¹ My summary of Plantinga's position is based upon his ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’, Nous, XV (1981), 41–51Google Scholar, and ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Faith and Rationality, pp. 16–93, ed. Plantinga, Alvin and Wolterstorff, Nicholas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).Google Scholar

² Grigg, Richard, ‘Theism and Proper Basicality: a Response to Plantinga’, International journal for Philosophy of Religion, XIV (1983), 123–7.Google Scholar

³ McLeod, Mark, ‘The Analogy Argument for the Proper Basicality of Belief in God’, International journal for Philosophy of Religion, XXI (1987), 3–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Can Belief in God Be Confirmed?’, Religious Studies, XXIV (1988), 311–23.Google Scholar

⁴ McLeod's first essay treats each of the three disanalogies, while his second essay treats only the third disanalogy. Hence, I will discuss only his first essay in Sections I and II, and both essays in Section III.

⁵ Plantinga, , ‘Basic’, p. 45.Google Scholar

⁶ McLeod, , ‘Analogy’, p. 5.Google Scholar

⁷ See Plantinga, , ‘Reason’, pp. 17 and 81.Google Scholar

⁸ On noetic structure, see Ibid. pp. 48–55.

⁹ McLeod, , ‘Analogy’, p. 13.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid. p. 81.

¹¹ McLeod confuses matters when, in his second essay, he equates outside confirmation of a belief (and, by extension, of a belief-forming mechanism) with the ill-fated quest to prove that our epistemic equipment puts us in touch with an external world. In the case of the outside confirmation under discussion here, I confirm a memory belief by stepping outside of my memory in order to consult other epistemic mechanisms. Whether one of these mechanisms, or all of them together, i.e. my whole human epistemic apparatus, genuinely puts me in touch with an external world, is a wholly different question. In addition, McLeod incorrectly identifies the kind of beliefs under discussion as those which are either self-evident, or incorrigible, or evident to the senses. But Plantinga's whole point is that, contrary to foundationalism, other kinds of beliefs – beliefs (2) and (3) are examples – can be properly basic. See McLeod, , ‘Belief’, p. 313.Google Scholar

¹² McLeod, , ‘Analogy’, p. 8.Google Scholar

¹³ Ibid. p. 10.

¹⁴ Quoted in McLeod, , ‘Belief’, p. 319.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid. p. 320.

¹⁷ Ibid. (my emphasis).

¹⁸ Ibid. p. 322.

¹⁹ Ibid. p. 320.

²⁰ Plantinga, , ‘Reason’, p. 76.Google Scholar

²¹ Ibid. p. 77.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid. p.78.

²⁴ It is worth noting that, by the time of his second essay, McLeod holds that the claim that there is an analogy between belief in God and certain examples of properly basic belief is a ‘basic thrust’ of Plantinga's argument. See McLeod, , ‘Belief’, p. 311.Google Scholar