and true friend” even in this life, and thus, should we have chosen wrongly, we have not even lost anything in the here and now (364). University of Cambridge Professor of Philosophy Simon Blackburn criticizes the wager in his ultra-short “Pascal’s Wager: A Critique” because while it purports “a position of metaphysical ignorance” it posits the Christian God (366). If the wager were consistent, it would invalidate itself for we could not know that the God of monotheism is the God who exists; if the wager were inconsistent, that is itself a form of invalidity. The wager, then, proverbially shoots itself in the foot.

The late English philosopher and mathematician W. K. Clifford (1845–1879) argues that we have an obligation to investigate all claims to truth and to believe only those which are warranted. If no warrant can be established, we have no business believing a given thing (368–369). The reason this is so extremely important is because everyone on every level of society from bottom to top bears tomorrow’s sons and daughters on its shoulders. It has an ethical duty not to muddy the waters, but rather to pass along intact as much as it can, each generation expanding on that of the one that came before. Investigating the truth carefully is a moral obligation, a matter of personal character. For example, if I steal from you, it may not have any real effect on you, for you might not even notice or you might be so well off that it makes no practical difference. Yet it makes a difference on my own character and on the example I set for others, weakening me even as it weakens the society in which I live (371). The bottom line is that if a man has no time to investigate the truth or falsity of certain things, “he should have no time to believe” either (372). Clifford finds little tenable in Christianity.

By contrast, the late and widely-known U.S. philosopher and psychologist William James’ (1842–1910) notion of a genuine option contrasts with Clifford in that James maintains there are some things that cannot be known but are nevertheless legitimately taken on faith; it also contrasts with Blackburn whose short criticism of Kierkegaard (highlighted in the section below) seems to imply that he believes there is ultimately a more objective and definitive answer to such questions (though given a single page of text upon which to base our impressions coupled with the well-known philosophical penchant for skeptical argumentation, it is hard to know exactly what Blackburn believes). Specifically, a genuine option for James is one that is a live option: we cannot reasonably be expected to long examine a question that suggests no initial credibility or interest to us. Even granting that such a question is ultimately true, we cannot make ourselves believe what we simply do not believe. Further, the only truth that even pyrrhonist skepticism “leaves standing” is that the consciousness itself is a reality. From here, all out attempts at knowledge, suggests James, are attempts to sort it all out and make sense of it, though excepting perhaps mathematical statements and other such statements which make no claims in themselves about reality, virtually all other claims have variously been defended and denied such that hardly a one stands without supporters and antagonists (351). In light of this realization, what exactly is truth? Nobody quite seems to agree. Even objective claims appear in many instances to be subjective declarations that may or may not accurately approximate reality: approximate “things in themselves.” To the person who seeks truth, then, the two greatest desires are to know truth and to avoid error (352).

That our opinions and passions do shape our beliefs seems beyond question to James, who claims that in certain deliberations, this recognition is not only natural but a perfectly valid and necessary means of choosing between options. To the degree that facts can be known, we strive to follow them, for objective truth presumably does exist, even if finding it and avoiding error seems inherently problematic. Some questions, however, do not seem to wait for such evidence, but, like Kierkegaard’s leap must be taken on faith and like Pascal’s wager are essentially forced. Such beliefs we defend with passion even when we feel we are being bested and made to appear a fool by our intellectual and cool-headed counterparts; somehow we believe even though we have little firm intellectual ground and cannot easily answer the skeptic’s objections (355). In these sorts of life questions, then, faith is an entirely legitimate response for James, for such questions cannot be decided objectively and often must be decided, at least insofar as they involve questions of morality and our interaction of person to person. These choices must come from the pool of live options, for they would not seem at all credible to the one making them otherwise. And credible they will seem when someone wagers or leaps, for if nothing more they carry for us pragmatic import, helping us synthesize our views of the world in meaningful ways that help us better live and adapt. In fact, this aspect is one of their inherent values to human beings.

