beliefs to be rational (entitled) they have to be rationally grounded in the deliverances of
reason and experience.
Confronted with such a claim, the religious believer has two options. She can accept the
validity of the claim and set out to provide the requisite grounding for her religious
beliefs if they don't already have it; or she can challenge the claim. If she goes with the
first option and succeeds in providing the grounding, she can continue to believe what
she did, though now she'll be doing it on this new basis. If she fails, she must give up her
beliefs. Or she may partially succeed and partially fail. In that case, she must revise her
belief system downward, as it were, until she believes only as much as she has succeeded
in grounding. Rather than engaging in the grounding endeavor, the Reformed
epistemologists chose the second of the two main options: they challenged the religious
epistemology of the Enlightenment on its central claim.
How did they conduct the challenge? They began by noting that a great many religious
beliefs are not in fact rationally grounded in the deliverances of reason and experience. A
good many of them are not rationally grounded in anything at all; they were neither
formed, nor are they maintained, on the basis of other beliefs. As such, they are what
Alvin Plantinga, one of the initiators of Reformed epistemology, has called “basic
beliefs.” One might also call them “immediate beliefs,” on the ground that they are not
formed by the “mediation” of inference.
Some beliefs are formed by believing what others tell one. Some are evoked by mystical
experience. Others are formed by reading and interpreting scripture. Yet others are
evoked by a person's experience of one or another aspect of the
end p.262
world or human existence. Here, for example, is what Plantinga says in one passage:
Upon having done what I knew is cheap, or wrong, or wicked I may feel guilty in God's
sight and form the belief God disapproves of what I've done. Upon confession and
repentance, I may feel forgiven, forming the belief God forgives me for what I've done. A
person in grave danger may turn to God, asking for his protection and help; and of course
he or she then forms the belief that God is indeed able to hear and help if he sees fit.
When life is sweet and satisfying, a spontaneous sense of gratitude may well up within
the soul; someone in this condition may thank and praise the Lord for his goodness, and
will of course form the accompanying belief that indeed the Lord is to be thanked and
praised. ([1981] 1998, 477)
Earlier I made the point that one thing that unites all three lines of thought I am
considering in this essay is their rejection of the traditional picture of religious beliefs as
add-on explanations. The point is particularly clear in this passage from Plantinga. It's the
experience of wrongdoing, remorse, danger, and delight that immediately evokes the
belief—and the experience of flowers and mountains, of stars and the moral law. And
though not all of Plantinga's examples can be felicitously construed as examples of a
religious interpretation of experience, some are certainly of that sort: I interpret my
feeling forgiven as a sign or manifestation of God's forgiving me; I interpret this “sweet
and satisfying” portion of my life as a sign or manifestation of God's goodness.
As mentioned earlier, the Reformed epistemologist makes a considerable point of saying
that not all religious beliefs are entitled—or warranted, or reliably formed, or whatever be