If a man believes that the star Sirius has a planetary system containing a planet with mountains over 40,000 feet tall, then if his belief is to be rational or reasonable he must have some reason or evidence for it. Similarly, it may be said, with the existence of God: the theist must be able to answer teh question "How do you know or why do you believe?" if his belief is to be rational; or at any rate there must be a good answer to this question. He needs evidence of some sort or other; he needs some reason for believing. Obviously this raises many questions. What is evidence? What relation holds between a person and a proposition when the person has evidence for the proposition? Must a rational person have evidence or reasons for all of his beliefs? Presumably not. But then what properties must a belief have for a person to be justified in accepting it without evidence? Is a person justified in believing a proposition only if it can be inferred inductively or deductively from incorrigible sensory beliefs? Or propositions that are obvious to common sense and accepted by everyone?
Math, religion, ethics all face the same challenge: if I can't sense it, can I really know it? The answer might seem to be no, but the idea that we only believe what we can sense fails horribly. So we try to latch on math, religion or ethics to those principles that guide us when we leave the realm of observation. In math there is the claim that this is enough for numbers (though Parsons raises the objection that is quite parallel to that raised by Enoch towards the naturalist Cornell realists about losing the special nature of math/ethics by resorting to the naturalistic argument). If ethics and religion fails this test, does that mean that they're out? Plantinga says "no" in the case of religion.
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