For Kierkegaard, objective truth is not only outward, but it is open-ended and never completely settled, for it is placed upon the object to be known and not upon the relationship shared between object and knower (316). When we examine an object, we are always trying to gather more data and there is always the possibility that we will have to revise our initial thesis. By contrast, subjective truth is inward and is entirely focused on the relationship between knower and known and could perhaps best be renamed “true faith”—how sincere and devoted a person is in his or her pursuit of God. Something like the paradox of the publican in the Gospel parable who beat his breast in shame versus the Pharisee who prayed loudly, thanking God that he was not like that “lowly publican” over there, Kierkegaard suggests that the man who worships the idol truly is in far greater possession of subjective truth than the man who worships the true God falsely:

Thus we have a sense of exactly what Kierkegaard means when he holds subjective truth to be of higher value and a greater good than objective truth. Subjective truth is, in this sense, largely synonymous with true faith.

Robert Merrihew Adams, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, breaks Kierkegaard’s claims down into three categories, the first being the “approximation argument.” As Kierkegaard writes (page 317), seeking objective truth in which an object is sought in itself and outside the relationship of the knower must always be approximate, for there is always the possibility of error (322). As long as even the smallest trace of doubt or uncertainty remains, we cannot wholly embrace God (or anything else) objectively. Adams suggests that this can border on ludicrous. The margin of possible error about the actual occurrence of the American Civil War, for example, is so small as to be negligible. Our statements about the American Civil War may as well be implicitly prefaced with “for all practical intents and purposes,” since there is almost no doubt whatsoever that the event actually occurred (323). Adams is willing to allow, however, that a small amount of doubt that would not matter concerning American Civil Wars or other such historical or objective matters nevertheless can be a great source of distress for the believer struggling with objective uncertainty, but he does not believe this warrants dismissing as invalid all objective considerations of truth and making a virtue of perpetual objective uncertainty. Instead, objective consideration can help quiet those pesky doubts, for when the odds are ninety-nine percent or higher with a margin of doubt so as to be entirely negligible in all other matters other than religious faith, we have far, far more reason to believe than we do to disbelieve (324). Toward this end, Adams uses the example of a wife who recognizes that the objective evidence suggests a 99.9 percent chance that her husband does in fact love her, but is still plagued by fears and doubts that he might not. Objective reason can aid her in helping her reason that her fears are unfounded and that she should believe when she has an all but 0.1 percent chance of being mistaken.

The “postponement argument” is the next position Adams identifies in Kierkegaard’s thought. In an objective pursuit of the truth, the facts are never all in and experimentation is endless: thus, we never completely reach a conclusion and could potentially keep waiting forever to fully believe: there is always and ever that next bit of evidence or new discovery waiting to be made. Even worse, if we allow empiricism to dictate our belief on any level, to that level Kierkegaard argues (or so Adams claims) that our faith will be incomplete (326). Yet to have a fully authentic faith, one must be entirely committed. Such a commitment (a) cannot depend on any objective basis for stabilizing its claims, it (b) cannot be consciously open to the possibility of revision in the future, (c) nor will any evidence ever be able to be admitted that will cause it to be objectively reconsidered (327). Our commitment of faith would be subject to all three limitations, however, if it were based on objective evidence. While Adams agrees that abandoning one’s faith in light of possible contrary evidence suggests a faith placed more in objective inquiry than religious commitment, he nevertheless takes issue with premise (a). Essentially, if we embraced (a) entirely, we would no longer be open to being “humble, teachable, open to correction, new inspiration, and growth of insight, even (and perhaps especially) in important religious beliefs” whereas that is an important part of religious ethics. Faith should not be placed in faith itself, however, but in God, and it is to be doubted that religious devotion to God is ever unconditional, for while God’s love is said to be unconditional, our love for Him is conditioned on His goodness and love for us (327–328). Few would be motivated to an unconditional loving commitment to a vile and malevolent Deity, though of God it is said that He loves sinners unconditionally, whatever final consequence might ensue if they do not submit themselves to Him and allow Him to re-form and re-shape their lives as He sees best fit.

The third view Adams identifies he terms Kierkegaard’s “passion argument,” in which it is argued that we do not believe because of any “introductory guarantees of security” or any of the other of the “mob of public pawnbrokers and guarantors” but simply because we will it with every fiber of our being (328, quoting Kierkegaard). Such a religious belief must (a) be very important and (b) objectively improbable. Concerning (b), Adams identifies two reasons why Kierkegaard values this criterion: one has to do with (i) the acceptance of risk and (ii) the costliness of the price (329). The importance of the belief is quite straight-forward, for if it is not a weighty question it is probably not worth believing very strongly. It also must involve risk and cost, or else it is not really faith: risk and cost being measurements of the amount of total passion (329–330, 332). Adams believes that passion may very well be a good thing to be desired in religious faith, but should it entail the exaltation of objective improbability? Why should we enshrine objective improbability as virtuous?

