Alvin Plantinga argues for the following two claims (Warranted Christian Belief, 186-190):
(1) If God exists, then basic belief that God exists is probably properly basic.
(2) If God does not exists, then basic belief that God exists is probably not properly basic.
Let’s assume that he’s right about (1) and (2). However, from (1) and (2) Plantinga infers that
(3) To answer the question of whether basic belief that God exists is properly basic, we must answer the question of whether God exists.
Here is what Plantinga says when he makes the inference:
And this dependence of the question of warrant or rationality on the truth or falsehood of theism [the dependence stated in 1 and 2] leads to a very interesting conclusion. If the warrant enjoyed by belief in God is related in this way to the truth of that belief, then the question whether theistic belief has warrant is not, after all, independent of the question whether theistic belief is true. So the de jure question we have finally found [of whether basic belief that God exists is properly basic] is not, after all, really independent of the de facto question [of whether God exists]; to answer the former we must answer the latter. (191, bold added)
There seem to be two importantly different readings of (3)—and, similarly, the bolded line above. On the first reading, (3) is unimportant. On the second, the inference from (1) and (2) to (3) is fallacious. The first reading is
(3a) To answer the question of whether basic belief that God exists is properly basic, is to thereby imply a (probabilistic) answer to question of whether God exists.
Fair enough: (3a) seems to follow (in some sense) from (1) and (2). But why would Plantinga care about establishing (3a)? If it’s true, all that means is that objections that are, in the first instance, de jure are also, in the end, de facto! Clearly this isn’t the conclusion Plantinga intends, because it’s meant to follow from (3) that
Atheologians who wish to attack religious belief will have to restrict themselves to objections like the argument from evil, the claim that theistic belief is incoherent, or the idea that in some other way there is strong evidence against theistic belief. (ibid)
The idea here, I take it, is that if (3) is correct, then atheologians will have to restrict themselves to objections that are, in the first instance, de facto. But how could that follow from (3a)? What follows from (3a) is that objections that are in the first instance de jure are also in the end de facto.
The other reading of (3), the one from which the above does follow (that is, the importnat one), is
(3b) To answer the question of whether basic belief that God exists is properly basic, one must first answer the question of whether God exists.
This seems to be the conclusion Plantinga wants. Unfortunately, it also seems not to follow from (1) and (2), as the following parody demonstrates:
1*) If Ivan is laughing, he probably just saw a comedy.
2*) If Ivan is not laughing, he probably did not just see a comedy.
3*) To answer the question of whether Ivan just saw a comedy, we must first answer the question of whether Ivan is laughing.
Even if (1*) and (2*) are true, and thus determining whether Ivan is laughing is one way to determine whether Ivan (probably) saw a comedy, there could still be other ways to determine whether he saw a comedy. Similarly, if (1) and (2) are true, and thus determining whether God exists is one way to determine whether belief that God exists is (probably) properly basic, there could still be other ways to determine whether belief that God exists is properly basic.
If someone has a more charitable reading of what Plantinga is up to, I’d love to hear it.
