Return to Reason: A Critique of Enlightenment Evidentialism and a Defense of Reason and Belief in God

This monograph mounts a sustained philosophical defense of theistic belief against the evidentialist challenge that emerged from Enlightenment thought. Clark argues that the demand for sufficient evidence before accepting religious belief, while appearing reasonable, rests on flawed epistemological assumptions that would, if consistently applied, undermine vast swathes of human knowledge including belief in other minds, the reliability of memory, and basic perceptual beliefs.

The work engages primarily with the evidentialist tradition exemplified by William Clifford's ethics of belief and its contemporary defenders. Clark contends that evidentialism embodies an overly restrictive conception of rationality inherited from Enlightenment foundationalism. This framework insists that rational beliefs must either be self-evident, incorrigible, or evidentially supported by such foundations. Clark demonstrates that this standard proves impossibly high, rendering irrational many beliefs we cannot help but hold and which seem paradigmatically reasonable.

Drawing on Reformed epistemology, particularly the work of Alvin Plantinga, Clark develops an alternative account of rationality that accommodates properly basic beliefs - those formed immediately in response to experience without inferential support. Just as we rationally form beliefs about the external world through perception without first establishing the reliability of our senses, Clark argues we can rationally form beliefs about God through religious experience, moral intuition, or what Calvin called the sensus divinitatis.

The monograph addresses several objections to this parity argument. Against the charge that religious disagreement undermines the rationality of theistic belief, Clark notes that philosophical disagreement about skepticism does not make belief in the external world irrational. He also examines whether the absence of universal religious experience disqualifies theistic belief from properly basic status, arguing that variations in cognitive faculties and circumstances adequately explain differential religious experience without impugning its epistemic credentials.

Clark's approach represents a significant shift in religious epistemology from attempting to prove God's existence through natural theology to defending the rational permissibility of belief without such proofs. This move parallels broader developments in late twentieth-century epistemology away from classical foundationalism toward more moderate, externalist theories of knowledge and justification. The work's enduring contribution lies in showing how theistic belief might satisfy reasonable epistemic standards without meeting the unreasonable demands of Enlightenment evidentialism.