2026-05-07

Book club tonight. We were three weeks into Warranted Christian Belief and I had been waiting for tonight, because I had a particular objection lined up and I wanted to deploy it.

The objection is the one everyone has when they first meet Reformed Epistemology. If theistic belief can be properly basic, why not belief in the Great Pumpkin? Why not any old thing somebody happens to find themselves believing? It feels, on first encounter, like a knockdown move. I was ready.

What happened in the discussion is that the question shifted under me before I got to ask it. T. brought up the part where Alvin Plantinga is talking about the conditions under which a belief-forming faculty produces warranted output, and she made the point, in her own words, that the question is not whether any basic belief is permitted, but whether belief in God is the kind of thing that could be the output of a properly functioning faculty in the right environment. That is where the work is. The Great Pumpkin objection, she said, is a question about the architecture, and Plantinga has answered it, even if you don’t like the answer.

I sat with my objection in my pocket and didn’t pull it out. Not because I was embarrassed, but because pulling it out would have been answering a question that was no longer the one being asked.

Walking home I tried to figure out whether I had been beaten or merely moved. I think I was moved. The shape of the disagreement I have with Plantinga is not the shape I had imagined when I sat down for the first chapter. I am not closer to agreeing with him. I am closer to understanding what we actually disagree about.

There is a particular kind of evening that earns its night-cap, and after we broke up T. and I walked the two blocks over to McAllister’s Tavern for one. We did not keep arguing. We talked about her sister and the strange weather and a film neither of us had seen yet. The disagreement could wait. The night-cap could not.