David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

In “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology,” Alvin Plantinga argues that belief in God need not be justified by the proofs and arguments of natural theology in order to be held rationally by believers. In order to show this, he develops an epistemological position in which some beliefs are properly basic, or rightly held with no antecedent propositions or premises, and he argues that belief in God is one of these properly basic beliefs.

Plantinga begins outlining his Reformed epistemology by giving his best construal of classical foundationalism (CF), introducing a model for rational thought which he calls a “noetic structure” (265). A noetic structure is “a set of propositions…with certain epistemic relations that hold among [the person who holds the propositions] and these propositions” (265). Among the propositions in a noetic structure, if there are no properly basic beliefs which by definition are not based on any other beliefs, the structure will contain self-referential dependencies or an infinite chain of dependent beliefs (267). A rational person cannot have only self-referencing beliefs or an infinite number of beliefs, so the noetic structure of a rational person–a rational noetic structure–must contain some properly basic beliefs. Furthermore, according to Plantinga’s construal of CF the non-basic beliefs in a rational noetic structure are proportional in strength to the support from the basic beliefs (267). In addition to these two requirements for rational thought, CF adds three criteria for properly basic belief: a belief is properly basic for person S only if it is self-evident for S or apparent to S’s senses, (267) or if it is a cautious claim about a S’s mental life, such as “it seems to me that I see a tree” (268). Plantinga claims that these criteria for proper basicality are insufficient or wrong because belief in God does not satisfy them and belief in God is a properly basic belief for those who hold it, since believers believe in God without antecedent propositions. To discover the right criteria, we must first realize that “[no]…condition for proper basicality follows from obviously self-evident premises by obviously acceptable arguments” (271), for if there were such a condition it would reference itself and beg the question. Instead, the criteria for proper basicality must be discovered inductively from sets of obviously basic beliefs and verified on relevant sets of example beliefs (271). These criteria establish belief in God as properly basic, and because properly basic beliefs are known independently of other propositions, those who hold a properly basic belief in God can hold that belief rationally without need for proof or argumentation.

One may argue that Plantinga does not adequately provide a means for identifying properly basic beliefs, and that this incompleteness allows us to construct a possible counterexample consistent with his epistemology in which belief in God is not properly basic. Plantinga admits that the sets of obviously basic beliefs used to discover the criteria for proper basicality can differ among ideological communities (271). It is epistemically possible for a community to agree upon a set of obviously basic beliefs that, by Plantinga’s inductive discovery technique, yield criteria for proper basicality that make the belief that God does not exist a properly basic belief. Alternatively, the criteria discovered by this community could enable other basic beliefs which support the belief that God does not exist, making it rational to believe that God does not exist. Clearly, anyone holding the belief that God does not exist cannot also hold the basic belief that God exists; furthermore, we would not want to say that some people can know that God exists while other people can know that God does not exist. In this case either (A) belief in God is not properly basic, (B) Plantinga’s epistemology is flawed, (C) basic belief is not sufficient for knowledge (Calvin), or (D) the Reformed notion of knowledge espoused by Plantinga is invalid.

Considering this objection from the viewpoint of the Reformed thinkers, we see that an ideology in which belief in God is not properly basic would be considered irrational by believers, and would be irrational on all accounts if God actually exists. From these considerations, we have good reason to doubt the possibility and rational consistency of the counterexample. To recall the ideas of Dutch theologian Herman Bavink quoted by Plantinga, the Reformed thinkers believed that we directly experience God in the intricacy and marvel of the world, and this is why our belief in God is properly basic (262). Perhaps if there are people for whom belief in God is not properly basic they are either unable to see the world this way or they choose not to.