Plantinga endeavors to show
de jure objections by developing this model or theory of warranted Christian Belief. He developes three types of such objections; (1) unjustified, (2) irrational, and (3) unwarranted. His model is built around how we know the truth of various Christian truth claims. He begins by profering God exists be itself part of the foundation of Christian Belief, so that no rational evidence is necessary. The evidentialist atheist replies that only propositions that are properly basic can be part of the foundations of knowledge. Plantinga then asks, what then are the citeria that determine whether or not a proposition is proplerly basic? The materialist will simply assert it must be 'self-evident' or 'incorrigible' to be properly basic. But Plantinga persists and asks 'how do we know' that these are the only proper criteria for foundations of knowledge, because to assert that Evidentialist assertion that ONLY self-evident or incorrigibility are criteria is self-refuting, cannot be taken to be truthful because it is circular in its reasoning and therefore refutes itself. The proposition itself is arbitrary.
Plantinga believes that belief in God is properly basic, not only with respect to justification but also with respect to warrant-warrant being that property which converts mere belief into true knowledge. Plantinga thinks that, apart from evidence, he actually KNOWS that God exists. This is what your references as sensus divinitatis
But he goes on and asks, "How does he know that God exists? We often hold beliefs and have no justification to hold such. So..is our belief that God exists not merely justified, but warranted. He asserts that rational warrant inherently involves the notion of the proper functioning of one's cognitive faculties. So Plantinga asks..."What does it mean for one's cognitive faculties to 'function properly'? Here Plantinga drops the bomb onto mainstream epistemology by proposing that a peculiarly theistic account of rational warrant and proper functioning, namely, that one's cognitive faculties are functioning properly if they are functioning as God designed them.
Now, stay with me! Plantinga profered knowledge as warranted true belief. This is considered a normative action of our neurologic wiring. Since Proper function is normative ( how our faculties ought to work) "proper function" cannot be understood in terms as merely ddscriptive of the statistically usual or normal way human faculties function. The notion of proper function, understood has the way something ought to work makes clear sense for artifacts that are designed by an intelligence. Why? Because the claim something functions the way it ought to is easily understood in terms of functioning the way it was designed to work or function. An engine functions properly in that it functions the way it was designed to function. Now if knowledge presupposes warranted belief, and it warrant belief presupposes that those beliefs were produced by properly functioning faculties, and if the notion of properly functioning faculties denotes being designed to function in a certain way, then knowledge presupposes a designer.
The naturalists owe us an account of what it would mean for humans to have properly functioning cognitive and sensory faculties that can avoid the idea of a designer and, says Plantinga, those accounts have not been successful. Proper function cannot be profered by evolution in terms of survival value or natural selection. So the truth of evolution cannot be required to make sense of proper functining faculties. So Plantinga says, A definition that capture the real essence of something, in this case "properly functioning faculties," cannot contingently apply to the thing being defined depending on whether or not some other factor (evolution) is true. Naturalistic evolutionary theory, human beings, their parts and cognitive faculties, arose by a blind, mindless, purposeless process such as things selected for solely in virtue of survivial value and reproductive advantage is irrational to be believed. If our cognitive faculties arose this way, then their ultimate purpose is to guarantee that we behave in certain ways; i.e. we move, fight, reproduce certain ways) that are enhancing to our survival. From this perspective, our beliefs, certainly our beliefs which are true, take hindmost position as a role it played in survival. Thus naturalistic evolutionary theory gives us reason to doubt that our cognitive system have the production of true beleifs as a purpose or that they do in fact, furnish us with true beliefs.
Simply put, evolution of our congitive function cannot be produced by evolutionary processes and, from an evolutionary viewpoint can not warrant or justify any belief. There seems to be no causal relationship between behavior and purpose of proper function...how our noetic setup ought properly function. As Darwin, himself said, "Why would anyone trust the belief of a monkey?"
Sorry it took so long to get here. But it seems to me that the battle for the past 2 millenia have been the cosmological battle between Christian theist and Epicurus to Darwinian materialism. We must increasingly engage these worldviews because they both must and do give rise to Christian morality and Darwinian morality. Darwin's ideas, as Daniel Dennett says, is a 'universal acid' that eats through just about every traditional Christian moral concept, leaving a revolutionized world in its wake. One of the great problems with allowing them side-by-side status is that this acid leaves in its wake a superfluous diety or a cobbling-together of a hybrid worldview which is not Christian theology. I suppose the war can be described as one or the other. Either we, as part of nature, are ultimately the derivitive of purposeless material forces and should be as moral darwinism has defined it. Or, we are ultimately the result of an intelligent designer, and the morality of that designer must be followed.
Thank you especially for reprising Alan Plantinga's thoughts regarding the present matters. Bottom line, it seems to me he hones in on what constitutes "warranted" belief.
"Warranted belief" necessarily finds its basis or criterion in something indetectable to science, which bases its own method in direct observables.
"Warranted belief" does not have so much to do with the phenomena of observation; it has to do with the observer of same — and as you suggest, with the basic cognitive constitution of the observer. Which has moral implications for human culture and society at large.
A "warranted belief" depends for its soundness on its source of truth. And that is the reason Plantinga draws our attention to what I would call "the ultimate axiom," which can only be God Himself.
In the history of mankind, the expressed universal idea is that God exists. If you get rid of that understanding, then other understandings — such as the metaphysical materialist one — can run riot through human societies, with no discernible limit.
But those engaged in such an enterprise can only succeed by deforming the world that human beings actually live in; and by deforming the structure of the human personality itself.
Above all, by erasing human history altogether....
I'd love to go on here, but am facing family difficulties at the moment.
So please give me a "rain-check?"
Meanwhile, to see how such ideas connect with immediately important trends in contemporary American sociopolitical "reality," please see here.
Thank you so very much for your splendid essay/post. dear Texas Songwriter!