Alvin Plantinga challenges the rooted tradition of thinking about justification as the subject’s fulfillment of his or her epistemic duty. I try to show that, in several respects, Plantinga misinterprets the idea of epistemic duties and that, consequently, his argument against deontologism is not sound. I begin by summarizing Plantinga’s understanding of epistemological deontologism and then offer my own critique of this interpretation, which focuses on five issues: the problem of recognizability of epistemic duty, describing epistemic duty as subjective, Plantinga’s (...) assumption of the principle of obviousness, the understanding of justification as absence of guilt, and the issue of doxastic voluntarism. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of “The Presumption of Atheism” by Antony Flew. Flew claims that at the beginning of a debate on the existence of God we should adopt a standpoint of atheism and the opus of proof lies on the theists. I question different requirements that Flew puts on the representatives of theism and atheism. In responding, I raise an epistemological issue concerning how strong evidence for a particular belief should be in order for one to hold that (...) belief. I claim that this depends on a subject’s circumstances and on his or her individual conditions. By means of these deliberations I try to reveal how various persons could reasonably demand from a theistic belief a different degree of probability than they do from an atheistic one. This shows, I think, that Flew’s procedure does not have to be rational for others, although it could be in his own case. (shrink)