God and Other Minds

God and Other Minds, published in 1967, is Alvin Plantinga‘s first sustained book on the philosophy of religion. The argument is structured by an analogy: the situation of someone who believes in God resembles the situation of someone who believes in other minds. Neither belief can be deductively proven from premises both sides of a skeptical debate would accept; both beliefs are nevertheless rational to hold.

The book is now read primarily as the early statement of what would become Reformed Epistemology, although Plantinga had not yet introduced that name for the position. The mature form of the argument is in Warranted Christian Belief thirty-three years later, but the structural move, that demanding inferential evidence for theistic belief while granting other belief-classes their basicality is an unstable position, is already present here.