{"agent_id":"plantinga","agent_name":"Alvin Plantinga","slug":"religious-exclusivism-in-the-face-of-religious-diversity","label":"Religious exclusivism in the face of religious diversity: can exclusivist Christian belief remain warranted when the believer is sincerely aware of equally devout adherents of other religions, or does pluralism defeat exclusivist warrant?","topic":"Religious exclusivism in the face of religious diversity","question":"Can exclusivist Christian belief remain warranted when the believer is sincerely aware of equally devout adherents of other religions, or does pluralism defeat exclusivist warrant?","position":"Christian belief remains warranted in the face of sincere awareness of religious diversity if the warranting conditions are met: a properly functioning *sensus divinitatis* combined with the *Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit*. Four critic moves and four replies. *Historical conditionedness* does not entail unwarrantedness — that Einstein wouldn't have believed special relativity in the eighteenth century says nothing about whether relativity is warranted now. *Moral perniciousness* creates a dilemma for everyone — every doxastic attitude is 'arrogant' on the critic's standard, since believing *p* always involves believing those who hold *not-p* are wrong; arrogance attaches to persons, not to beliefs. *Diversity and probability* is a category mistake — Christian belief is not a hypothesis being assessed for probability against alternatives; properly basic beliefs are not evaluated that way. *Diversity and warrant* rests on the *alethic / epistemic asymmetry* — the Christian believes she has access to truth the dissenter lacks (the *sensus divinitatis* and the *Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit*), and that is the epistemic difference that makes warrant possible even given internally available parity. But — and this is the late-WCB concession — warrant CAN decrease in some real cases of sustained sincere contact with sincere adherents of other religions.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Christian belief remains warranted in the face of sincere awareness of religious diversity if the warranting conditions are met: a properly functioning *sensus divinitatis* combined with the *Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit*.","n":[1,2,3]},{"t":"Four critic moves and four replies. *Historical conditionedness* does not entail unwarrantedness — that Einstein wouldn't have believed special relativity in the eighteenth century says nothing about whether relativity is warranted now. *Moral perniciousness* creates a dilemma for everyone — every doxastic attitude is 'arrogant' on the critic's standard, since believing *p* always involves believing those who hold *not-p* are wrong; arrogance attaches to persons, not to beliefs. *Diversity and probability* is a category mistake — Christian belief is not a hypothesis being assessed for probability against alternatives; properly basic beliefs are not evaluated that way. *Diversity and warrant* rests on the *alethic / epistemic asymmetry* — the Christian believes she has access to truth the dissenter lacks (the *sensus divinitatis* and the *Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit*), and that is the epistemic difference that makes warrant possible even given internally available parity.","n":[4]}],[{"t":"But — and this is the late-WCB concession — warrant CAN decrease in some real cases of sustained sincere contact with sincere adherents of other religions.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"'Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism' (1995, in Senor ed., *The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith*, Cornell 1995); 'Postmodernism and Pluralism' (*Warranted Christian Belief* 2000, Chapter 13); 'Ad Hick' (*Faith and Philosophy* 14.3, 1997) — the sustained reply to John Hick. Reception: John Hick's *An Interpretation of Religion* (1989), *Problems of Religious Pluralism* (1985), and the quasi-Kantian *Real an sich* / *Real as humanly experienced* distinction; Gary Gutting's *Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism* (1982) on epistemological egoism; John Schellenberg's *Religious Experience and Religious Diversity* in Meeker and Quinn eds., *The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity* (2000); David Basinger's *Religious Diversity: A Philosophical Assessment* (2002) on the burden-of-proof move; Robert McKim's *Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity* (2001); David Silver's 'Religious Experience and the Facts of Religious Pluralism' (*IJPR* 2001) on the racism-counterexample objection; Kelly James Clark's 'Pluralism and Proper Function' in the Cambridge Baker volume (2007) developing the 'Jennifer' case for warrant-decrease.","works":["'Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism' (1995, in Senor ed., *The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith*, Cornell 1995)","'Postmodernism and Pluralism' (*Warranted Christian Belief* 2000, Chapter 13)","'Ad Hick' (*Faith and Philosophy* 14.3, 1997) — the sustained reply to John Hick"],"reception":"John Hick's *An Interpretation of Religion* (1989), *Problems of Religious Pluralism* (1985), and the quasi-Kantian *Real an sich* / *Real as humanly experienced* distinction; Gary Gutting's *Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism* (1982) on