God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God, by Alvin Plantinga. 271 pp. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1967. $8.50

1968 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-264
Author(s):  
Diogenes Allen
Keyword(s):  
Other Minds ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Belief In God

God and other programs

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Louise Friquegnon
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Analogical Inference ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Teleological Argument ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Analogical Argument

In God and Other Minds, Alvin Plantinga formulated an ingenious defence of the teleological argument for the belief in God, based on alleged similarities to the analogical argument for other minds. I shall state what I take to be Plantinga's central argument and then I shall criticize it on two counts: 1. Even if Plantinga's claims about the similarities between these two famous arguments were sound, they would at most provide rational support for pantheism, but not for the traditional Judaeo-Christian theism that Plantinga attempts to defend; and 2. The similarities alleged by Plantinga do not in fact hold. The analogical inference to other minds is grounded on resemblance between one's own behaviour and the behaviour of others, while the teleological argument for God is grounded on resemblance between human contrivances and the world. If the teleological argument really worked, it would count against rather than being supported by the analogical argument, for it would reduce the world to a soulless machine created and programmed by God, and, by inverse inference, would strongly suggest that God himself is exactly so much of a Mind as J. C. Smart and Hilary Putnam take human minds to be, i.e. a computer program.

God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God.

1970 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Michael A. Slote ◽  
Alvin Plantinga
Keyword(s):  
Other Minds ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
Belief In God

Faith and Goodness

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 167-191
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
The Other ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Richard Swinburne ◽  
The Relationship

Recent work on the subject of faith has tended to focus on the epistemology of religious belief, considering such issues as whether beliefs held in faith are rational and how they may be justified. Richard Swinburne, for example, has developed an intricate explanation of the relationship between the propositions of faith and the evidence for them. Alvin Plantinga, on the other hand, has maintained that belief in God may be properly basic, that is, that a belief that God exists can be part of the foundation of a rational noetic structure. This sort of work has been useful in drawing attention to significant issues in the epistemology of religion, but these approaches to faith seem to me also to deepen some long-standing perplexities about traditional Christian views of faith.

The Crucial Disanalogies Between Properly Basic Belief and Belief in God

1990 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Grigg
Keyword(s):  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Classical Foundationalism ◽  
Basic Beliefs

The antifoundationalist defence of belief in God set forth by Alvin Plantinga has been widely discussed in recent years. Classical foundationalism assumes that there are two kinds of beliefs that we are justified in holding: beliefs supported by evidence, and basic beliefs. Our basic beliefs are those bedrock beliefs that need no evidence to support them and upon which our other beliefs must rest. For the foundationalist, the only beliefs that can be properly basic are either self-evident, or incorrigible, or evident to the senses. Belief in God is none of these. Thus, says the foundationalist, belief in God is justified only if there is sufficient evidence to back it up.

scholarly journals Objective, Intersubjective Mystical Relationships: Justification and Reality

Open Theology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 198-216
Author(s):  
Michael Barber
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
William Alston ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Personal Character ◽  
Bodily Presence ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
Analytic Philosopher

Abstract Amplifying the idea of religious experience as occurring within an encompassing “religious province of meaning” and developing the personal character of the experience of God in the Abrahamic religious traditions, this paper argues that mystics in those traditions experience God “objectively.” Their experience of God is that of experiencing God as what Alfred Schutz called a “Consociate,” despite the lack of God’s bodily presence. Such a phenomenological account of religious experience converges with the description by analytic philosopher William Alston of religious experience as an objectively given, non-sensual perception of God, even though the personal Consociate model is preferable to the perceptual one, given the Abrahamic traditions. Conversely, Alston and Alvin Plantinga show how ascending levels of rational justification of religious experience are possible with reference to the experiential level, and such levels can be accommodated within the Schutzian “theoretical province of meaning” in its collaboration with the religious province. Both the Consociate and Schelerian/personalist accounts of God resist any explaining away of religious experience as mere phantasy, and the religious finite province of meaning provides a more comprehensive explanation of religious experience than either Alston’s or Plantinga’s approaches. However, the strategy of envisioning religious experience as taking place within a finite province of meaning is more noetic in character than Scheler’s view of an eidetically elaborated noematic absolute reality that precedes the rise of consciousness itself and that counterbalances the noetic portrayal of religious experience.

God and other minds

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
FIONA ELLIS
Keyword(s):  
Other Minds ◽  
Inductive Approach ◽  
Belief In God

AbstractI reconsider the idea that there is an analogy between belief in other minds and belief in God, and examine two approaches to the relevant beliefs. The ‘explanatory inductive’ approach raises difficulties in both contexts, and involves questionable assumptions. The ‘expressivist’ approach is more promising, and presupposes a more satisfactory metaphysical framework in the first context. Its application to God is similarly insightful, and offers an intellectually respectable, albeit resistible, version of the doctrine that nature is a book of lessons.

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