Abstract
The first book is a debate between Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley on the existence of God. They discuss whether belief in an all-good, omniscient, omnipotent, God is warranted. While I cannot do justice to the nuances of the complex give-and-take of their arguments, I can suggest some salient lines of their positions. In the opening chapter, Plantinga is concerned to oppose the philosophy of materialism or naturalism. He poses the question of whether faith is warranted. He holds that faith "just is a certain kind of knowledge, and knowledge of truths of the greatest importance" (p. 9). Plantinga then defines warrant as "the quantity enough of which distinguishes knowledge from true belief" (p. 9). Warrant, says Plantinga, is related to the "proper function" of our cognitive faculties, "working in the way they are supposed to work" and in the "appropriate cognitive environment" (p. 11). Proper function seems to be related to the notion that our cognitive faculties have been designed for a certain purpose and that our using them for this purpose is how we know that our knowledge is warranted. Naturalism, the belief that matter is all there is, he says, cannot ground proper function and thus cannot provide the warrant for making our true beliefs into knowledge. The reason why it cannot ground proper function is that naturalism does not have any notion of things being designed in nature by "conscious, purposeful intelligent agents" (p. 20). In this way, naturalists have no reason to think that the beliefs with which their cognitive faculties supply them are reliable (p. 30). Thus, naturalism leads straight to an absolute skepticism, since none of our beliefs are warranted.