by Alvin Plantinga



Alvin Plantinga has been called "the most important philosopher of
religion now writing." After taking his Ph.D. from Yale in 1958, he
taught at Wayne State University (1958-63), Calvin College (1963-82),
and has filled the John A. O'Brien Chair of Philosophy at the University
of Notre Dame since 1982. He was president of the Western Division of
the American Philosophical Association during 1981-82 and president of
the Society of Christian Philosophers, which he helped to found, from
1983 to 1986. He frequently directs summer seminars for the National
Endowment for the Humanities. He has received numerous honors, including
an Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Danforth Foundation, a
fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral
Sciences, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a fellowship from
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, separate fellowships from the
N.E.H., and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
He has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University. He
has been invited to deliver more distinguished lectures series at
American, Canadian, and British universities than can be listed here,
except to note that he was selected to give the eminent Gifford Lectures
at Aberdeen University in 1987-88. He was recently honored by a volume
of essays bearing his name in D. Reidel's Profiles series. Widely
acclaimed for his work on the metaphysics of modality, the ontological
argument, the problem of evil, and the epistemology of religious belief,
he is the author or editor of seven books, including God and Other
Minds, The Nature of Necessity, and Faith and Rationality. Several of
his articles, which have appeared in journals such as Theoria, American
Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Journal of Philosophy,
and so forth, have been hailed as masterpieces of the metaphysician's
craft.



Atheological objections to the belief that there is such a person as God
come in many varieties. There are, for example, the familiar objections
that theism is somehow incoherent, that it is inconsistent with the
existence of evil, that it is a hypothesis ill-confirmed or maybe even
disconfirmed by the evidence, that modern science has somehow cast doubt
upon it, and the like. Another sort of objector claims, not that theism is
incoherent or false or probably false (after all, there is precious little
by way of cogent argument for that conclusion) but that it is in some way
unreasonable or irrational to believe in God, even if that belief should
happen to be true. Here we have, as a centerpiece, the evidentialist
objection to theistic belief. The claim is that none of the theistic
arguments-deductive, inductive, or abductive-is successful; hence there is
at best insufficient evidence for the existence of God. But then the
belief that there is such a person as God is in some way intellectually
improper-somehow foolish or irrational. A person who believed without
evidence that there are an even number of ducks would be believing
foolishly or irrationally; the same goes for the person who believes in
God without evidence. On this view, one who accepts belief in God but has
no evidence for that belief is not, intellectually speaking, up to snuff.
Among those who have offered this objection are Antony Flew, Brand
Blanshard, and Michael Scriven. Perhaps more important is the enormous
oral tradition: one finds this objection to theism bruited about on nearly
any major university campus in the land. The objection in question has
also been endorsed by Bertrand Russell, who was once asked what he would
say if, after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked
whyhe had not been a believer. Russell's reply: "I'd say, 'Not enough
evidence, God! Not enough evidence!'" I'm not sure just how that reply
would be received; but my point is only that Russell, like many others,
has endorsed this evidentialist objection to theistic belief.

Now what, precisely, is the objector's claim here? He holds that the
theist without evidence is irrational or unreasonable; what is the
property with which he is crediting such a theist when he thus describes
him? What, exactly, or even approximately, does he mean when he says that
the theist without evidence is irrational? Just what, as he sees it, is
the problem with such a theist? The objection can be seen as taking at
least two forms; and there are at least two corresponding senses or
conceptions of rationality lurking in the nearby bushes. According to the
first, a theist who has no evidence has violated an intellectual or
cognitive duty of some sort. He has gone contrary to an obligation laid
upon him-perhaps by society, or perhaps by his own nature as a creature
capable of grasping propositions and holding beliefs. There is an
obligation or something like an obligation to proportion one's beliefs to
the strength of the evidence. Thus according to John Locke, a mark of a
rational person is "the not entertaining any proposition with greater
assurance than the proof it is built upon will warrant," and according to
David Hume, "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."

