claiming that a sensation suggests a sound with such immediacy that we are unaware of
having it.^5
Reformed epistemologists, too, claim that our beliefs about the external world are formed
by certain psychological processes that occur immediately without inference or any kind
of argument. Thus, I believe that I am seeing a tree when I am appeared to treely. I have a
memory of what I had for breakfast in response to a question asked of me. But the logical
objection that haunted empiricism returns. One can be appeared to as often as one likes,
and find alleged memories forming in response to questions, but the fact remains that this
is compatible with not seeing the tree, or not having had what one thinks one had for
breakfast. This is admitted by Reformed epistemologists (Plantinga 2000).
Why, then, should we trust the mental phenomena called beliefs? The answer given is
that it is rational to do so if we have no good reason not to (Alston 1991). We trust the
faculties that provide the beliefs. Further, religious believers think that the harmony thus
brought to our experiences is best explained by a further assumption that they are
designed by God. It is not difficult to see why critics of these views have accused them of
heaping assumption upon assumption. A critic of Reid talks of finding ourselves in “a
maze of first principles” (O. M. Jones 1927). Hume's Cleanthes in the Dialogues would
call this a matter of building in the air.
We can see how in Reid, and in Reformed epistemologists, our epistemic relation to
“being in the world” is one of belief. The belief in the existence of such a world is one we
cannot help having, whatever skeptics may say. Some suggest that belief in God is also a
natural belief, formed in us by certain experiences. Others argue, with Reid, that it is an
assumption we make to account for the order our natural beliefs bring to experience. But
whether we say belief in God is a natural belief or that the assumption of God's existence
is a natural propensity of the mind, the fact that the belief and the propensity are not
universal has led to disputes over whether either should be called “natural” in Hume's
sense of “natural instinctive beliefs.”^6
Third, consider the influence of neo-Kantianism in nonanalytic contemporary philosophy
of religion. There are continuities between the naturalist claim that we have natural,
instinctive beliefs, and Kant's claim that the categories of consciousness are presupposed
in everything we experience. H. O. Mounce (1999) argues that there is little difference
between Hume's distinction between what is manifest and what is ultimate, and Kant's
distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms. In each case, we are
acquainted with how reality appears to us, rather than with reality as it is in itself, which
is forever beyond the reach of our finite faculties. If God is ultimate reality, isn't this what
we should expect?
end p.452
Some neo-Kantians have argued that in the appearances of reality presented to us, what
we have are interpretations of reality. It has been argued, notably by John Hick (1989),
that the world religions are interpretations of ultimate reality. This has led some to be
skeptical about the possibility of certitudes or absolutes in religion (Katz 1978).^7
We have now looked at the epistemological legacy of three schools of thought in
contemporary philosophy of religion. It will be recalled that my purpose in doing so was,
first, to show that they accept the form of Descartes' dilemma: How, from my