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God and Rationality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert C. Solomon
Robert C. Solomon*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Extract

Is belief in God rational? Over a century ago, Hegel (following Kant) and Søren Kierkegaard established one set of parameters for discussing that question, but in a language that appears opaque to many philosophers today. Very recently, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross, and George Mavrodes have been debating similar issues in a modern analytic idiom. In this essay, I want to use this modern philosophical language in an attempt to clarify certain issues surrounding the relevant notion of “rationality” and related notions essential to the natural theologian, and in so doing attempt to make presentable the dispute between Hegel and Kierkegaard.

For our purposes here, I take “rationality” to be predicated of an epistemological concept of belief, even if, as I believe, any such notion would have to be a special case and a logical derivative of a more general notion of “rationality” as primarily practical.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , December 1974 , pp. 283 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Philosophical Association meetings in St. Louis, Mo., on May 4, 1972, in reply to a paper by Gary Iseminger entitled “Successful Argument and Rational Belief.” I am indebted to Professor Iseminger for some of the shaping of this paper, but will acknowledge particular debts in the text.

References

1 Plantinga, Alvin God and Other Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

2 Ross, James F. Philosophical Theology (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).Google Scholar

3 Mavrodes, George Belief in God (New York: Random House, 1970) (BG)Google Scholar. Mavrodes, George “Some Recent Philosophical Theology,” Review of Metaphysics, XXIV, No.1 (September 1970), pp. 82–111 (esp. pp. 83–93) (RM).Google Scholar

4 Philosophical Review, LXVIII (1959), p. 498.

5 Mavrodes requires only that a rationality claim can be so expanded, but this is far too weak; any statement that “p is rational” (e.g., p = “3 + 6 =9“) can be so expanded, the question is whether it must.

6 Cf. Plantinga, op. cit., p. 4Google Scholar, ”… follows deductively or inductively from propositions that are obviously true and accepted by nearly every sane man together with propositions that are self-evident or necessarily true.“