Kelly James Clark

Kelly James Clark (b. 1956) is an American analytic philosopher of religion in the Reformed epistemology tradition associated with Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, under whom he studied at the University of Notre Dame. For much of his career he taught at Calvin College (now Calvin University) and has held research positions including at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University and the Abrahamic Studies program at Brian Institute. His first major book, Return to Reason (1990), defends the rationality of religious belief without classical foundationalist evidence, popularizing Plantinga's claim that belief in God can be properly basic. Faith after Foundationalism (the work currently in our database) extends this critique of evidentialism into philosophy of religion more broadly. Clark has also written on cognitive science of religion, arguing in works such as Religion and the Sciences of Origins that theism is compatible with evolutionary biology and naturally arises from ordinary cognitive faculties. More recently he has focused on Abrahamic dialogue, editing volumes on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophy of religion. Critics within analytic philosophy (e.g., Richard Swinburne, evidentialists) charge that Reformed epistemology too easily licenses sectarian beliefs as basic; others, such as cognitive scientists Pascal Boyer and Justin Barrett, debate the theological significance of religion's cognitive naturalness, which Clark interprets sympathetically.