Return to Reason: A Critique of Enlightenment Evidentialism and a Defense of Reason and Belief in God

by Kelly James Clark

A penetrating critique of the Enlightenment assumption of evidentialism--that belief in God requires the support of evidence or arguments to be rational. Garnering arguments from C. S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid, William James, and John Calvin, Clark asserts that this Enlightenment demand for evidence is itself both irrelevant and irrational.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology

168 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 1990

About the author

Kelly James Clark is an American philosopher noted for his work in the philosophy of religion, science and religion, and the cognitive science of religion.

He received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame where his dissertation advisor was Alvin Plantinga. He has held professorships at Calvin College, Oxford University, University of St. Andrews, Notre Dame & Gordon College. He also served as Executive Director for the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1994 to 2009.

He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids Michigan.

Reviews

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of Kelly James Clark’s Return to Reason

Argument and Critique
Clark begins his book by critiquing some of the more popular arguments for the existence of God. He seeks to refute the evidentialist’s standards for reason. This includes critiquing Christian arguments that assume that worldview. In short, the cosmological argument is inadequate because it arbitrarily uses the principle of sufficient reason: for every positive fact or truth there is a sufficient reason for why that fact obtains and why that statement is true. This is used to explain why the universe as a whole has a cause. So far so good. Clark critiques the Classical Method on their interaction with objections, the inadequacy of natural theology, and the fallaciousness of their proofs. Rather, good Christian argumentation is cogent and person-relative: the argument must be sound and the person must recognize it to be sound (44).

God and Evil
He interacts with the standard atheist argument against God because of evil. He then defines and distinguishes theodicy from defense. He proposes, following Alvin Plantinga, a “transworld defense of God’s actions in the face of evil.” In other words, “if a person suffers from a transworld depravity, then in all the worlds God can create in which that person exists and is free, that person would have freely gone wrong at least once” (73). This removes the logical contradiction in the argument from evil.

Critique of Enlightenment Evidentialism
Clark takes the evidentialism of W.K. Clifford to task in this section. Clifford maintains that we can only believe something—and act on that belief—if we have proper evidence for it. Clark rebuts this using the arguments of William James and C.S. Lewis. Belief in God is a passional decision that can legitimacy be made apart from Clifford’s standards of evidence. In short, if we adopt Clifford’s approach to evidence, we will have very few true beliefs. In reality no one thinks this way. We hold many beliefs—justifiedly so—apart from such evidence. Also, Clifford’s belief is itself a passional decision made apart from evidence.

Belief in God as Properly Basic
Clark, following Alvin Plantinga, argues that God has so constituted our cognitive faculties that we are perfectly rational to believe in him without regard to Enlightenment evidential criteria. This is concurrent with a discussion on Classical Foundationalism, its defects, and a turning to a Reformed Epistemology. Classical Foundationalism—the view that foundational beliefs are self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the senses—is self-falsifying. In its stead Clark proposes a Reidian epistemology that relies on “common sense.” For Clark, belief in God is “properly basic.” Properly basic beliefs are those that are foundational and non-inferential.

Conclusion
Clark has a snappy, engaging writing style. He couldn’t be boring if he tried. He will strike some readers as arrogant. The book was an excellent, succinct introduction to Reformed Epistemology. I have a few cautions:
1) I am not convinced—yet—of transworld depravity and Plantinga’s free-will defense. Maybe he is right. Perhaps 6 months from now I will be won over. But I have to do more thinking on it.
2) Is knowledge “justified” or “warranted”? Is the proof of the Christian God found in the “impossibility of the contrary” (Bahnsen) or is it found in “the God-structured cognitive faculties” of our brain (Plantinga)? I really can’t offer a critique at the moment. It would not be fair to Clark. He wrote this book before Plantinga wrote his trilogy. But I do have a few questions regarding it. How is the argument that “belief in God is properly basic” any less question-begging than Bahnsen claiming that the “truth of Christianity is the impossibility of the contrary?” Again, I will pull my punches. The Reformed Epistemologists have answered these questions; I haven’t gotten around to all the literature.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good presentation of Reformed Epistemology. The book is definitely introductory. If you want to study reformed epistemology, this book would be a good place to start. No prior philosophical training is required, but a couple areas may require some re-reading to grasp.

This book attempts to show that belief in God B is, or can be, reasonable even if B is not attended by evidences for, (in support of) B. This is achieved by (i) showing that the evidence for and against God's existence fail to meet the standard of a "cogent proof" (a proof that no rational person could deny), (ii) the irrelevance and irrationality of evidentialism (the notion that, as epistemic agents, we should never believe anything on insufficient evidence), (iii) some problems with classical foundationalism, and (iv) a defense of proper-basicality, finding belief in God eligible for a properly-basic belief. These beliefs are rational to hold, even in spite of propositional evidence in their favor. So, like belief in other minds is rational even without propositional evidence in favor of that belief (read up on the literature here if you think you have good evidence to believe in the existence of other minds), belief in God is too. This kind of view allows for the rationality of Clark's saintly grandmother - who, like many of our grandma's, do not have propositional evidence in favor of their belief in God, but we nevertheless take them to be rational.

(This book isn't specifically an apologetic for the Christian faith, it has apologetic value for the Christian faith, though. I know that that term (value) is vague (for example, many things could have apologetical "value," even books by atheists), but I'll trust the reader won't quibble with me here and will understand my point if s/he reads the book. Anyway, that's why I shelved this book on the apologetics shelf.)

