During the past few decades much scholarly work has been done on John Calvin by theologians, historians, and others. Some of this work has recognized the ways in which Calvin, despite his rejection of Scholasticism and his ostensibly purely scriptural approach to theology, does in fact use philosophical argument in his work and does engage implicitly with philosophical issues even in his decisions not to proceed philosophically (see Helm 2004). But the context in which philosophers are most likely to have encountered Calvin's ideas since the early 1980s has been that of so-called Reformed epistemology. This is an approach to the philosophy of religion pioneered mainly, though not exclusively, by philosophers associated with the Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) tradition. It is noteworthy for combining some of Calvin's ideas on the understanding of God with the antifoundationalism that has become more or less orthodox in the mainstream of secular epistemology since the 1950s and 1960s.
The Reformed epistemologists start with a rejection of evidentialism—the claim that one is only justified in holding a belief if one can provide a rational justification for it. Reformed epistemologists such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (1983) repudiate evidentialism in epistemology generally, and the epistemology of religion in particular. One cannot refute a skeptic by giving a nonquestion-begging proof of the reality (or even probability) of the external world or of other minds; but there is no rational requirement that one should do so. These beliefs are "properly basic" (Plantinga 1981); one does not form them on the basis of argument and is only rationally required to defend them if good reasons for doubt are given in some particular case. Similarly, according to the Reformed epistemologists, with belief in God.
This account has been worked out most elaborately by Plantinga (1993). He argues that what is needed to turn true belief into knowledge is warrant, an externalist notion that he explicates in terms of proper function. A belief is warranted if it is formed by the proper functioning of a subject's cognitive apparatus. The internalist notion of justification is given only a secondary role; one is justified in holding a belief if one can defend it against specific claims that it is false or unreasonable. Applying this account to religious belief, Plantinga (2000) draws heavily on Calvin's notion of the sensus divinitatis. People have been so created that their minds, when functioning properly, are naturally led to a belief in God. This is not through argument, any more than their belief in other minds or physical objects is formed by argument. The obvious disanalogy is that religious skepticism is a live issue in a way that other forms of skepticism are not. Here, Plantinga turns again to Calvin, to his doctrine of sin and its noetic effects. Those who disbelieve in God (or who have inadequate, confused, or half-hearted beliefs) do so because, ultimately, they are repressing or distorting the operations of the sensus divinitatis in themselves. (Plantinga compares this with the error theories of religion advanced by Marxists and Freudians, who argue that religious beliefs are self-deceiving evasions of reality.) This tendency to repression is universal; those who escape from it do so through the operations of divine grace. Calvin is again the main source for Plantinga's account of how the "internal instigation of the Holy Spirit" is necessary for one to be brought to belief in the specifically Christian doctrines of sin and redemption and thus to a true belief in God, which the sin-damaged sensus divinitatis cannot now achieve alone. Hence, Plantinga, while seeing non-Christian religions as evidence of the universality of the sensus divinitatis, rejects the idea that they can give their adherents a true or adequate knowledge of God.
It is striking that what is perhaps the most discussed late twentieth/early twenty-first-century development in religious epistemology is so deeply indebted to a theologian often thought of as nonphilosophical (although Plantinga's interpretation of Calvin has itself been questioned, for example, see Jeffreys [1997]). Plantinga denies that his account is Calvinist in any narrowly denominational sense, and indeed appeals to St. Thomas Aquinas as well as to Calvin. But as a Catholic commentator notes (Zagzebski 1993), the Reformed epistemologists' characteristic externalism, and their focus on the beliefs of individuals rather than of communities, are both, for better or worse, deeply rooted in the thought and sensibility of the Reformed tradition.
Bibliography
Helm, Paul. John Calvin's Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Jeffreys, Derek. "How Reformed Is Reformed Epistemology? Alvin Plantinga and Calvin's Sensus Divinitatis." Religious Studies 33 (1997): 419–431.
Plantinga, Alvin. "Is Belief in God Properly Basic?" Nous 15 (1981): 41–51.
Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Plantinga, Alvin, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds. Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
Zagzebski, Linda. "Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the Mind." In Rational Faith: Catholic Responses to Reformed Epistemology, edited by Linda Zagzebski. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993.
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