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We found 15 Reddit comments about Warranted Christian Belief. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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15 Reddit comments about Warranted Christian Belief:

u/AmoDman · 17 pointsr/Christianity

The problem is, a lot of the books that Christians here are recommending are very different in both style and direction than the kinds of books that you're talking about with Dawkins and Hitchens. Which, to be frank, ought to be expected. Detailed philosophical argumentation just isn't something most Christians are worried about or interested in since, once establishing faith, theology and discipleship are far more interesting intellectual pursuits to believers.


In any case, here are a variety of more serious academic responses to the kinds of books you've been reading:


Reasonable Faith By William Lane Craig


Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga


Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga


Why God Won't Go Away: Is the New Atheism Running on Empty? by Alister Mcgrath


Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith by Francis S Collins


God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? by John C Lennox


Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are Missing the Target by John C Lennox


Edit: And don't forget that you don't have to buy any of these books to read them! For serious. Library card + inter-library loan system via internet is the way to win.

u/fnv245 · 6 pointsr/askphilosophy

Plantinga wrote 3 books related to this subject. He wrote "Warrant: The Current Debate" to give an overview of the field of philosophy on what needs to be added to true beliefs to yield knowledge. Then he wrote "Warrant and Proper Function" to give his own take. Finally he wrote "Warranted Christian Belief" which basically applies his epistemology to Christian belief. So the guy has done a ton of work in epistemology and also applying epistemology to Christianity.

Links to Books:

https://www.amazon.com/Warrant-Current-Debate-Alvin-Plantinga/dp/0195078624

https://www.amazon.com/Warrant-Proper-Function-Alvin-Plantinga/dp/0195078640/ref=pd_sim_14_1/164-8766607-7794903?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=H9CQMRJ1GDZG8WF2EHQ8

https://www.amazon.com/Warranted-Christian-Belief-Alvin-Plantinga/dp/0195131932/ref=pd_sim_14_2/164-8766607-7794903?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=H9CQMRJ1GDZG8WF2EHQ8

u/WhomDidYouSay · 5 pointsr/Reformed

Marx said this in some of the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto:

> The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.... Freeman and slave...in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another...

Marx's whole philosophy is that (economic) power disparity is the reason we have constant turmoil. If you get rid of the economic differences, you get rid of the turmoil. It's pure naturalist materialism, and is founded completely outside God, since Marx thought "religion is...the opium of the people."

So, to regard racial divisions as purely class power struggles (Marxism) is to deny the fundamental issues of man's value as an image bearer of God, deeply flawed by sin and sinful desires. Instead of saying "we can fix this mess by creating Heaven on earth", we should teach the gospel.

Edit to add:

Alvin Plantinga quoted Marx, then summarized pretty well this way:

> Marx suggests that religion arises from [a] perverted world consciousness -- perverted from a correct, or right, or natural condition. Religion involves cognitive dysfunction, a disorder or perversion...a lack of mental and emotional health. The believer is therefore in an etymological sense insane. [Warranted Christian Belief, p141]

u/Proverbs313 · 5 pointsr/DebateReligion

From a post I made awhile back:

If you want to go for a scholastic/western positive apologetics approach check out: The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

If you want to go for a scholastic/western negative apologetics approach check out Alvin Plantinga's God and Other Minds. This is the work that actually re-kindled serious philosophical debate on the existence of God in Anglophone philosophical circles according to Quinten Smith (a notable atheist philosopher btw). From there you could also check out Alvin Plantinga's warrant trilogy in order: Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief.

Personally I'm skeptical of the scholastic/western approach in general and I favor the Eastern/Mystical approach. I think the scholastic/western approach cannot escape radical skepticism, and I mean this in terms of secular and religious. If one takes seriously the scholastic/western approach in general, whether one is atheist or theist, radical skepticism follows. This video from a radical skeptic that goes by the user name Carneades.org does a good job of demonstrating this: Arguments of the Indirect Skeptic

The Orthodox approach has always been mystical rather than scholastic all the way from the beginnings of Christianity. From Jesus, to the apostles, to the church fathers, to right now we still have the original apostolic faith in the Orthodox Church. Check out this short documentary to learn more: Holy Orthodoxy: The Ancient Church of Acts in the 21st Century.

Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky explains the Eastern/Mystical approach: "To properly understand the Orthodox approach to the Fathers, one must first of all understand the mystical characteristic of Orthodox theology and the tradition of the apophatic approach to an understanding-if "understanding" is indeed the proper word-of what the hidden God in Trinity reveals to us. This needs to be combined with the insight that what is incomprehensible to our reason inspires us to rise above every attempt at philosophical limitation and to reach for an experience beyond the limits of the intellect. The experience of God is a transcendence born from union with the divine-henosis (oneness with God) being the ultimate goal of existence. This makes the requirement of true knowledge (gnosis) the abandoning of all hope of the conventional subject-object approach to discovery. It requires setting aside the dead ends of Scholasticism, nominalism, and the limits set by such Kantian paradigms as noumena/phenomena. One must return to, or better yet, find in one's heart (or nous, the soul's eye) union with the Holy Trinity, which has never been lost in the Orthodox Church."

