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Coherence, Proper Basicality and Moral Arguments for Theism by William Lad Sessions is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

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Alvin Plantinga has recently and forcefully argued that belief in God is properly basic for some persons. ~ Positively, he claims that a basic belief in God can be "entirely acceptable, desirable, right, proper, and rational" (1983:39). Negatively, he holds that neither classical foundationalism nor coherentism provides the necessary conditions under which a belief is properly basic, and so neither can be used to show that belief in God is not properly basic. On Plantinga's view, then, a properly basic theist will have nothing to do with coherence. My aim in this paper is to show that coherence is not irrelevant to properly basic beliefs and that a properly basic theist should welcome arguments expressing coherence. There are four sections to the paper: (1) summarizes Plantinga's account of proper basicality; (2) provides a (partial, limited) account of coherence; (3) discusses some possible roles for coherence with respect to proper basicality; and (4)suggests how moral arguments for theism, much neglected in recent decades, might play some coherentist roles even for those for whom belief in God is properly basic. A basic belief for a person S, Plantinga says, is one not based on

Who reads Coherence, Proper Basicality and Moral Arguments for Theism?

Author

William Lad Sessions

Publisher

Springer Netherlands; Springer-Verlag; Springer Science and Business Media LLC (ISSN 0020-7047)

Published

1987

Language

EN

Field

Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)