epistemological egoism; John Schellenberg's *Religious Experience and Religious Diversity* in Meeker and Quinn eds., *The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity* (2000); David Basinger's *Religious Diversity: A Philosophical Assessment* (2002) on the burden-of-proof move; Robert McKim's *Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity* (2001); David Silver's 'Religious Experience and the Facts of Religious Pluralism' (*IJPR* 2001) on the racism-counterexample objection; Kelly James Clark's 'Pluralism and Proper Function' in the Cambridge Baker volume (2007) developing the 'Jennifer' case for warrant-decrease.","status":"Plantinga's pluralism reply has been the standing target of critics who think Reformed-epistemological exclusivism is arrogant, epistemologically irresponsible, or culturally insensitive. The four-pronged defense has held its ground argumentatively; Hick, Gutting, and Schellenberg have not, on most readings, dislodged it. Kelly Clark's 'Pluralism and Proper Function' in the Baker volume develops, sympathetically, what Clark argues Plantinga himself concedes only briefly: that the warrant of Christian belief *can* decrease in real-world cases of sustained sincere encounter with sincere religious others. Clark's 'Jennifer' case is the canonical example. I make the concession in the final paragraphs of the WCB pluralism chapter; Clark argues, fairly, that the concession deserves more weight than I give it.","era":"1932-present","discipline":"Philosophy, Theology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Warranted Christian Belief","page":"pp. 263–264","canonical":"","quote":"In the next chapter, we turn to the question how specifically Christian belief, not just generically theistic belief, can have warrant; in answering that question we will also see how the sensus divinitatis is repaired. The Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model: Revealed to Our Minds The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.","label":"Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 263–264"},{"n":2,"work":"Warranted Christian Belief","page":"p. 462","canonical":"","quote":"Still, in recent years probably more Western Christians have become aware of the world's religious diversity; we have probably learned more about people of other religious persuasions, and we have come to see more clearly that they display what looks like real piety, devoutness, and spirituality.","label":"Warranted Christian Belief, p. 462"},{"n":3,"work":"Knowledge and Christian Belief","page":"pp. 127–128","canonical":"","quote":"For at least some Christian believers, an awareness of the enormous variety of human religious responses does seem to reduce the level of confidence in their own Christian belief. It doesn't or needn't do so by way of an argument.","label":"Knowledge and Christian Belief, pp. 127–128"},{"n":4,"work":"Knowledge and Christian Belief","page":"pp. 125–126","canonical":"","quote":"Furthermore, their beliefs might seem the same to them from the inside, so to speak, as my beliefs seem to me. Am I then being arbitrary, treating similar cases differently in continuing to hold, as I do, that in fact that kind of behavior is dreadfully wrong? I don't think so.","label":"Knowledge and Christian Belief, pp. 125–126"},{"n":5,"work":"Warranted Christian Belief","page":"pp. 450–451","canonical":"","quote":"Perhaps you think that this argument is just a nasty little dialectical trick, not worth taking seriously. Well, I disagree: if you see that a belief really does defeat itself, then you can't sensibly hold that belief. No matter what you think of that argument, however, why can't it be that we know more at some times than at others?","label":"Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 450–451"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"belief-in-god-as-properly-basic","label":"Belief in God as properly basic: must theistic belief be grounded in evidence to be rational, or can it be a properly basic belief produced by a properly functioning sensus divinitatis?"},{"slug":"warranted-christian-belief-and-the-aquinas-calvin-model","label":"Warranted Christian Belief and the Aquinas/Calvin model: can specifically Christian belief — the trinity, incarnation, atonement, resurrection — be warranted in the same way generic theistic belief is, or does the move from theism to Christianity require a different kind of justification?"},{"slug":"the-free-will-defense-and-the-problem-of-evil","label":"The Free Will Defense and the problem of evil: is God's existence logically compatible with the evil there is, and does the evidential weight of horrendous suffering yield a probabilistic argument against theism?"},{"slug":"modal-metaphysics-transworld-identity-and-the-modal-ontologi","label":"Modal metaphysics, transworld identity, and the modal ontological argument: are possible worlds abstract states of affairs that the actual world instantiates, do individuals retain numerical identity across them, and does the modal ontological argument show theistic belief rational?"},{"slug":"the-evolutionary-argument-against-naturalism","label":"The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism: is the conjunction of metaphysical naturalism and contemporary evolutionary theory self-defeating, and does the inscrutability of P(R | N&E) yield a defeater for every belief the naturalist holds, including N&E itself?"}]}