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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (9815)	11/12/2010 10:47:31 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Respond to of 69300

'Reformed epistemology In the philosophy of religion, reformed epistemology is a school of thought regarding the epistemological of belief in God put forward by a group of Protestant Christian philosophers, most notably, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, Nicholas Wolterstorff and Michael C. Rea. Central to Reformed epistemology is the claim that belief in God is a "properly basic belief": it doesn't need to be inferred from other truths in order to be reasonable. Since this view represents a continuation of the thinking about the relationship between faith and reason that its founders find in 16th century Reformed theology, particularly in John Calvin's doctrine that God has planted in us a sensus divinitatis,[1] it has come to be known as Reformed epistemology. Reformed epistemology aims to demonstrate the failure of objections that theistic belief—and in later works of the school, full-blown Christian belief—is unjustified, unreasonable, intellectually sub-par or otherwise epistemically challenged in some way, even where one believes it without supporting argument. By contrast, many modern foundationalists, and evidentialists claim that theistic belief is rational only where one's so believing is inferentially based in propositional and/or physical evidence, and a subset of these think further that no adequate evidence is available. Reformed epistemology seeks to defend faith as rational by demonstrating that theistic belief can be properly basic — reasonable though it is not held as an inference from other truths. Reformed epistemology grew out of the parity argument presented by Alvin Plantinga in his book God and Other Minds (1967): if believing in other minds is rational though unsupported by argument, so might believing in God be rational, even if similarly unsupported. Plantinga (2000a) would later argue that theistic belief has "warrant". Roughly, in Plantinga's theory of knowledge, warrant is that property of true beliefs that makes them knowledge. What this turns out to be, says Plantinga, is the property of being "produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly (subject to no malfunctioning) in a cognitive environment congenial for those faculties, according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth"[2] Because there is an epistemically possible model according to which theistic belief is properly basic--ie. the one on which God has designed our cognitive faculties such as to be disposed to form belief in God--theistic belief is warranted apart from theistic argument. Plantinga contends that this model is likely true if theistic belief is true; and on the other hand, the model is unlikely to be true if theism is false. This connection between the truth-value of theism and its positive epistemic status suggests to some that the goal of showing theistic belief to be externally rational or warranted requires reasons for supposing that theism is true (Sudduth, 2000). It should be noted that though Reformed epistemology denies that theistic arguments are necessary to rational belief in God, many of its adherents see theistic arguments of various sorts as providing that belief with additional warrant. Faith as addressing issues beyond the scope of rationality The position that faith addresses issues beyond the scope of rationality holds that faith supplements...' en.wikipedia.org