Adams concludes that Kierkegaard’s conception of faith may actually be more rationally founded than the latter would be willing to admit (333). It is “objectively advantageous” to want to be a Christian now if one ardently and passionately desires to know the truth through Christianity (334). If Christianity is false, the quest will not succeed, but if it is true, it is objectively advantageous to become a believer now while the uncertainty is strong. This particular view of Kierkegaard is not unlike Pascal’s wager, in which an objective gain is the desired result and involves a high risk of objective uncertainty, making the wager that much more costly. These questions concern an examination of authentic faith. But what of belief? Is faith and belief (or at least “beliefs”) necessarily the same thing?

A basic belief is one upon which other beliefs are rested, just as a foundation is the framework upon which the walls, floor, and roofing are erected. A properly basic belief is one that has met a given set of criteria and been validated and confirmed as legitimate. Classical foundationalism posits the following criteria: properly basic beliefs must be (1) evident, (2) sensually perceptible (according to the model of the ancients), and/or (3) incorrigible (from the perspective of Modern and contemporary thinkers): that is, they must not be open to doubt, such as the statement “I seem to see a star.” Belief in God could not be taken as a properly basic belief without being shown to be evident and either incorrigible or evident to the senses. Rather, such a belief would have to meet these conditions before it was admitted as properly basic.

For Notre Dame professor Alvin Plantinga (whom we also met last week in The Present King of France is Bald), however, the very tenets of classical foundationalism render it “self-referentially incoherent”: its claims (like virtually all normative claims), cannot be supported by its own standards. There is nothing that makes a belief in classical foundationalism itself evident or incorrigible, nor does it admit to sense perception. If we are to accept the tenets of classical foundationalism, Plantinga argues that many of our common-sense beliefs will not be justified. Thus, Plantinga attempts a look at our “noetic structure,” or our way in which we assemble and construct knowledge such that various propositions share some kind of interdependent relationship one with another (383). Foundationalism, then, sees some beliefs as being the foundation of all others and attempts to determine which of these are properly basic. Plantinga doesn’t take issue with that notion, but separates it into two camps, the one he calls weak and the other strong. The weak one makes fewer normative claims and Plantinga is perfectly willing to grant it; the strong version entails what we have described above as necessarily being (1) evident, (2) sensually perceptible, and/or (3) incorrigible. But surely not just any belief will fly even in weak foundationlism: there must be some test or else “the Great Pumpkin objection” stands where we could posit as foundational the existence of the Great Pumpkin (from the Peanuts comic strip, a figure which the character Linus believes rises once every Halloween) (387).

The only positive method* Plantinga proposes for determining properly basic beliefs is that of induction. (*A positive method is one that actively proposes and defends ideas as opposed to a negative method which merely meets objections and/or levels criticisms. The planner and scheduler who makes active recommendations and defends them at a committee meeting is using a positive method, the doubtful or cautionary member who expresses reluctance employs a negative method. While a negative method can certainly be vicious, no negative connotation is expressly implied by the term; rather, it is merely a formal designation.) Under this model, we would attempt to gather together as many beliefs as we could that people hold basic and construct hypotheses which could in turn be tested as proper standards of validity against the very examples we used to generate them; we use examples to form paradigms for belief and test the paradigms against the examples to ensure their continued validity (389–390). In the end, this approach to epistemic validation frees the Reformed believer from a need to do any more than engage in a negative apologetic, or in other words merely meet the objections to his or her viewpoints without proposing any positive counter-instances. The Reformed view takes God to be properly basic, a foundational belief upon which her entire cosmology or worldview is rested. God is not to be proven by analysis, but taken on faith and it is only sin that keeps us from seeing the reality of God more clearly, for the knowledge of Him, as the late theologian John Calvin (1509–1564) and hero of the Reformed tradition teaches, is innate: even St. Aquinas years before proposed a weaker version of this claim by suggesting that “God is man’s beatitude”: the thing for which humanity longs, though often seen as in a mirror darkly, confused and uncertain. (Calvin would probably not disagree, but argue that this murkiness is the result of man’s sinful nature.)

