The key idea of Reformed Epistemology is that religious beliefs can be rational even if they are held noninferentially, without being based on arguments. The first part of this chapter clarifies in more detail what Reformed Epistemology says and how the view has evolved in three stages over the past forty years. The first stage was concerned with ground-clearing and initially characterizing the view; the second stage included book-length definitive statements of the view by William Alston and Alvin Plantinga. The third stage consists of twenty-first-century developments of the view, connecting it with, among other things, the cognitive science of religion, cognitively impacted experiences, epistemic intuition, and religious testimony. The second part of the chapter briefly presents three important objections to Reformed Epistemology – having to do with the need for independent confirmation, belief in the Great Pumpkin, and religious disagreement – and considers what can be said in response to them.

This chapter will illustrate the triple weave of epistemology, metaphysics, and soteriology in Advaita Vedanta, focusing on that advanced by the master exponent of Advaita, Shankara (c. 800 CE). Drawing from the work of Alvin Plantinga and William Alston, the paper will show that Shankara’s soteriological and metaphysical reflection is supported by internalist and externalist epistemologies, with the most important being internalist, owing to Shankara’s metaphysical presuppositions. These epistemological heuristics are deployed to gain insight into Shankara’s religious epistemology and then to stimulate an extended discussion of – and argument for – the epistemic merit of religious testimony and religious experience. Successfully doing all this will illuminate the epistemic value of those two mechanisms but also illustrate the triple weave of philosophical reflection in India, a single intellectual rope, as it were, now constituted by the strands of metaphysics, epistemology, and soteriology. While the focus of the chapter is Shankara’s thought, it will point to other Indian thinkers and systems that similarly – and, arguably, invariably – employ this threefold strand of reasoned reflection to establish and advance their own fundamental philosophical positions.