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Foundationalism and Peter's Confession
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
One part of the Clifford–James dispute is still with us, namely a more inclusive foundationalism which has grown out of criticism of evidentialism in relation to belief in God. ‘Evidentialism’ will here mean the view, attributed to thinkers in the middle ages, that foundational premises must be either self-evident or evident to the senses. One answer now given by some (chiefly Plantinga) to such foundational questions is that belief in God is a properly basic belief, though not properly basic in an evidentialist sense. Thus one can rationally hold such a belief without proving it by argument. I will argue that belief in some specific personal God, such as Allah, Yahweh or Jesus as the Christ (Peter's confession), as constituted by sacred texts is the form belief takes for Christian believers and that there are special questions as to whether such beliefs can be shown to be properly basic.
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1 ‘Ordinary arguments’ will mean the context dependent proofs based on premises accepted by one's readers or listeners.
2 Throughout the paper, I shall use ‘cannot be shown’ as short for ‘cannot be shown to be properly basic except to those who already believe in the reality of a particular personal God’.
3 Metaphysics, IV, 4, 1006a16.Google Scholar
4 Ibid. 1008b14.
5 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 78f.; 88f.Google Scholar
6 Ibid. pp. 102f.; 155f.
7 Plantinga, Alvin, God and Other Minds: a Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 245f.Google Scholar
8 Plantinga, Alvin and Wolterstorff, Nicholas, eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 90.Google Scholar
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid. pp. 76f.
11 This emphasis on expression of the real in experience need not commit well-known confusions in traditional expression theories. Tormey, for example, convincingly argues that traditional expressionists such as Dewey confused the expression of emotions or states of mind of the artist, which is a confused impossibility, with the expression of the emotive tone of the texture of music, for example. Tormey, Alan, The Concept of Expression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 99f.Google Scholar This second sense of ‘expression’ is the sense in which Aristotle, Hume and Kant convince us by expressing something real in experience.
12 The vividness of belief for Hume, in contrast to mere images of imagination, is due to repeatedly encountering the object of belief in ordinary activities. In fact, repetition even seems sufficient for belief in God, as both Hume and Pascal saw in their very different ways. This sufficiency of the practice of religion for belief in God is of course a difficult problem for theistic apologists.
13 Augustine, , On the Trinity, Bk. XV, Ch. XII;Google ScholarAbelard, Peter, Peter Abelard's philosophische Schriften, ed. Geyer, B. in Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters XXI (Munster: Aschendorff, 1933), 21–6.Google Scholar Foley, in his theory of rationality, also emphasizes that rational persons have open-ended commitments to disciplines and bodies of knowledge even when ignorant of detail of these. Thus persons are committed to beliefs they would have if they were more expert, better read, etc. See Foley, Richard, The Theory of Epistemic Rationality (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 68f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 I have doubts about the theological defence of this sort of seeing of God from nature in Plantinga and Calvin. Of course, thinkers at widely different places and cultures have thought of the teleological and cosmological proofs of God's existence. I suspect that this more immediate sort of awareness of God while contemplating nature, though I myself have such feelings, is a product of romanticism and not of the New Testament. Of course, Paul did say that God's ‘eternal power and deity has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made’ (Rm. 1:20) and Jesus that God cared for the lilies of the fields. (Mt 6:28–9; Lk. 2:27–8)
15 A deep topic deserving at least another paper is that the being who created the universe or the being than which none greater can be conceived perhaps attributively means God in every possible world. In Donnellan's terms, perhaps they are attributive definite descriptions in contrast to the referential definite descriptions of the New Testament (Donnellan, Keith S., ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, The Philosophical Review, LXXV (07, 1966), sec. III).Google Scholar Christians establish the reference of ‘God’ by a causal historical path through the New Testament, specifically in part through Peter's confession.
16 I thank my colleagues and personal friends Warren Carr, Win-chiat Lee, Charles Lewis and Ralph Wood for their criticisms of earlier versions of this paper.