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to "Reformed Epistemology" - I still regularly refer to this book years after first reading it to explain why its rational to believe in God without necessarily being able to defend that belief by the canons of Enlightenment "proof". Super-readable.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good section on Reformed Epistemology.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good, albeit old introduction to reformed epistemology.

[Annie Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

:O :O Wow very eye-opening. I think I've been thinking about evidence for religion the wrong way all along.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is arguable that Plantinga is more consistent with Calvin than Van Til.

"It is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had free will. That means creatures
which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but
had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And
free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will
though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy
worth having.

"Free will though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth
creating.

—CS Lewis, Mere Christianity


“All agents” here includes God Himself. His Omnipotence
means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the
intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but
not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say
“God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold
free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about
God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire
meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words
“God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God:
the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no
more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to
carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because
His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

—CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain

[John David · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Return to Reason” is a valiant effort in trying to hold down the fort for post-Enlightenment, rational belief in a God. For a short book, it covers a lot of territory, including an argument against natural theology, and a critique of foundationalist epistemology (for definitions of these terms, see the second and third paragraphs respectively). It’s a great undergraduate text for what philosophers call “reformed epistemology” (again, see below) and introduces some of the most popular names in this tradition. Unfortunately, I found this book to be tragically flawed in several respects, and in the end, a terrible failure, both of the imagination and of philosophy.

Clark begins off on a solid footing with a thoroughgoing critique of natural theology – that is, the idea that a belief in God can be derived from logical propositions that all rational beings can agree upon. The most recognizable of these arguments are seen in Aquinas’ five proofs, including the argument from design and the cosmological argument. He rightly argues that different (rational) people can use different standards of evidence and only think these standards apply in certain situations. For example, regarding the argument from design, some people think that the argument from sufficient reason applies to all things within the universe, while others – namely the people who find the design argument convincing – think it can apply to the universe as a whole itself. Some astrophysicists have recently asserted that the Big Bang itself may not have had a cause (I’m thinking here of Lawrence Krauss), which would blow the entire lid off of the cosmological argument as we know it. Because of this, natural theology seems like a failure on all fronts: using only the tool of classical Enlightenment reason, it’s not the case that all people will agree on the positive truth value of God claims.

Because this relentless need for evidence and reason, which Clark terms “evidentialism,” cannot prove the existence of God, he sees it fit to critique foundationalism, the belief that all inferential beliefs are based on more basic beliefs. Instead, thinking that he’s offering a detailed critique of foundationalist epistemology, he really just goes on to flatly state that when you want to believe in something, you can “just do it.” In fact, in “Faith and Rationality,” Nicholas Wolterstorff states this flatly and unashamedly. “A person is rationally justified in believing a certain proposition when he does believe unless he has adequate reason to cease from believing it. Our beliefs are rational unless we have reason for refraining; they are not non-rational unless we have reason for believing” (Clark, p. 147). I’m sorry, but this simply isn’t the way that rationality works, and it’s relatively easy to see why. Say I want to belief that an Invisible Giant Meatball Sandwich causes things to fall to the ground, not gravity. Try proving me wrong.

Instead of changing his worldview in the light of insufficient evidence, like most philosophers would do, Clark followed in the footsteps of an unfortunate yet storied philosophical tradition known as reformed epistemology (so named because of its roots in the Protestant Reformation, especially in the theology of John Calvin), but recently revived by the likes of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Alston. Reformed epistemology holds that belief in a God is both basic and proper, or what philosophers call “properly basic.” “Basic” here means without recourse to being explained by something else (it’s a primary belief which doesn’t need explanation itself), and “properly” means that a belief is justified. In other words, reform epistemologists believe that God is both something that is justified, but also doesn’t have to be explained. Well, isn’t that just precious – and convenient. It seems obvious to me that reformed epistemology is simply a way of trying to smuggle in the back door what you can’t get in if you actually follow the rules of the game of philosophy: you know, like evidence, reason, and logical methods. Does anyone know of a reformed epistemologist who also happens to be an atheist?

Crickets. I hear crickets.

I’m by no means uncritical of the Enlightenment, or the traditions that flow from it. But what I find most dishonest about this book is not that it feels that it can dismiss centuries of philosophical thought in 150 pages, but that it makes the tremendously intellectually dishonest move of trying assert (note that I didn’t say “prove” or “demonstrate”) totally ad hoc a belief that can be introduced by no rational means. I’m also not someone who thinks that philosophy should necessarily in any way resemble science in content or method, but one really is treading ground when you import the word “rationality” here, leading people on to believe that it’s anything like the rationality of science. Clark, Plantinga, Wolterstorff and other reformed epistemologists haven’t really critiqued anything. They’ve skirted the issue, and have thereby created a whole new welter of problems for themselves. I can understand when someone asserts that their belief in God is basic – that it is primary, and can’t be explained by anything else. But saying that it’s properly basic – that these kinds of beliefs are justified – is simply not reasonable or rational. There’s a reason why they call it Calvinism. And it should stay in the sixteenth century where it belongs.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The topic is fascinating, however it is poorly written and conflates theism with Christianity.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good summary of the new Reformed Epistemology - Wolterstoff, Plantinga and Mavrodes.