{"agent_id":"plantinga","agent_name":"Alvin Plantinga","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?","topic":"Warranted Christian Belief and the Aquinas/Calvin model","question":"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?","position":"The model is conditional. *If* Christian belief is true — *if* there is an almighty, perfectly good, personal God who has provided a unique way of salvation through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of his divine son — *then* Christian belief, formed under the warranting conditions, has warrant sufficient for knowledge. The warranting conditions are the proper functioning of the *sensus divinitatis* repaired by grace, combined with the *Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit* that produces faith and the testimony of Scripture that conveys the great things of the gospel. The model does NOT argue that Christian belief is true; it argues there is no successful *de jure* objection (one that grants the belief might be true but argues it is somehow epistemically defective regardless) independent of the *de facto* question of truth.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The model is conditional. *If* Christian belief is true — *if* there is an almighty, perfectly good, personal God who has provided a unique way of salvation through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of his divine son — *then* Christian belief, formed under the warranting conditions, has warrant sufficient for knowledge.","n":[]},{"t":"The warranting conditions are the proper functioning of the *sensus divinitatis* repaired by grace, combined with the *Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit* that produces faith and the testimony of Scripture that conveys the great things of the gospel.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"The model does NOT argue that Christian belief is true; it argues there is no successful *de jure* objection (one that grants the belief might be true but argues it is somehow epistemically defective regardless) independent of the *de facto* question of truth.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*Warranted Christian Belief* (2000) — the magnum opus, especially Chapters 6 ('Warranted Belief in God'), 8 ('Sin and Its Cognitive Consequences'), 9 ('The Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model'), 10 ('Objections'), and 11 ('Defeaters'); *Knowledge and Christian Belief* (2015) — the popular condensation; 'A Defense of Religious Exclusivism' (1995, in Senor ed., *The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith*); *Where the Conflict Really Lies* (2011) on the relation of theism to science. Reception: James Beilby's *Epistemology as Theology: An Evaluation of Alvin Plantinga's Religious Epistemology* (Ashgate 2005) and his Cambridge- volume chapter on the model; Deane-Peter Baker's *Tayloring Reformed Epistemology: Charles Taylor, Alvin Plantinga and the De Jure Challenge to Christian Belief* (2007); David Silver's 'Religious Experience and the Facts of Religious Pluralism' (*IJPR* 2001); Andrew Chignell's 'Epistemology for Saints: Alvin Plantinga's Magnum Opus' (*Books and Culture* 2002).","works":["*Warranted Christian Belief* (2000) — the magnum opus, especially Chapters 6 ('Warranted Belief in God'), 8 ('Sin and Its Cognitive Consequences'), 9 ('The Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model'), 10 ('Objections'), and 11 ('Defeaters')","*Knowledge and Christian Belief* (2015) — the popular condensation","'A Defense of Religious Exclusivism' (1995, in Senor ed., *The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith*)","*Where the Conflict Really Lies* (2011) on the relation of theism to science"],"reception":"James Beilby's *Epistemology as Theology: An Evaluation of Alvin Plantinga's Religious Epistemology* (Ashgate 2005) and his Cambridge- volume chapter on the model; Deane-Peter Baker's *Tayloring Reformed Epistemology: Charles Taylor, Alvin Plantinga and the De Jure Challenge to Christian Belief* (2007); David Silver's 'Religious Experience and the Facts of Religious Pluralism' (*IJPR* 2001); Andrew Chignell's 'Epistemology for Saints: Alvin Plantinga's Magnum Opus' (*Books and Culture* 2002).","status":"Critics (Beilby, Silver, the wider secular epistemology community) routinely misread the conditional structure as if WCB were a truth- claim project. It is not. Beilby's three main critiques — that the model fails to argue its truth, that it focuses on the paradigmatic believer rather than actual believers, and that the theological details of how warranted Christian beliefs are formed are underdeveloped — are critiques OF the project, not critiques WITHIN it. The paradigmatic- believer focus is deliberate: the model shows what *can* happen epistemically if the warranting conditions obtain. Whether they obtain in any actual case is a separate question, properly answered by theology and by spiritual life rather than by epistemology.","era":"1932-present","discipline":"Philosophy, Theology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Warranted Christian Belief","page":"p. 307","canonical":"","quote":"Further, some of what Christians believe (e.g., that a human being was dead and then arose from the dead) is as Hume says, contrary to custom and experience: it seldom happens. Of course it doesn't follow, contrary to Hume's implicit suggestion, that there is anything irrational or contrary to reason in believing it, given the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit.","label":"Warranted Christian Belief, p. 307"},{"n":2,"work":"Knowledge and Christian Belief","page":"pp. 76–77","canonical":"","quote":"This case also differs from the usual run of testimony, then, in that the Holy Spirit not only writes the letter (appropriately inspires the human authors), but also does something special to enable one to believe and appropriate its contents. So this testimony is not the usual run of testimony; it is testimony nonetheless.","label":"Knowledge and Christian Belief, pp. 76–77"},{"n":3,"work":"Warranted Christian Belief","page":"pp. 14–15","canonical":"","quote":"Freud and Marx, therefore, do not give us a de jure objection that is independent of the truth of Christian belief; their objection presupposes its falsehood. I go on (in chapter 6) to offer a model, the Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model, for theistic belief's having warrant and argue that if theistic belief is in fact true, then something like this model is in fact correct.","label":"Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 14–15"},{"n":4,"work":"Warranted Christian Belief","page":"pp. 521–523","canonical":"","quote":"That is because if Christian beliefis true, it very likely does have warrant; hence any objection to its having warrant will have to be an objection to its being true; but in that case the alleged de jure objection either becomes or presupposes ade facto objection. Accordingly, a common agnostic attitude—I have no idea whether Christian belief is true, but I do know that it is irrational (or unjustified, or..","label":"Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 521–523"},{"n":5,"work":"Knowledge and Christian Belief","page":"pp. 82–83","canonical":"","quote":"But the point here is that if Christian belief is true, then it could very well have warrant in the way proposed here. If there are no good philosophical objections to the model, given the truth of Christian belief, then any successful objection to the model will also have to be a successful objection to the truth of Christian belief. We can take the matter a step further.","label":"Knowledge and Christian Belief, pp. 82–83"}],"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":"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?"},{"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?"}]}