In the nineteenth century we have W.K. Clifford, that "delicious enfant
terrible" as William James called him, insisting that it is monstrous,
immoral, and perhaps even impolite to accept a belief for which you have
insufficient evidence:

Whoso would deserve well of his fellow in this matter will guard the
purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any
time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can
never be wiped away.[1]

He adds that if a

belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a
stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of
power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in
defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from
such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our body and
spread to the rest of the town. [2]

And finally:

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe
anything upon insufficient evidence.[3]

(It is not hard to detect, in these quotations, the "tone of robustious
pathos" with which James credits Clifford.) On this view theists without
evidence-my sainted grandmother, for example-are flouting their epistemic
duties and deserve our disapprobation and disapproval. Mother Teresa, for
example, if she has not arguments for her belief in God, then stands
revealed as a sort of intellectual libertine-someone who has gone contrary
to her intellectual obligations and is deserving of reproof and perhaps
even disciplinary action.

Now the idea that there are intellectual duties or obligations is
difficult but not implausible, and I do not mean to question it here. It
is less plausible, however, to suggest that I would or could be going
contrary to my intellectual duties in believing, without evidence, that
there is such a person as God. For first, my beliefs are not, for the most
part, within my control. If, for example, you offer me $1,000,000 to cease
believing that Mars is smaller than Venus, there is no way I can collect.
But the same holds for my belief in God: even if I wanted to, I
couldn't-short of heroic measures like coma inducing drugs-just divest
myself of it. (At any rate there is nothing I can do directly; perhaps
there is a sort of regimen that if followed religiously would issue, in
the long run, in my no longer accepting belief in God.) But secondly,
there seems no reason to think that I have such an obligation. Clearly I
am not under an obligation to have evidence for everything I believe; that
would not be possible. But why, then, suppose that I have an obligation to
accept belief in God only if I accept other propositions which serve as
evidence for it? This is by no means self-evident or just obvious, and it
is extremely hard to see how to find a cogent argument for it.

In any event, I think the evidentialist objector can take a more promising
line. He can hold, not that the theist without evidence has violated some
epistemic duty-after all, perhaps he can't help himself- but that he is
somehow intellectually flawed or disfigured. Consider someone who believes
that Venus is smaller than Mercury-not because he has evidence, but
because he read it in a comic book and always believes whatever he reads
in comic books-or consider someone who holds that belief on the basis of
an outrageously bad argument. Perhaps there is no obligation he has failed
to meet; nevertheless his intellectual condition is defective in some way.
He displays a sort of deficiency, a flaw, an intellectual dysfunction of
some sort. Perhaps he is like someone who has an astigmatism, or is unduly
clumsy, or suffers from arthritis. And perhaps the evidentialist objection
is to be construed, not as the claim that the theist without evidence has
violated some intellectual obligations, but that he suffers from a certain
sort of intellectual deficiency. The theist without evidence, we might
say, is an intellectual gimp.

Alternatively but similarly, the idea might be that the theist without
evidence is under a sort of illusion, a kind of pervasive illusion
afflicting the great bulk of mankind over the great bulk of the time thus
far allotted to it. Thus Freud saw religious belief as "illusions,
fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wishes of
mankind."[4 ]He sees theistic belief as a matter of wish-fulfillment. Men
are paralyzed by and appalled at the spectacle of the overwhelming,
impersonal forces that control our destiny, but mindlessly take no notice,
no account of us and our needs and desires; they therefore invent a
heavenly father of cosmic proportions, who exceeds our earthly fathers in
goodness and love as much as in power. Religion, says Freud, is the
"universal obsessional neurosis of humanity", and it is destined to
disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is, resisting the
tendency to edit it to suit our fancies.

A similar sentiment is offered by Karl Marx:

Religion . . . is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the man
who has either not yet found himself, or else (having found himself) has
lost himself once more. But man is not an abstract being . . . Man is
the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society, produce
religion, produce a perverted world consciousness, because they are a
perverted world . . . Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,
the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of
unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of illusory
happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the people
should shake itself free of illusion as to its own condition is the
demand that it should abandon a condition which needs illusion.[5]

Note that Marx speaks here of a perverted world consciousness produced by
a perverted world. This is a perversion from a correct, or right, or
natural condition, brought about somehow by an unhealthy and perverted
social order. From the Marx-Freud point of view, the theist is subject to
a sort of cognitive dysfunction, a certain lack of cognitive and emotional
health. We could put this as follows: the theist believes as he does only
because of the power of this illusion, this perverted neurotic condition.
He is insane, in the etymological sense of that term; he is unhealthy. His
cognitive equipment, we might say, isn't working properly; it isn't
functioning as it ought to. If his cognitive equipment were working
properly, working the way it ought to work, he wouldn't be under the spell
of this illusion. He would instead face the world and our place in it with
the clear-eyed apprehension that we are alone in it, and that any comfort
and help we get will have to be our own devising. There is no Father in
heaven to turn to, and no prospect of anything, after death, but
dissolution. ("When we die, we rot," says Michael Scriven, in one of his
more memorable lines.)

Now of course the theist is likely to display less than overwhelming
enthusiasm about the idea that he is suffering from a cognitive
deficiency, is under a sort of widespread illusion endemic to the human
condition. It is at most a liberal theologian or two, intent on novelty
and eager to concede as much as possible to contemporary secularity, who
would embrace such an idea. The theist doesn't see himself as suffering
from cognitive deficiency. As a matter of fact, he may be inclined to see
the shoe as on the other foot; he may be inclined to think of the atheist
as the person who is suffering, in this way, from some illusion, from some
noetic defect, from an unhappy, unfortunate, and unnatural condition with
deplorable noetic consequences. He will see the atheist as somehow the
victim of sin in the world- his own sin or the sin of others. According to
the book of Romans, unbelief is a result of sin; it originates in an
effort to "suppress the truth in unrighteousness." According to John
Calvin, God has created us with a nisus or tendency to see His hand in the
world around us; a "sense of deity," he says, "is inscribed in the hearts
of all." He goes on:

Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who though they struggle
furiously are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God, is
abundant testimony that his conviction, namely, that there is some God,
is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were in the
very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a doctrine that
must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master
from his mother's womb and which nature itself permits no man to
forget.[6]

Were it not for the existence of sin in the world, says Calvin, human
beings would believe in God to the same degree and with the same natural
spontaneity displayed in our belief in the existence of other persons, or
an external world, or the past. This is the natural human condition; it is
because of our presently unnatural sinful condition that many of us find
belief in God difficult or absurd. The fact is, Calvin thinks, one who
does not believe in God is in an epistemically defective position-rather
like someone who does not believe that his wife exists, or thinks that she
is a cleverly constructed robot that has no thoughts, feelings, or
consciousness. Thus the believer reverses Freud and Marx, claiming that
what they see as sickness is really health and what they see as health is
really sickness.

Obviously enough, the dispute here is ultimately ontological, or
theological, or metaphysical; here we see the ontological and ultimately
religious roots of epistemological discussions of rationality. What you
take to be rational, at least in the sense in question, depends upon your
metaphysical and religious stance. It depends upon your philosophical
anthropology. Your view as to what sort of creature a human being is will
determine, in whole or in part, your views as to what is rational or
irrational for human beings to believe; this view will determine what you
take to be natural, or normal, or healthy, with respect to belief. So the
dispute as to who is rational and who is irrational here can't be settled
just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is fundamentally
not an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute.
How can we tell what it is healthy for human beings to believe unless we
know or have some idea about what sort of creature a human being is? If
you think he is created by God in the image of God, and created with a
natural tendency to see God's hand in the world about us, a natural
tendency to recognize that he has been created and is beholden to his
creator, owing his worship and allegiance, then of course you will not
think of belief in God as a manifestation of wishful thinking or as any
kind of defect at all. It is then much more like sense perception or
memory, though in some ways much more important. On the other hand, if you
think of a human being as the product of blind evolutionary forces, if you
think there is no God and that human beings are part of a godless
universe, then you will be inclined to accept a view according to which
belief in God is a sort of disease or dysfunction, due perhaps, to a sort
of softening of the brain.

