Warranted Christian Belief Book

Warranted Christian Belief is highly relevant to today's intellectual climate and covers a lot of ground. Everywhere there are charges of irrationality or charges that Christian belief is not justified. This is not an apologetic work. Plantinga sets out to show that Christian belief is warranted, that there is not anything irrational about believing it, even in a basic way. Whether are not it is actually true is left up to others to argue.

I did not interact very much with part I. He basically argues that there are two main interpretations of Kant and that neither one shows that our concepts or language cannot refer to God. I will have to come back and read this again after I finally make it through my chronological readings to Kant.

Part II is definitional. What exactly do people mean when they throw out words like "irrational" or "justification"? How exactly are people flouting their epistemic duties in believing Christianity? And, as the main point of the book, what is warrant? It is the difference between true belief and knowledge. A belief has warrant "if and only if it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief". If there is no such environment, then charges of irrationality make no sense.

All of that is of interest to both theists and non-theists, I think. Part III is geared a little more toward the believer as he begins to give an epistemic account of Christian belief based on a Calvin/Aquinas model. (While he is at it, he references Danny Kaye which made me smile happily:There are models of many different kinds: model airplanes, artists' models, models in the sense of exemplars, models of a modern major general.") He argues that this belief is properly basic by showing the similarities with other cognitive processes we believe in a basic way such as memory or perception.

He deals with defeaters in Part IV, choosing Historical Biblical Criticism, Postmodernism, Pluralism, and of course, the big problem of Evil and showing that none of these constitutes as a defeater for Christian belief.

It was an interesting exercise throughout to apply the arguments to atheism. I definitely think Christians fall into the same trap atheists do in their charges (i.e. a sort of reverse "wish-fulfillment" a laFreud where the atheist believes God does not exist because he does not "wish" him to so he can live his life however he wants).

In closing, just a quick note on writing style: although some of the material is difficult, Plantinga writes in a conversational way that aids understanding, but is not terribly "dumbed down". Furthermore, he writes with humility and does not treat his opponents abrasively, demonstrating a sympathetic understanding of his opponent's view.