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Alvin Plantinga’s “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?”
March 2, 2012 | by Kyle | | Leave a Comment
Hello UPA’ers!
First off, a big thank you to everyone who came out for the Larry Laudan discussion last week. It was an enormously insightful meeting, and we were all privileged to receive some of Professor Laudan’s time.
Now we return to our philosophy of religion unit. Few figures have loomed as large in contemporary philosophy of religion as Alvin Plantinga, and this week’s reading is one of his many papers on the subject of God’s existence. Entitled “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?”, Plantinga argues that there are various propositions that are “properly basic”, where a basic proposition is one that is accepted without any basis in other beliefs. After giving some examples of plausible basic propositions, Plantinga takes the proposition “God exists” to be a “properly” or rightly basic belief and argues for this conclusion. We will discuss his line of reasoning, and the epistemological framework from which he is starting.
This week, we’re returning to our usual meeting place and meeting time of GAR 3.116, at 4:30 on Friday. Come by for what will be an interesting discussion!
Here is a link to the reading: https://webspace.utexas.edu/kal698/is%20belief%20in%20god%20properly%20basic.pdf
Best,
Armando and Kyle, co-presidents
P.S. Here’s a video of Plantinga discussing these and related points: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7377jU2a8Y