negative. In the face of an influential critique of the everyday, the Reformed
epistemologist has affirmed, for example, the worth of our everyday practices for the
formation of religious beliefs. Nonetheless, Reformed epistemology began with the
negative polemic that I have described. In the last decade or so of the twentieth century,
Reformed epistemologists have gone well beyond the polemic with which the movement
began to offer what one might think of as an account of the worth of our everyday
practices for the formation of religious beliefs. In Perceiving God, Alston has offered an
account of the rationality of those religious beliefs that are about mystical experience and
are evoked thereby. In his trilogy on warrant (1993a, 1993b, 2000), Alvin Plantinga first
articulated a general theory of warranted belief, and then, within that context, offered an
account of the warrant of religious beliefs; at the foundation of his account is the
anthropological claim, admittedly controversial, that human beings are naturally disposed
to form immediate beliefs about God. Religion does not originate as a system of
explanation in competition with, or as a supplement to, science.
Heidegger
I count myself among Reformed epistemologists. As such, I have my disagreements with
Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, particularly with its (apparent) assumption that
religious language is both nonassertoric and, with respect to God, nonreferential. I hold
that much of it is used to refer to God and to make predications about God. On this
occasion, though, I have set these disagreements off to the side so as to highlight the
innovation in religious epistemology that together these movements represent. That
innovation, I have suggested, is especially to be located in these two themes: religious
beliefs are not for the most part arrived at as explanations of one thing and another; and
the religious beliefs of ordinary people are for the most part OK as they are. In
conclusion, let me briefly call attention to the affinity of these movements, with respect to
these two themes, to some of Heidegger's central claims concerning religion.^4
Heidegger's corpus is vast, and the passages relevant to our topic, numerous. Here I will
attend to just three central texts. Two of them originated as lectures: “Phenomenology
and Theology” (1976) and “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics”
(1969). The third originated as a letter-essay: “Letter on Humanism” (1977). The
discussion would naturally be enriched by bringing other Heideggerian texts into the
picture, but it would not, so I judge, be altered in any fundamental way.
The role occupied for Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion by logical positivism, and
for Reformed epistemology by Enlightenment evidentialism, is occupied for Heidegger
by metaphysics, understood as what he calls “ontotheology.” (The term was borrowed
from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, A632=B660.) That is to say: ontotheology is
Heidegger's polemical partner. One cannot understand his thought on religion—or
indeed, on anything else—without understanding what he has in mind by ontotheology,
and why he is so relentlessly on the attack against it.
end p.266