Random Thoughts

[Angrboda]

Linville endorses Plantinga’s criteria for warranted belief, which says that “a belief is warranted just in case it is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is truth-aimed and functioning properly in the environment for which it was designed.” Linville says that if God exists, then our moral beliefs meet these criteria because then “human moral faculties are designed [by God] to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.” On the other hand, if naturalism is true, then Linville argues that we have no reason to think that our moral beliefs are the result of a truth-aimed mechanism, and therefore naturalism “presents an undercutting defeater for our moral beliefs taken as a whole.” If Linville is correct, then if God exists, then belief in moral realism is warranted. Conversely, if naturalism is true, then belief in moral realism is not warranted.

This conclusion is similar to Plantinga’s conclusion that basic belief in God can be warranted, if there is a God who endowed us with an immediate awareness of His existence. Because this conclusion is conditional, one cannot know whether their noninferential belief in God is warranted unless they also know that God exists. As philosopher Herman Philipse writes, people who are unsure whether they should believe in God “cannot reassure themselves that their beliefs may be warranted even if they have no arguments to support them. For their beliefs may be warranted in the basic way only if God exists, and that was precisely what they were calling into question.” Anthony Kenny makes the similar point: “The doubting believer in God cannot reassure himself that his belief is warranted; for only if there is a God is his belief warranted, and that is what he was beginning to doubt.” Likewise, Keith Parsons explains, “[Plantinga] argues that theistic belief is very likely warranted and properly basic, in the externalist sense, but only if theism is in fact true. This means that believers are in no position to argue that their belief in God is warrant basic unless they can adduce reasons, arguments, or evidence for the existence of God.”

Review of The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology || The Moral Argument