Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God

The central thesis is that belief in God can be properly basic: rationally justified without being inferred from other beliefs or supported by propositional evidence. The volume rejects classical foundationalism, the view that a belief is rational only if it is self-evident, evident to the senses, incorrigible, or inferable from beliefs that are. Plantinga's lead essay argues that classical foundationalism is self-referentially incoherent: the criterion itself cannot be derived from self-evident or incorrigible beliefs . If the criterion fails, then the evidentialist objection to theism—that belief in God is irrational without sufficient evidence—loses its footing. The alternative is a Reformed epistemology that treats theistic belief as grounded in a basic disposition to see the world as God's handiwork, analogous to how we form beliefs about other minds or the past.

The 1983 essay 'Reason and Belief in God' is an early statement of themes Plantinga would develop systematically in Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993), and Warranted Christian Belief (2000). In 1983, the focus is largely negative: dismantling classical foundationalism and the evidentialist objection. The positive account of proper basicality is sketched but not fully developed. In the Warrant trilogy, Plantinga supplies a full externalist epistemology—proper functionalism—that explains why basic beliefs can have warrant. A ThriftBooks review notes that the 1983 essay is 'a great introduction to the thought he more fully develops later on (primarily in the Warrant Series)' . Readers should treat Faith and Rationality as the opening move and the trilogy as the mature system.

Alston's essay, 'Christian Experience and Christian Belief,' shifts the argument from the negative critique of foundationalism to a positive account of how religious experience can justify Christian belief. Alston argues that certain experiences—a sense of God's presence, the moving of the Holy Spirit—can contribute to the rationality of Christian belief in a way analogous to how perceptual experience justifies beliefs about the physical world . This is a different strategy from Plantinga's. Plantinga grounds proper basicality in a broadly Reformed account of the sensus divinitatis and the effects of sin; Alston develops a general epistemology of experience and applies it to the religious case. Together, the two essays show that Reformed epistemology is not a single argument but a family of approaches united by the rejection of evidentialism.

The volume provoked sustained debate, particularly from Catholic philosophers sympathetic to Thomistic natural theology. The summary in WorldCat describes the book as examining the epistemology of religious belief 'between Reformed and Roman Catholic philosophers,' signaling that the essays were understood as a contribution to an interconfessional dispute . Critics such as Gary Gutting argued that the Reformed rejection of natural theology was too sweeping, and that Catholic thought had resources for defending a qualified evidentialism. Jay Van Hook and others raised questions about whether the appeal to proper basicality could avoid arbitrariness in distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate basic beliefs. Plantinga's response, developed across subsequent essays and the Warrant trilogy, was to insist that the proper basicality of theistic belief does not require a criterion that can be stated in advance; it requires only that the belief be produced by properly functioning faculties aimed at truth.

The most common misunderstanding is that 'properly basic' means 'groundless' or 'immune to rational criticism.' Neither is correct. A properly basic belief is not inferred from other beliefs, but it can still be defeated by counter-evidence or undermined by showing that the faculty producing it is unreliable. Plantinga explicitly allows that theistic belief can be defeated if the problem of evil or other objections are successful . A related misunderstanding is that proper basicality is a privilege claimed only for theistic belief. Plantinga's argument is that many ordinary beliefs—memory beliefs, belief in other minds, belief in the external world—are properly basic in the same sense. The point is not to exempt theism from scrutiny but to deny that it alone must meet a standard that other basic beliefs do not.

Faith and Rationality is an edited collection with eight essays by different authors, including Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Alston, Mavrodes, Marsden, and Holwerda. It is not a unified treatise with a single argumentative arc. Plantinga's contribution is the lead essay and the most influential piece, but the volume as a whole represents a collective statement of Reformed epistemology as a movement, not just Plantinga's individual position. The inclusion of George Marsden's historical essay on 'The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia' and D. Holwerda's essay on Pannenberg's theology indicates that the editors intended a broader intervention in Christian intellectual life, not only a technical contribution to epistemology . Readers seeking Plantinga's systematic epistemology should turn to the Warrant trilogy; readers seeking the manifesto of a movement should start here.