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Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that belief in God is not merely rational for someone on the basis of the Spirits witness, but that it is warranted for them so that they can know God exists. A belief can be rational even though in fact it is false.

What on earth do I mean by that? What we mean by rational is a person who does not violate any epistemological duty in believing that he’s within his epistemological rights in believing that.

E.g. if someone says “Hi my name is Fred” it is rational to believe his name is Fred, but it’s possible his name is not Fred, they could be lying.

So being rational isn’t merely enough. Is this belief warranted for us in such a way that it can be said we actually have knowledge of God and Christianity’s truth?

Plantinga says we have warrant as well as rationality. He says the inner witness of the Holy Spirit is the close analogue of a cognitive faculty that we have and in that sense it is a belief forming mechanism that can be reliable and he thinks that the beliefs formed by this mechanism meet the conditions for being warranted.

Therefore Plantinga would say that we can know the truths of the Gospel through the witness of the Holy Spirit so these are warranted for us

So you don’t need evidence for them, they are properly basic with regards to warrant and rationality.

So according to Plantinga, the central truths of the gospel are self-authenticating — they don’t get their evidence or warrant on the evidential basis of other propositions

What then is the role of arguments and evidence in knowing Christianity’s truth?

The fundamental way we know the truth of Christianity is through the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit. So the only role arguments have is a subsidiary role. Martin Luther made a distinction between the magisterial and ministerial uses of reason.

Magisterial: When reason stands over and above the gospel like a magistrate and judges its truth on the basis of argument and evidence.

Ministerial: When reason submits to and serves the Gospel message.

Only the ministerial use of reason is legitimate, philosophy is the handmade of theology. Reason is a God-given tool to help us better understand and defend our faith.

“ours is a faith that seeks understanding”

St Anselm

So the Christian who has the Inner witness of the Holy Spirit and apologetic arguments may be said to have a dual warrant for the truth of their Christian beliefs, reinforcing them of the confident truth of Christianity. This can be very advantageous for the christian as it can increase your confidence in Christianity’s truth claims and challenge perhaps your carnal christian faith. It would also possibly inspire the believer to have more confidence to share their faith knowing they can engage with the sceptic with a back pocket of arguments for the truth of Christianity. These arguments also help the believer in times of doubt or spiritual dryness.

The unbeliever may not come to Christ because of the arguments and evidences, however, they may listen more to the drawing of the Holy Spirit in their lives as a result.

Moral law written on our hearts?

“Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) 16 This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.”

Romans 2:14-15

Paul is teaching here that God’s moral law is properly basic and that people have an inherent knowledge of right, wrong, good and evil. So that the religious relativist or nihilist who thinks that there are no objective moral values and duties is flouting this properly basic belief that is written on their heart by God.

It’s not teaching that belief in God is properly basic, but it is referring to the moral law written on ones heart.

Possible defeaters of properly basic beliefs?

Plantinga does say this belief does not imply its indefeasibility. This belief is defeatable by other incompatible beliefs that come to be accepted.

If the theist comes to believe in things incompatible with his belief in God then he has a cognitive dissonance and in order to remain rational, you are going to have to give up some of their beliefs and perhaps it would be their belief in God 

Cognitive Dissonance: The state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change.

For example, imagine a Christian is confronted with the problem of evil against the existence of God. If you are to remain rational in your belief, you are going to need a defeater for this attack on your belief.

This is where apologetics helps out, like the free-will defense could be a way of defeating the problem of evil.

Free-Will Defense animated video

Power of Warrant

However, Plantinga argues that the original belief itself may so exceed its alleged defeater in warrant that it actually becomes an intrinsic defeater of its ostensible defeater. 

Ostensible: stated or appearing to be true, but not necessarily so.

Plantinga gives the example of someone who has been accused of a crime who knows that they did not commit it, yet all the evidence is stacked against him and if a Jury looked at the evidence, the judge would come to a guilty conclusion.

Such a Judge is not rationally obligated to follow where the evidence leads because they know that he’s innocent and the judge knows that as a properly basic belief there’s no reason for them to give up that properly basic belief and agree with his jury that he is in fact guilty. The belief that they did not commit the crime intrinsically defeats the defeaters brought against it by the evidence.

I am not saying this is how the legal system works. A tv series like Prison Break is a prime 
example where even in the face of fraudulant video evidence, the person accused does not give in as 
they know that it's a setup, even if they're not sure how it's been done.

Plantinga makes the theological application by suggesting that belief in God may similarly intrinsically defeat all of the defeaters that are brought against it.

He suggests that the circumstances which could produce a powerful warrant for belief in God are a implanted natural sense of God that we believe God has placed in our hearts as well as the testimony/witness of the Holy Spirit which deepens and accentuates this inborn innate sense of God.

This aligns with this view that only the ministerial use of reason is valid, it cannot take on a magisterial role of judging the Gospels.

So even if you don’t have all the answers to defeaters, you can know Christianity is true despite the evidence that piles up against it

What about Muslims and Mormons spirit claims?

The fact that other persons claim to have a witness of the Holy Spirit or burning in the bosom (As Mormons say) does nothing to defeat the belief that a person who genuinely has the witness of the Holy Spirit to the truth of his faith the existence of an authentic and unique witness of the Holy Spirit does not exclude anyway there can be people who make false claims. (Sorry, quite a mouthful!)

How does the existence of false claims to a witness of the Holy Spirit in favour of a non-christian religion do anything logically to undermine the fact that the Christian believer does possess the actual and authentic witness of the Holy Spirit? Why should you be robbed of your joy because someone else falsely either with sincerity or insincerity to the spirits witness?

