Plantinga defends exclusivism about the truth of religious claims, He says nothing about exclusivism on the matter of salvation.

An exclusivist, for Plantinga's purposes, isn't just someone who believes that her own religion is the true one. She must also satisfy Condition C:

a) being rather fully aware of other religions

b) knowing that there is much that at least looks like genuine piety and devoutness in them

c) believing that you know of no arguments that would necessarily convince all or most intelligent and honest dissenters

Moral Objections

One charge is that exclusivism is or entails oppression or imperialism. Plantinga dismisses this as implausible. Exclusivists may be oppressors or imperialists, but not by virtue of being exclusivists.

Reply: Plantinga is right strictly speaking. However, this ignores an important question: does exclusivism as a matter of fact tend to promote these sorts of attitudes?

A second moral charge against exclusivism is that it is or entails a kind of arrogance.

Plantinga argues that if this is true, then it's almost certainly unavoidable and has nothing to do with religion in particular.

First, most of us are in an analogue of Condition C with respect to some of our beliefs -- political beliefs, moral beliefs, philosophical beliefs. Second, even if we claimed to suspend judgment in cases where we meet Condition C, we would still be claiming that this is the better or superior attitude.

Reply: Plantinga is right and part of his point is important: holding a position that others disagree with and that you can't prove is not in itself arrogant. Or if it is, religious exclusivism isn't in any especially bad position.

Also: he points out that the anti-exclusivist himself if in condition C with respect to his own anti-exclusivism -- making him arrogant by his own criterion.

However, there are different sorts of cases here. The anti-exclusivist is almost certainly not relying just on the fact that the exclusivist is in Condition C. He will probably argue that in the case of religious beliefs, the question of which one is right is particularly obscure and the degree of "epistemic parity" among different sorts of believers is very high. In these sorts of cases -- where good arguments seem lacking and where there is considerable equality of quality of evidence -- he might argue that insisting on one's pet view seems arrogant.

Epistemic Objections

The two most common objections are that exclusivism is irrational or unjustified. Start with the second charge.

"Unjustified" most likely means "not within one's intellectual rights" -- failing in some "epistemic duty."

Suppose these duties exist. Suppose the exclusivist thinks long, hard and prayerfully about her position and continues to think that she is right. How could she be shirking a duty? If duties are the issue, she is not unjustified.

The next version of the charge will be that preferring one's own religion is arbitrary because there is an epistemic parity among it and many other religions -- roughly equal evidence and roughly equal degrees of internal markers of truth -- same sorts of inner experience, etc.

On internal markers: Plantinga says that he will grant for argument's sake that other sorts of believers have the same sorts of inner experiences, sense of conviction, etc. that he has. But he asks us to compare: suppose you think something is deeply unjust -- say, arranging the death of your lover's spouse. Suppose we grant that some people disagree. and suppose we grant that they feel as internally convinced as you do. This hardly shows that you should abandon your position. It is at least as likely, you would think, that they have a blind spot -- that they are missing something.

But couldn't you be wrong? Plantinga's reply is: of course. But that's true for most any position.

Irrationality

Plantinga considers five sorts of rationality:

Aristotelian Rationality All this means is that you are capable of reason. The believer can surely be rational in this sense.

The Deliverances of Reason This means that you formed your belief by using the rational and related faculties: deductive abilities, memory, experience, etc. The exclusivist is irrational in this sense only if there is a good argument based on "the deliverances of reason" against her position. Plantinga thinks this isn't so.

The Deontological Sense Does the believer fulfill his epistemic duties? This has already been considered and there's no reason to think the answer must be no.

Zweckrationalitaet This is means-ends rationality. It's not clear that it even applies to belief selection. But if it does, it's not clear that the exclusivist fails this test.

Sanity and Proper Function If someone is insane or their cognitive systems aren't functioning correctly, then their beliefs may be irrational. Their beliefs would be unwarranted Plantinga considers different notions of warrant:

Justified True Belief: The exclusivist's beliefs could be true. On one version of justification -- roughly, Roderick Chisholm's -- the believer is justified if she is trying to get to the truth. The exclusivist could satisfy this criterion.

On the coherentist version of justification, one's beliefs must cohere with some larger body of beliefs. But the exclusivist's beliefs could surely satisfy this requirement.

The last version of warrant that Plantinga considers is his own proper function account. We discussed this earlier in the course. If there is a God who has endowed us with a faculty for coming to true religious beliefs, and if the exclusivist's beliefs issue from that faculty, her beliefs will be warranted. But the pluralist objector _ Plantinga claims _ is not trying to show that this isn't so.

Reply: this is not so clearly true. Hick offers positive arguments for his pluralism. If those arguments are good, we have reason to think that the exclusivist's beliefs aren't the result of a properly functioning faculty.

Also, there are objections to Plantinga's account of warrant. but to be fair, he doesn't rest his case on this account. He could fall back on one of the other notions of warrant.

But Plantinga asks "don't the realities of religious pluralism count for anything at all?"

His answer is that they could undermine the believer's confidence in her belief. In that case, she might no longer be in a position to have knowledge if her belief is true. But it's also possible that the opposite might happen: she might come away with convictions renewed.

My Problem With Plantinga

Is Plantinga right that the exclusivist can hold her position without committing an intellectual sin?

The answer is surely yes. Like any number of philosophical views, Christianity (Plantinga's choice) or Islam or Hinduism can be given reasonable defenses. I hold philosophical views that I think are reasonable even though I know that other people whom I respect disagree. So far so good.

Also: does a person have to be able to produce a philosophical defense to be justified in holding a religious view? No. Most people aren't philosophers or theologians. They're entitled to put some trust in people they have reason to think are better at this than they are.

But: Plantinga seems to make it a little too easy.

The problem he underestimates is described on p. 515 of the text in the inset box: if Plantinga had been born into another religion, he would probably believe very differently than he does. He tries to reduce this to a formula:

If S's religious or philosophical beliefs are such that if S had been born elsewhere or elsewhen, she wouldn't have them, then those beliefs are produced by an unreliable belief producing mechanism and hence have no warrant.

He points out that someone born to Christian parents in, say, Mexico wouldn't believe this, and so, he thinks, the objector is "hoist on his own petard."

The trouble is that this version of the objection is far too simple. No serious philosopher would reduce the problem to a formula like this.

First, for almost any belief there are some circumstances you could have been born into that would have led to a different belief. Everyone who is serious recognizes this. The worry here, then, has to be something else.

Van Inwagen (in the inset) mentions Nazism. He suggests that the non-Nazi would say "So what?" if it's pointed out that he would probably have been a Nazi if he had been born in Nazi Germany. But this "So what?" is ambiguous. It could mean that one environment is as good as another, and one can believe as one wishes. or it could mean: Nazi Germany wasn't a good place to come to sound beliefs about politics, but 21st century USA is much less subject to that objection. (This isn't to say it's perfect here. It's to say that the environment is not nearly as oppressive as it was in Nazi Germany. The difference in degree seems to be a difference in kind.)

The first point would amount to a sort of relativism that Plantinga (and van Inwagen) want to avoid. The second point is more important. Some environments are less likely to lead us astray than others. I don't worry about my political beliefs being irrational because they were formed in a reasonably non-coercive environment.

Many people's religious beliefs are not formed on the basis of arguments, reasons or careful investigation and aren't subjected to careful scrutiny. They have little or no reason for thinking their beliefs are superior to the ones they would have if they had been born into some other tradition.

What is the worry? It's that we do seem to have a belief-forming mechanism when it comes to religious beliefs, but that mechanism seems mostly to respond to cues from our religious environment. Drop a person into a religious environment at an early age and s/he will fairly reliably come to see that particular religion as the truth. But the mechanisms that bring this about appear to be pretty much the same in the case of all religions, even though the resulting beliefs are very different and even though they conflict with beliefs that other people come to apparently by the operation of the same mechanism.

This suggests that whatever this mechanism is responding to, it's not the truth but something else.

The exclusivist can insist: her beliefs are different from those of people in other religions. Their beliefs are a result of either the wrong mechanism or the corruption of the right one. Hers are the "good" or true ones. But unless she offers some evidence for this it's not clear why anyone should take it seriously. It sounds like special pleading.

Also: Plantinga seems to overlook a point that comes out of his own discussion. He says that the exclusivist may see other sorts of believers as missing something or as having a blind spot. The trouble is this mote in the other's eye may well be matched by a beam in the exclusivist's own. Most of us have only a dim idea what it would really be like to look at the world form the point of view of someone steeped in another religious tradition. I don't know what it would be like to see things as a devout and learned Muslim does. To that extent, my own epistemic situation is impoverished -- especially insofar as religious belief rests in part (as Plantinga thinks it does) on experiential grounds. Plantinga's Condition C doesn't really extend very far.

A comparison: I don't appreciate Wagner. But I have reason to believe I may be missing something and that if I were really familiar with Wagner's music, I would come to hear it very differently. I've had such experiences in the past with respect to other sorts of music. I've also had it with respect to certain genres of art and painting. This makes me cautious. If people who seem serious, sober and sane take something seriously whose merits I don't see, and if I know that their view is based on deep experience of things I know only superficially, I will be reluctant to make judgments that they are confused or wrong. But if this view is plausible about art and music, it seems to be plausible about religion as well.

At one point, Plantinga imagines people who think that murdering your lover's spouse is morally trivial. He imagines them as having the same internal sense of conviction that he has in thinking the opposite. He still thinks he's justified in sticking to his view. I agree: he is. But I think the analogy is shallow. Any of us can say a great deal about what people who see murder as trivial are missing. It's very doubtful that they are aware of something we're missing. It's much more likely that they are deficient in empathy or are otherwise disadvantaged for moral thinking. Hypotheses like this aren't very plausible at all in the case of a Christian contemplating the religious life of a Jew or a Hindu.

The pluralist hypotheses might well be wrong. But it does have a certain advantage intellectually. It allows that people who apparently disagree might (a) both be wrong about a lot of detail, but (b) more or less equally in touch with some important aspect of reality. The differences in the way they see things can be accounted for in cultural terms.

Of course, if there are arguments for the superiority of Islam over Christianity, say, then those arguments would need to be considered. They might even succeed. But this isn't the sort of thing Plantings seems to have in mind. He seems to have more or less unargued conviction in mind. It's hard to see how, on intellectual grounds, exclusivism is an attractive view in that case -- or hard for me, at least.