“Sensus divinitatis” and “Mystical Perception”: Two Models of Epistemic Justification of Religious Beliefs

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of epistemic justification of religious beliefs. The autor considers two accounts of epistemic justification which were proposed by two influential contemporary philosophers of religion, Alvin Plantinga and William Alston. According to Plantinga, religious beliefs can acquire their justification due to a reliable belief-forming mechanism called sensus divinitatis. According to Alston, justification of religious beliefs is the function of doxastic practices some of which can use mystical experience as their source. It has been demonstrated that despite of the essential differences the proposed justification models shares some of their charaterics, including of some common shortages. In particular, none of them is able to account for genuiness of epistemic contact with God as the object of knowledge without the reference to the reliablity of the belief-forming mechanisms through which the cognizer forms the beliefs in question. This means that both accounts are vulnerable to the problem of “epistemic circularity”. The author proposes a virtue epistemological solution to the problem. According to this solution, a double determination – first, from the part of God who being the supreme good and truth does attract the will of the cognizer, and, second, from the part of the epistemic virtues that move the cognizer towards the truth and away from the error, – could impart to the religious beliefs a positive epistemic status.