Source: Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky, (2004). Three Views on Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism. p. 178. Zondervan, Grand Rapids

u/ThaneToblerone · 4 pointsr/Christianity

I think the best thing to do here (especially if you enjoy reading) is to do some study into the good reasons why Christianity is believed to be correct. William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith is one of the best, most cohesive defenses of the reasonability of the Christian faith I've ever read but there are plenty of other good sources too (Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God and The Coherence of Theism, J.P. Moreland and Bill Craig's Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview, Paul Copan and Bill Craig's Come Let Us Reason, Craig Keener's Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, and Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief just to name a few).

u/[deleted] · 4 pointsr/Christianity

If you are being persecuted because you believe in God, then that is unacceptable. I don't know enough about your, or your friends', situation to make a judgement. I'm inclined to trust people, but the claim that someone was fired from an Academic institution for their beliefs is a very serious charge.

I generally don't go to people like Stephen Meyer. When I want to investigate reasons for and against faith I tend to open these books.


Arguing about Gods

Logic and Theism

The Miracle of Theism

Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology

Existence of God

Warranted Christian Belief

u/CaptLeibniz · 2 pointsr/TrueChristian

>I believe that Christianity is rationally defensible, that religious experiences are valid, and that belief in God enjoys proper basicality--as Alvin Plantinga has defended

I think Plantinga, Alston and Wolterstorff's reformed epistemology is one of the most convincing defenses of rational belief that has hence been devised.

Warranted Christian Belief is an extraordinarily good read. There is an updated, condensed version also: Knowledge and Christian Belief.

u/pburton · 2 pointsr/Anarcho_Capitalism

Plantinga is an old-school academic philosopher, so the best way to get familiar with his ideas is his published works (Amazon links below):

  • The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader - a well-edited anthology that presents a broad survey of Plantinga's ideas (leans heavily toward his epistemology, though IIRC).
  • Warrant: The Current Debate
  • Warrant and Proper Function
  • Warranted Christian Belief This is the only one of the "warrant" books I've read. The three books aren't considered a "trilogy" as such, rather WCD and WPF are companion pieces and WCB then builds a different argument based on the earlier works. Namely, Plantinga responds to what he calls the de jure argument that Christianity is irrational, unjustified, and/or unwarranted (in contrast to the de facto argument that Christianity is false). Some googling will reveal reviews of the book from every conceivable angle, some with responses from Plantinga himself. When Plantinga refers to the earlier books, he gives some context, so it's possible to read this book without having read the other two.

    Plantinga is also on the editorial board of Faith and Philosophy, the journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and he's contributed several articles over the years. There are even more published articles written by his students and colleagues about his ideas.
u/pleepsin · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

The thought that it's hard to conceptualize a ground for moral facts, whether natural or non-natural, is certainly something that motivates Mackie's argument from queerness. He does object to Hare's non-cognitivism, because he thinks that moral statements are meant to invoke moral properties, and fail to do so. Moral realists are also cognitivists, as are other error theorists like mackie. Most of these people, nevertheless, find it hard to conceptualize a grounding for moral facts. Indeed, this is a main reason naturalism is thought not to be very compelling, that it's much harder to conceive of a natural ground for moral facts than a non-natural one. Sharon Street, and as you pointed out, Ronald Dworkin make this point.

Parfit is not an anti-realist, he is a deflationist. He thinks there are moral facts, they are just non-metaphysical facts (like mathematical facts are).

>It's flagrantly circular to say rationality is determined by whatever a maximally rational being desires. So at most you could say that morality is determined by whatever a maximally rational being desires. But then you've done nothing to answer the big metaethical questions concerning rationality (in this normatively-loaded sense of the term): e.g. are judgments of rationality a matter of practical attitude, or do they make reference to some sort of ontology, and if so, what is the nature of this ontology?

Rationality is not determined by whatever a maximally rational being desires. Morality is determined by whatever a maximally rational being desires. This helps to explain the normative force of morality, because it helps us understand why it's rational to behave morally (if a being endorses your action who is perfectly rational, there seems to be very good reason to do it).

>Certainly not if it merely relocates all the big metaethical questions from one normative domain to another (equally problematic) normative domain.

Although normative properties generally are still weird, they are a lot less weird than moral properties. (It is a lot more difficult to see why something is rational to believe than it is to see why it is moral to do). Nevertheless, no moral theory is obligated to provide an account of all normativity (that's the job of a theory of normativity). If that were the case many arguments for moral realism wouldn't work (like Terrence Cuneo's comparison argument).

