{"id":300,"date":"2011-02-20T02:05:33","date_gmt":"2011-02-20T02:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/?p=300"},"modified":"2020-12-29T22:10:45","modified_gmt":"2020-12-29T22:10:45","slug":"if-we-cannot-prove-the-claims-of-religious-belief-is-it-nevertheless-reasonable-to-believe-these-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/if-we-cannot-prove-the-claims-of-religious-belief-is-it-nevertheless-reasonable-to-believe-these-claims\/","title":{"rendered":"If we cannot prove the claims of religious belief, is it nevertheless reasonable to believe these claims?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is an introduction to the Reformed Epistemology (RE) movement that was particularly associated with the philospher Alvin Plantinga.  Plantinga was interested in establishing the grounds on which a belief might be considered &#8220;rational (reasonable)&#8221;.  Post-Enlightenment, beliefs required &#8220;evidence&#8221; or &#8220;foundations&#8221;, viz. <em>foundationalism<\/em> but more recently it was recognised that we nevertheless have things we consider reasonable to have believed without such evidence, so-called <em>basic<\/em> beliefs &#8211; that is, beliefs which are not founded on other beliefs. RE was known for proposing that theistic beliefs can be held to be properly basic and therefore do not require &#8220;evidence&#8221; for it to be rational to hold them.  <\/p>\n<p>This was a 3000 word essay for an undergraduate module but still manages to cover significant issues in the debate.  You can read a PDF <a href=\"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/Documents\/Content\/Reformed-epistemology.pdf\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is an introduction to the Reformed Epistemology (RE) movement that was particularly associated with the philospher Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga was interested in establishing the grounds on which a belief might be considered &#8220;rational (reasonable)&#8221;. Post-Enlightenment, beliefs required &#8220;evidence&#8221; or &#8220;foundations&#8221;, viz. foundationalism but more recently it was recognised that we nevertheless have things we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":301,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,17],"tags":[145,144],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy-of-religion","category-science-and-religion","tag-alvin-plantinga","tag-re"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}