Today:

1. Today: • Odds & Ends Plantinga: • Outline of his paper • Evidentialism • Natural Theology • Aquinas on knowledge and faith

2. Guiding Question Is it reasonable to believe that God exists?

3. The Case for the PoA (ii) Second Move: • In the case of theistic debates, our aim is to achieve knowledge or reasonable beliefabout whether God exists. • To have a knowledgeable or reasonable belief about something, we must have sufficient reasonfor believing it. • So, we should adopt the PoA to ensure that we never arrive at an unreasonable belief that God exists.

4. Epistemology • Epistemology is the study of knowledge. • More generally, epistemologists examine belief. • Epistemologists theorize about what makes a belief reasonable.

5. Plantinga: Motivating Questions Plantinga proposes to discuss a “constellation” of questions in his paper, including: • Does the believer-in-God accept the existence of God by faith? • Is belief in God contrary to reason, unreasonable, irrational? • Must one have evidence to be rational or reasonable in believing in God?

7. “Theistic Belief” Plantinga draws a distinction between: (i) Believing in God, and (ii) Believing that God exists • Plantinga focuses (as we have) on (ii). • Further, he takes the belief that God exists to be a straightforward existential belief. • He specifically rejects any non-standard reading of that belief, e.g. that the belief is simply the adoption of a “behavioral policy”.

8. Objections to Theistic Belief 1) Verifiability Objection 2) “Bodiless Person” Objection 3) Logical (“Deductive”) Problem of Evil 4) Evidential (“Probabilistic”) Problem of Evil 5)Evidentialist Objection

9. Evidentialist Objection 1. One ought not believe something upon insufficient evidence. [Evidentialist Credo] 2.We have no sufficient evidence for the proposition that God exists ------------------------------------------------------- C. One ought not believe that God exists.

10. Evidentialist Credo “One ought not believe something upon insufficient evidence.” • The Evidentialist Credo makes the claim that such belief in the absence of sufficient reason is a violation of some kind of dutyofrationality.

11. Natural Theology • Plantinga next looks at the tradition of “natural theology”, specifically focusing on the most notable member of that tradition, Thomas Aquinas. • Plantinga’s reason for doing so is that he thinks “natural theology” is also committed to the Evidentialist Credo. • This immediately presents Plantinga with an apparent problem, since Aquinas talks extensively about “faith” in a way that might seem to go against the Evidentialist Credo.

12. Aquinas on Knowledge and Faith • For Aquinas, knowledge is a product of “demonstration”. (What we can know, for Aquinas is what we can “demonstrate”.) • By “demonstration” Aquinas means deduction from propositions which are all self-evident or evident-to-the-senses. • Aquinas thinks that some theistic propositions can, for some people, be known in this way, e.g. “God exists”, and “God is good”. • For those propositions faith is not necessary.

13. Aquinas on Knowledge and Faith • There are other theistic propositions which cannot be demonstrated and thus which everyone must believe on faith, e.g “God is triune.” • But what does it mean, for Aquinas, to “believe on faith”? • It is not to believe in the absence of evidence, nor is it to believe on the basis of feelings. • As Plantinga puts it, “Fundamentally, for Aquinas, to accept a proposition on faith is to accept it on God’s authority; faith is a matter of ‘believing God’.”(63)