So the dispute as to who is healthy and who diseased has ontological or
theological roots, and is finally to be settled, if at all at that level.
And here I would like to present a consideration that, I think tells in
favor of the theistic way of looking at the matter. As I have been
representing that matter, theist and atheist alike speak of a sort of
dysfunction, of cognitive faculties or cognitive equipment not working
properly, of their not working as they ought to. But how are we to
understand that? What is it for something to work properly? Isn't there
something deeply problematic about the idea of proper functioning? What is
it for my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is it for a
natural organism-a tree, for example-to be in good working order, to be
functioning properly? Isn't working properly relative to our aims and
interests? A cow is functioning properly when she gives milk; a garden
patch is as it ought to be when it displays a luxuriant preponderance of
the sorts of vegetation we propose to promote. But then it seems patent
that what constitutes proper functioning depends upon our aims and
interests. So far as nature herself goes, isn't a fish decomposing in a
hill of corn functioning just as properly, just as excellently, as one
happily swimming about chasing minnows? But then what could be meant by
speaking of "proper functioning" with respect to our cognitive faculties?
A chunk of reality-an organism, a part of an organism, an ecosystem, a
garden patch-"functions properly" only with respect to a sort of grid we
impose on nature-a grid that incorporates our aims and desires.

But from a theistic point of view, the idea of proper functioning, as
applied to us and our cognitive equipment, is not more problematic than,
say, that of a Boeing 747's working properly. Something we have
constructed-a heating system, a rope, a linear accelerator-is functioning
properly when it is functioning in the way it was designed to function. My
car works properly if it works the way it was designed to work. My
refrigerator is working properly if it refrigerates, if it does what a
refrigerator is designed to do. This, I think, is the root idea of working
properly. But according to theism, human beings, like ropes and linear
accelerators, have been designed; they have been created and designed by
God. Thus, he has an easy answer to the relevant set of questions: What is
proper functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working
properly? What is cognitive dysfunction? What is it to function naturally?
My cognitive faculties are functioning naturally, when they are
functioning in the way God designed them to function.

On the other hand, if the atheological evidentialist objector claims that
the theist without evidence is irrational, and if he goes on to construe
irrationality in terms of defect or dysfunction, then he owes us an
account of this notion. Why does he take it that the theist is somehow
dysfunctional, at least in this area of his life? More importantly, how
does he conceive dysfunction? How does he see dysfunction and its
opposite? How does he explain the idea of an organism's working properly,
or of some organic system or part of an organism's thus working? What
account does he give of it? Presumably he can't see the proper functioning
of my noetic equipment as its functioning in the way it was designed to
function; so how can he put it?

Two possibilities leap to mind. First, he may be thinking of proper
functioning as functioning in a way that helps us attain our ends. In this
way, he may say, we think of our bodies as functioning properly, as being
healthy, when they function in the way we want them to, when they function
in such a way as to enable us to do the sorts of things we want to do. But
of course this will not be a promising line to take in the present
context; for while perhaps the atheological objector would prefer to see
our cognitive faculties function in such a way as not to produce belief in
God in us, the same cannot be said, naturally enough, for the theist.
Taken this way the atheological evidentialist's objection comes to little
more than the suggestion that the atheologician would prefer it if people
did not believe in God without evidence. That would be an autobiographical
remark on his part, having the interest such remarks usually have in
philosophical contexts.

A second possibility: proper functioning and allied notions are to be
explained in terms of aptness for promoting survival, either at an
individual or species level. There isn't time to say much about this here;
but it is at least and immediately evident that the atheological objector
would then owe us an argument for the conclusion that belief in God is
indeed less likely to contribute to our individual survival, or the
survival of our species than is atheism or agnosticism. But how could such
an argument go? Surely the prospects for a non-question begging argument
of this sort are bleak indeed. For if theism-Christian theism, for
example-is true, then it seems wholly implausible to think that widespread
atheism, for example, would be more likely to contribute to the survival
of our race than widespread theism.

By way of conclusion: a natural way to understand such notions as
rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of the
relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the question
whether it is rational to believe in God without the evidential support of
other propositions is really a metaphysical or theological dispute. The
theist has an easy time explaining the notion of our cognitive equipment's
functioning properly: our cognitive equipment functions properly when it
functions in the way God designed it to function. The atheist evidential
objector, however, owes us an account of this notion. What does he mean
when he complains that the theist without evidence displays a cognitive
defect of some sort? How does he understand the notion of cognitive
malfunction?

NOTES

[1]W.K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief," in Lectures and Essays (London:
Macmillan, 1879), p. 183.
[2]Ibid, p. 184.
[3]Ibid, p. 186.
[4]Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), p.
30.
[5]K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3: Introduction to a
Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, by Karl Marx (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1975).
[6]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis
Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.3 (p. 43- 44).