The term “warrant” simply refers to whatever is required for belief to be considered a legitimate knowledge claim, just as a search warrant authorizes the police to legitimately enter and scour a place of residence from top to bottom. Warrant distinguishes between the “true opinion” Plato identified, which is more like a lucky guess than a claim to real knowledge, and true knowledge. Even though “true opinion” is in fact true, it could not on this view be considered warranted and thus would not constitute true knowledge, for the individual merely happened to be correct but did not know that he or she was. (For Plato, this was the truth level of the poets who were messengers of the Divine, uttering true things they did not fully understand.) Warrant may be of two flavors, though Plantinga argues that the internalism variety experiences some problems not associated with that of externalism. On an internalist view, something does not necessarily have to be known to constitute knowledge, its views may consist of an elaborate interweaving of valid (though unsound) premises, and, to complicate things still further, rationalist thinkers from Descartes onward did a number on our trust of navigating only through the ideas of the mind. Externalism seems to enjoy better support, for it considers whether or not the organs of perception are functioning as they ought, whether the environment is conducive for their use (proper lighting, absence of fog, lack of noise interference, etc.), whether all questions are contained in a framework designed to securely record and shelve truth, and whether there is a high probability that under these conditions a view is in fact true. Assuming that our pursuit and positing of God meets these externalist conditions—and if God and the theistic conception of Him is accurate as the Reformed thinker believes—then Plantinga feels one has more than sufficiently established the validity and soundness of positing God as a properly basic belief.

Key Kantian terms: noumenal world versus phenomenal world. Roughly, the noumenal world consists of “things-in-themselves” as they actually are in themselves; phenomenal reality is our perception of those things, the only reality we, as human beings, will ever know, for we can never get outside our own heads to see things-in-themselves as they actually are in themselves. We see only their “appearances,” a technical term Kant employs for what we might call “things-in-perception.” In fact, for all we know, noumenal reality may be only a “thing-in-itself,” plurality a conception supplied by our perceptual synthesis and found nowhere without. A detailed and somewhat technical examination can be found in The Noumenal and Phenomenal Realms in Perspective, an article written by Dr. Steve Palmquist, Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Hong Kong Baptist University.

We have no way to get outside our own heads to see how things are in themselves, so we must categorize them according to human perception, not only in the form of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and feeling, but also in organizing these perceptions in meaningful ways, assigning them names, and determining what bearing they have on our lives, a process that is at least partially culturally conditioned. Once gripped with this awareness, we tend to become considerably more cautious in thinking or describing the world as a fixed place or being dogmatic in our pronouncements, because however fixed it may actually be in and of itself, we will forever see only through the lens of our humanity where our perception apparently literally colors what we see—if we are to believe physics, we do in fact color reality every time we open our eyes: color is what our retinas produce from the interplay of an object’s surface and light waves. It apparently does not exist in the world at all, though Kant might question how we could know this with certainty. He does believe that a real world exists, but as Arthur Brown’s opinion piece Was Kant a Mystic? explains, while it cannot be said that a man wearing dark sunglasses creates the external (noumenal) world, the sunglasses nevertheless have “modified” his perceptual (phenomenal) world such that all objects appear darker than usual.

John H. Hick, Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion Emeritus at Claremont Graduate University and H.G. Wood Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, employs a modified version of the Christian concept of salvation as an organizational schema for evaluating the various religions of the world in his essay “Religious Pluralism and Salvation.” This approach of looking at the idea of salvation in a broad sense, he suggests, is a profitable one, for it recognizes that all religions more or less attempt to move us out of ourselves and into more other-centered, holistic persons (450–451). At back of all religious experience, Hick assumes the concept of the Real, choosing to look at the world not according to a naturalistic explanation but rather a religious one, borrowing from Kant’s view of the limitations of reason, which, though it cannot make the journey across to the other side of metaphysics itself (only faith may bridge that gap), nevertheless rises up indignant, pronouncing the materialistic conception of the world cold and largely uninhabitable. The Real is the Fore to which all else is Ground: the Real is transcendent “Wholly Other” that each religion seeks to make contact with according to its own phenomenal framework (455). The Real may be conceived in different guises, each of them equally valid, just as different photographs of the same expedition all capture some essential truth about the adventure even if individually incomplete and limited. No one may ever be said to have appended the Real. For Hick, then, The Real transcends the answer of naturalism and affirms the existence of a transcendent noumenal reality.

