Plantinga is Grossly Monumentally Massively Wrong
Given religious diversity the proper attitude, the adult attitude, is doubt. At the minimum it means withholding belief. At most it means denying belief. There is a huge difference between assenting to a belief and doubting it, just as there is between assenting to a belief and denying it. There are just too many ways to be wrong. So there is no epistemic parity between belief and doubt (or rejection) at all. Doubting (or rejecting) a belief is easy. We all do it all of the time. The hard part is to set forth a positive case for one particular belief out of the myriad number of them available. For Plantinga to say doubt (or denial) is “self-referentially inconsistent” is grossly monumentally massively wrongheaded. The person doing the doubting or denying something simply says there isn’t enough evidence to positively assent to that belief. And people all over the world do this with respect to the other faiths they reject. How is that “self-referentially inconsistent”? Is Plantinga’s denial of all other religions also “self-referentially inconsistent”? People cannot have a “self-referentially inconsistent” belief until they believe in something. The way he uses the word “belief” is akin to claiming that a historian who argues we do not know what happened at Custer’s Last Stand has a belief about what happened, i.e., that we do not know what happened at Custer’s Last Stand. Does that make any sense, that a historian who says “I don’t know what happened at Custer’s Last Stand” is saying “I know what happened at Custer’s Last Stand”? If such a conclusion is to be considered a belief then Plantinga is equivocating on the meaning of the word. For then the word “belief” is equivalent to the word “doubt.” Can we say Plantinga doubts Christianity? Can it be said that as a non-believer I believe in Christianity? Does it even make sense to say this about the relationship of Plantinga to Christianity, or me to Christianity? Hardly.