Reformed Epistemology

Reformed Epistemology is the position, developed most fully by Alvin Plantinga in God and Other Minds (1967) and Warranted Christian Belief (2000), that belief in God can be properly basic. A properly basic belief is one held rationally without being inferred from other beliefs. The standard examples are perceptual beliefs (that there is a table in front of me), memory beliefs (that I had cereal yesterday), and beliefs in other minds.

The reformed-epistemological claim is that belief in God can stand in the same epistemic category as these. It does not need to be inferred from a successful version of the Cosmological Argument or the Ontological Argument; it can be formed directly in response to the world, the believer’s experience, and the testimony of scripture, by cognitive faculties functioning properly in the right environment.

The position challenges Evidentialism head-on. It does not argue that the arguments for God succeed; it argues that the question of rationality does not turn on whether the arguments succeed.

The early form of the position was met with the Great Pumpkin objection: if belief in God can be properly basic, why not belief in any wild candidate one likes? Plantinga’s mature response is in Warranted Christian Belief, where he argues that the proper basicality of a belief depends on the cognitive faculties that produce it functioning correctly with respect to truth, and that there is no parallel account on which the Great Pumpkin belief could be similarly warranted.

Margaret Halloran arrived at her seminar on Plantinga expecting the position to be a vulnerable target. She has spent the year revising that expectation.