A Mormon or Muslims false claims to experience the witness of God’s spirit in his heart to the truth of the Quran/book of Mormon does nothing to undermine the veridicality of our own experience.

Rebuttal: How do you know your experience isn’t spurious?

We’ve covered this. The experience of the spirits witness is self-authenticating for him who really has it. The spirit filled Christian can know immediately that his claim to the spirits witness is true despite the presence of false claims made by other persons adhering to other religions.

So with the Mormons/Muslim etc. You could challenge the reliability of their holy books and prayerfully challenge them on these topics because we know they hold to a false witness of the Holy Spirit and we trust God to break down their false confidence. We know they don’t really have an authentic witness of the Holy Spirit that’s self-authenticating, they have been lead stray by a counterfeit experience.

So after presenting defeaters, only by ignoring God’s drawing will they remain an unbeliever.

The film Contact (1997) has a good example of a properly basic belief played out — where someone 
holds a view where all the evidence seems stacked against them but they know the truth in spite of how the situation looks. It's err, not necessarily a Christian friendly film, but it is just a 
film, nothing more.

Accusation: False claims to a witness of the Holy Spirit ought to undermine my confidence in the reliability of the cognitive faculties that forms religious beliefs because those faculties evidently so often mislead people. 

There are so many false religions in the world that you just can’t have any confidence in the cognitive faculties that lead to religious beliefs because by our own admission, most people have false beliefs as a result of these faculties.

Why should we trust our experience when we think everyone else’s beliefs are untrustworthy?

1. As Christians we don’t need to say every non-christian religious experience is simply spurious. It may well be adherents of other religions do enjoy a veridical experience of God in certain respects
   1. We don’t need to say that all of these experiences are spurious. 
   2. We are not committed to the belief that the cognitive faculties that are responsible for peoples religious beliefs are fundamentally unreliable.
2. The objection unjustifiably assumes that the witness of the Holy Spirit is a product of human cognitive faculties or that it’s indistinguishable from the products of human faculties and that’s simple false.
   1. Non-Christian religious experiences such as Buddhist or Hindu religious experience is typically very different from a Christian experience
   2. One way to test this is ask ex-Muslims or ex-Mormons who have become Christians “is your experience of God now different than when you were that religion?” In most cases they will say absolutely!

Could the Intensity of the Holy Spirit increase?

There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why the Holy Spirit, in such a sense, could dial things up to get your attention. There are stories of Muslims who came to know Christ in a dream who may first be sensing God’s existence and doubting their faith and then a dream overwhelms then of God’s presence and the Lordship of Jesus. This is quite common.

Muslims who come to Christ through dreams

The Holy Spirit could vary relative to it’s circumstances and the needs of people. What God won’t permit is a situation where the Christian is in a rational position to leave the faith, that’s down to the individual. God never through his will allows you to leave the faith, that’s on the individual. God does not will someone to leave the faith, become an atheist and spend eternity separated from him. That’s like a reverse John 3:16.

Hasn’t it been shown that neuroscientists can artificially stimulate the brain to have religious experiences which are obviously non-veridical and yet they are like the witness of the Holy Spirit?

A few problems with this assumption.

1. It’s simply not true. The experiences that neuroscientists have been able to artificially induce by brain stimuli are more akin to pantheistic religious experiences like in Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism —. A sort of sense of oneness with the all where you loose your personal identity in the totality of everything absolute. They’re not like Christian at all such as experiences of God’s personal presence and love.
2. The fact that a non-veridical experience can be induced which is qualitatively identical to a veridical experience does absolutely nothing to undermine the fact that there are veridical experiences and that we are rational in taking those experiences to veridical. Otherwise you’d have to say, because neuroscientists can induce in your brain experiences of seeing an object or having a hallucination of some sort, therefore your 5 senses are utterly unreliable and you should never trust them when you do see an object. This is absurd

2 theological reasons why those Christians who do support the magisterial uses of reasons are mistaken

First, such a role would consign most Christians to irrationality

Most Christians have neither the time nor the training, nor the library resources to develop a full blown christian apologetic for the basis of their faith. Even the proponents of the magisterial use of reason were at one time early in their education still presumably lacking such an apologetic. So according to the magisterial use of reason, these people should not have believed in Christ until they had finished their apologetic, otherwise they would be believing for an insufficient reason!

So if you have a friend who you ask “how do you know Christianity is true?” And they say “I don’t know”, should they reject Christ until they can come up with an answer to that question? Obviously not. They knew Christianity was true because they knew Jesus even if they hadn’t worked out an apologetic for their faith.

So we can know the truth whether we have rational arguments or not and the vast majority of Christians throughout the world and down through history have never been in a position where they could justify their christian beliefs in a rational way through arguments and evidence like I’ve done on this site.

If God just abandoned us to work out by our own reason whether or not God exists then getting into heaven would be like getting into Harvard and God would be immensely cruel.

Second, if the magisterial use of reason were legitimate, then a person who had been given poor arguments for Christianity would have a just excuse for not believing in God

Imagine someone who had been given an invalid argument for God’s existence, could that person stand before God on the judgement day and say “The Christians gave me rubbish arguments, it’s their fault I stopped believing in you”? No! All men are without excuse

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

So even those who are given no good reasons to believe and many good reasons not to believe are ultimately without excuse because the ultimate reasons they do not believe is because they deliberately reject the testimony of God’s own Holy Spirit to the great truths of the Gospel or to God’s existence.