Jeremy Koons' Excellent Critique of Plantinga on Properly Basic Theistic Belief
Koons, Jeremy Randall. "Plantinga on Properly Basic Belief in God: Lessons from the Epistemology of Perception", The Philosophical Quarterly 61:245 (2011): 839-50.
Here's the abstract:
Plantinga famously argues against the evidentialist that belief in God can be properly basic. Consideration of the epistemology of cognitive faculties (like perception and memory) that produce psychologically non-inferential belief helps us understand how various inferentially-justified theoretical beliefs are epistemically prior to our memory and perceptual beliefs, preventing such beliefs from being epistemically basic. Taking seriously Plantinga’s analogy between the sensus divinitatis and cognitive faculties like memory and perception, I argue that such considerations give us good reason to think that the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis cannot be properly basic, either. We close by considering a number of objections to our argument by and on behalf of Plantinga.
The penultimate draft can be found here.
Intuition Check
Intuition check: Assume Platonism about properties, propositions, and possible worlds. Such is the natural backdrop of the modal ontological argument. Assume further that the key possibility premise of the modal ontological argument is true, viz., that there is a possible world at which maximal excellence is exemplified. Then by Axiom S5 and that premise, we get the God of classical theism -- or do we? Seems to me we don't. For the picture is that God is ontologically posterior to and dependent upon the existence and ontological structure of the platonic multiverse -- God's existence is the ontological consequence of the nature and structure of platonic space. But if that's right, then God is, in a real sense, a dependent being, in which case classical theism is false.
Dan Baras' Reliability Challenge for Theistic Platonism
In "A Reliability Challenge for Theistic Platonism" (Analysis 77(3): 479-87 (2017)), Dan Baras argues that theistic platonists face something analogous to Street's evolutionary debunking argument. Here's the abstract:
Many philosophers believe that when a theory is committed to an apparently unexplainable massive correlation, that fact counts significantly against the theory. Philosophical theories that imply that we have knowledge of non-causal mind-independent facts are especially prone to this objection. Prominent examples of such theories are mathematical Platonism, robust normative realism and modal realism. It is sometimes thought that theists can easily respond to this sort of challenge and that theism therefore has an epistemic advantage over atheism. In this paper, I will argue that, contrary to widespread thought, some versions of theism only push the challenge one step further and thus are in no better position than atheism.The next step is to apply the debunking argument to God's moral knowledge in particular.
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