The various religious traditions tend to offer various metaphysical claims about the material universe, its origins or lack thereof, and life after death, even if in the negative. While Hick admits that these issues are very important, they are things we cannot know with certainty in the here and now and therefore we cannot be overly critical in the absence of evidence. Thus, Hick offers us a lesson from the Buddha to his disciples about not unduly concerning oneself with what cannot be known. Historical disagreements also arise, but these tend not to directly conflict with one another, rather affording a difference in emphases or time period.

Hick’s view, then, is one of pluralism in which the noumenal reality known as the Real is experienced phenomenally and is thus variously conceived in differing but all more or less valid views that attempt to capture something of this essential nature. (You and I may draw two pictures of the Capital Building, you of the front, me of the back, and, to the degree our artistic ability adequately captures the details, both drawings may be considered equally valid though totally different: if one drawing is particularly poor, its validity may be comprised in fact, though not in principle. However, no one should mistake the drawings—however accurate—for the Capital Building itself.) This stance of the (a) pluralist is contrasted with the (b) inclusivist, because the inclusivist tends to think a given religion is the ultimate truth but that other religions are approximations of this truth and more or less accurately capture parts of it. The Christian inclusivist, for example, is comfortable with the idea that if there is in fact a hell and a need for salvation, people who lack knowledge because they were born in the wrong country (or lack knowledge for any other reason save perhaps their own negligence) will be held accountable only for what they do know—what has been written on their heart—and not what they did not know: God is the creator of the entire universe and all the peoples in it; all are created in His image and are in this sense sons and daughters of God. The (c) exclusivist, by contrast, not only sees his or her respective religion as being the ultimate truth but believes that all are excluded who do not conceive of the world through its specific vision of reality. For Hick, however, all religions are varying phenomenal ways in which the merely natural is transcended, leading us into greater ethical and religious concern. No one view is ultimately correct, for all are phenomenal interpretations of noumenal reality: phenomenal interpretations of the Real which is by definition so Wholly Other as to be unknown and unknowable by human sensorium, or at least to remain meaningless to human understanding before being filtered through human sensorium and packaged for human consumption.

Professor of Philosophy David Basinger of Wesleyan College in Rochester, New York, believes that there is a middle ground between what Hick advocates and the exclusivist stance of Plantinga in his article “Hick’s Religious Pluralism and ‘Reformed Epistemology’—A Middle Ground,” the only essay not found in Ten Essential Texts, but rather in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. Specifically, Basinger believes that the two thinkers are asking different but equally important questions. We will examine each briefly in turn before concluding. Basinger argues that Plantinga (and the Reformed perspective in general) is concerned with examining what constitutes epistemic validity: When is a person rational for holding one particular, mutually exclusive belief out of many? (535). In order to demonstrate a rational claim, all the believer need do is show that his or her claim is no less plausible than others, not that it is the most plausible of them all. This is the negative apologetic we described earlier. Therefore, while Hick in his adherence to pluralism will see the exclusivist as wrong, he will not see him or her in violation of the basic epistemic principles which govern rationality. Put another way, perfectly rational people may be mistaken, but that does not make them irrational or their claims idiotic.

According to Basinger, in granting that the exclusivist is within epistemic bounds, Hick now asks upon what basis we should decide whether pluralism or exclusivism is the most tenable answer. The exclusivist cannot simply claim the question is irrelevant because she finds a predisposition to believe as many in her culture do. Now she is being asked, at least if she is aware of the many various and apparently mutually exclusive theses about the world, why she holds her claim and not those others: how is it that she believes her “religious belief-forming mechanisms are functioning properly” whereas those of others are not: why she is right and they are wrong. The Christian exclusivist will likely cite “the fall” and the resultant sin nature, though Basinger finds this stance problematic in that other exclusivist religious traditions make counter claims and one cannot so easily fall back on a merely negative apologetic. Basinger believes that this recognition moves Reformed thinkers from the more or less passive role of persons who do not have to answer the question for themselves of why they believe into persons who now must decide why they have chosen their method of belief to the exclusion of others. They do not necessarily have to engage publicly in a positive apologetic, but within their own minds the question cannot be answered so easily merely in the negative. Basinger believes, then, that both questions are important and that religiously minded thinkers like Plantinga and Hick both have a legitimate place in the faith community, probing us to examine ourselves and find out the reason for the hope that we have within us and the beliefs we find essential toward securing this end—and why these particular beliefs are properly basic and not others.