>I've read Firth and Brandt and Michael Smith, and I consider myself pretty well-informed about ideal observer theory, but I've never encountered "the algorithm analogy".

That's because I invented it when I responded to your post. It seems like it would be a good thing to use in an undergraduate class to make ideal observer theory compelling, but then again, I'm not a teacher.

>Where exactly do people in the literature compare the epistemic merits of moral intuitions with inferential claims about God's psychology? Are you saying that all inferential claims are ipso facto epistemically superior to all intuitions?

Well for starters there's a trivial argument that DCT offers a more reliable basis for morality than ethical intuitionism, namely that it's compatible with ethical intuitionism. So you could back up your intuitions with other stuff, whereas the person who is solely an ethical intuitionism has got nothing to back up their intuitions with.

Nevertheless, I did probably speak too soon in saying it's a general belief that claims about god's psychology are more defensible than claims stemming from intuition about morality. More accurately, most people seem to believe that in light of the objections to ethical intuitionism from cognitive science, claims about God's psychology are prima facie more reliable than intuitionist claims about morality.

The problem of divine hiddenness, for example, implies we know enough about God's character to have a sensible idea of how hidden he would be:

http://philpapers.org/rec/TRIGSA

A lot of religious knowledge also stems from authority, which is typically understood to be more reliable than intuition:

http://philpapers.org/rec/BENBOA-4

On reformed epistemology, knowledge of God is properly basic, which puts it on the level of belief in free will, which seems to be more well-founded than faulty intuitions:

https://www.amazon.com/Warranted-Christian-Belief-Alvin-Plantinga/dp/0195131932

But all in all, when you look at the language religious epistemologists and scholars of religion use, it certainly seems to be a language in which knowledge of God's character is presumed more reliable than an epistemology which looks like it fails. Of course, none of this amounts to an argument that knowledge of God's psychology is more reliable than moral intuition in general, and such would make for a very interesting paper, so thanks for the idea!





u/manateecarbonation · 1 pointr/Christianity

Also , if you're interested in a more well rounded perspective on my point of view from someone more educated than myself, I'd check out : this

u/_000 · 1 pointr/DebateAChristian

It might be best to just jump into the literature itself. Like both articles on VE stated, there are different camps, though they're not always mutually exclusive. And Wiki mentioned Alvin Plantinga. He's quasi-VE, but written very directly on the subject you're interested in. He has a paper called "Justification and Theism" that predates his trilogy on warrant, the last one titled Warranted Christian Belief. In fact, I have an abridged chapter of that book; Plantinga presented it as a paper at a conference years ago. I also have, from that same conference, a paper "Proper Epistemic Function and the Intellectual Virtues" by Jay Wood and Robert C. Roberts, who are referenced in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on VE. There's also a paper on Proper Function in science. I don't mind scanning these papers and emailing or uploading them.

I also think that you would benefit from subjecting Foundationalism (which includes both Empiricism and Rationalism) to much more critical scrutiny, and for reasons unrelated to "supernatural" questions. The foundations are illusory. Richard Rorty, who was thoroughly atheist himself, had some of the harshest criticisms of Foundationalism.

u/45-1 · 1 pointr/DebateReligion

New username here. It's been a while since was in the literature on these issues, but I got my degree in Phil & Religion under a guy whose adviser was Plantinga and I heard Plantinga give a conference presentation on what became his Warrented Christian Belief. The school I went to was a heart of Pressup Apologetics, since Gordon Clark, who in addition to Van Til, was a founder of the movement, although Val Til was taught more. So I did papers on Van Til and his successor John Frame, but did read some books by Clark on other subjects.



>Upvote for a thoughtful and detailed answer. I suppose I still can't come to see past what I perceive is circularity.



The best critique I know of Plantinga's "proper basicality" is by Tyler Wonder and you can hear him talk about it in pretty good detail over at Common Sense Atheism. He did his PhD on this so he's worth paying attention to, even if I can't say that his argument goes through.



>I can't accept Plantinga's response to the Great Pumpkin objection, because he never offers criteria for proper basicality (other than the vague idea that it occurs only in the "right circumstances").



Well, as far I understand, providing a strict criteria would reintroduce the very problems that make Classical Foundationalism self-defeating by ruling itself out. That's why grounding beliefs by way of Virtue Epistemology helps retain the foundationalist structure. And VE doesn't permit just any belief, but it must grant that our cognitive faculties are generally reliable, which is also self-defeating if denied. And I think cognitive science can support this, yet Plantinga's reasoning goes back to Thomas Reid's "Common Sense Realism" (which was in response to Hume).



>If I am understanding him correctly, Plantinga essentially says that a properly basic belief requires some grounds for belief, but to me, this sounds awfully similar to a demand for evidence.



