โ Scribed by William Lad Sessions
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Alvin Plantinga has recently and forcefully argued that belief in God is properly basic for some persons. ~ Positively, he claims that a basic belief in God can be "entirely acceptable, desirable, right, proper, and rational" (1983:39). Negatively, he holds that neither classical foundationalism nor coherentism provides the necessary conditions under which a belief is properly basic, and so neither can be used to show that belief in God is not properly basic. On Plantinga's view, then, a properly basic theist will have nothing to do with coherence. My aim in this paper is to show that coherence is not irrelevant to properly basic beliefs and that a properly basic theist should welcome arguments expressing coherence. There are four sections to the paper: (1) summarizes Plantinga's account of proper basicality; (2) provides a (partial, limited) account of coherence; (3) discusses some possible roles for coherence with respect to proper basicality; and (4)suggests how moral arguments for theism, much neglected in recent decades, might play some coherentist roles even for those for whom belief in God is properly basic.
A basic belief for a person S, Plantinga says, is one not based on other beliefs (or propositions) S holds, and a properly basic belief for S is a belief of S which it is rationally proper, right, etc. for S to hold "in the basic way". The "basis" relation Plantinga says is quite "familiar but hard to characterize in a revealing and non-
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES