Warranted Christian Belief

Warranted Christian Belief is the third and most sustained volume of Alvin Plantinga‘s warrant trilogy, published by Oxford University Press in 2000. It runs to over five hundred pages and is the mature statement of Reformed Epistemology at full philosophical strength.

The book’s central argument is that Christian belief, if true, is very likely warranted, that is, formed by cognitive faculties functioning properly in the right environment. Plantinga calls this the Aquinas/Calvin model and develops it as a defeasible model of how Christian belief could be warranted, not as an argument that it is true. The conditional structure of the argument is widely misread; Warranted Christian Belief is not an argument that Christianity is true, it is an argument that the standard de jure objection (“even if Christianity were true, it wouldn’t be rational to believe it without sufficient evidence”) cannot be made to work.

The book is also the most thorough analytic engagement with the de jure question in print. It absorbs and answers a long list of objectors, including the ones Margaret Halloran was preparing to deploy when her advisor assigned her to read it. The chapter on the Great Pumpkin objection, in particular, reorganizes a debate she had thought was already settled.