It's not evidential because, "properly basic" beliefs are known directly without appeal to inferences (memory-based beliefs, for example, are direct, not built on anything but memory). They just aren't indubitable.



>Sure, perhaps a properly basic belief needn't be an a priori belief (esp. in weak foundationalism), but Plantinga, to my knowledge, has not provided any means of distinguishing between one thing or another.



This is where Virtue Epistemology and a Reidian-based rendering of cognitive faculties comes in.












u/Proliator · 1 pointr/ReasonableFaith

>How is the knowledge of what a person is intrinsic? Also, how do you know that you, yourself, are a person, from an epistemic standpoint?

It's just the general definition for what you are. You know that experience and you know how it manifests externally. That is how you can define what a person is.

>How would you assert that you are the specific creature that was made in God's image?

Because the Bible doesn't say creature, it says man, a specific creature.

>Not trying to poke at things, but wouldn't an even simpler explanation be that they are "soulless" (can't think of a decent word at the moment), but still appear to have a mind? Similar to AI.

Not at all. How is it simpler that they would be different? That you are the only person with a "soul" despite everyone being created by God? Wouldn't that just be special pleading?

Remember the simplest explanation is not "the simplest to implement", it's not about whats simplest to make happen when you already know intrinsically consciousness can happen. Rather the simplest explanation is the one that makes the fewest assumptions.

Assuming everyone who looks and acts like you has a mind, which you know you have, is one assumption.

Assuming everyone who looks and acts like you, does not in fact has a mind is one assumption. This also assumes you're now the only one with a mind. So that's two. Then you assume that for other's its a facsimile or AI. That's three. etc.

>I agree with that, but the problem is what humanity is. How do you know you are the creature that God was referring to?

As above, the Bible does not use "creature" it uses "man", as in "mankind".

>So then what is the point of believing them over not?

They're necessary for understanding the external world.

Before we were grounding all belief. To do that we grounded fundamental beliefs in ourselves, which makes sense as we are the ones that hold belief.

Now we've jumped to a scope beyond ourselves. These are the beliefs that are foundational to understanding the external world, but not necessarily foundational to ourselves or all belief in general.

>Are there any books in particular or online summaries that would relate to this certain aspect of PBBs?

I read Plantinga's book "Warranted Christian Belief" awhile back and I believe that starts to dig at those topics. This goes into some depth but it is written in more accessible language.

A more formal treatment by him would be his paper "On proper basicality" but it's an academic philosophy paper so it might be hard to digest. There's also "Is belief in god properly basic?", another paper of his but I can't find a link that isn't behind a paywall.

You can check out this list of some of his work. He addresses many of the questions you've been asking. Reformed epistemology is as good a place as any to jump into this.

William Lane Craig also talks about it occasionally, but I don't think he's written something specifically in regards to it.

u/Leahn · -1 pointsr/DebateAChristian

> You are making a huge assumption that the Bible is god's guide.

I am answering from within the parameters you gave me. You asked originally about JW's interpretation of Christianity. I think I am granted such assumption in the light of this fact.

> What about all those people who fervently believe the Koran or Old Testament (only) or the Upanishads or the Veda or any other holy book to be god's guide to man?

God will judge them, not me. My task is to spread His good news to them. If He deem them worthy of salvation, then they are worthy of salvation.

> Do you not pause and question what makes your holy book so special, what makes your holy book the true word of god? If other people believe in other holy books with as much you zeal as you do in yours, how can you tell your not falling into the same false belief as they are? How do you know you are following the true word of god and not some impostor?

I suggest Plantinga's book Warranted Christian Belief or C.S.Lewis' Mere Christianity.

My argument for it is fairly simple. The God worshipped by the Christians is the same God that was already being worshipped when Ur was the most important city in the world. The other gods came and went, but He remained.

> If you are truly following the word of god (bible) and Hindus aren't (in general), shouldn't you feel god more?

No, why should I?

> Shouldn't god give you some indication you are on the right path as oppose to how you would feel if you were Hindu?

O, but He does! Truth will set you free, and that is your signal.

> That is like giving your children a test and then rewarding everyone who answered the questions equally regardless if they got it right, and then punishing those who got it wrong (punishment depending on your belief on heaven/hell can simply be having it somehow worse off in the afterlife then another person).

The destiny of mankind is to stay on Earth. No one will be 'worse off' than anyone else.

> How are any of your children supposed to know what the right answers (any 'lifestyle/faith' that gets you the best possible afterlife) are if you give everyone equal encouragement throughout the learning process and test?

There is no best possible afterlife. There is a simple hope of eternal life here on Earth.

> If Hindus can/will obtain the same level of afterlife as members of your faith, then again I ask, why are you spreading your faith?

Why do you tell your friends when something good happens to you?