The problem of the beginning of knowledge: reflections on the voluntarist model of justification of theistic belief

The article discusses the “voluntarist model of justification of theistic belief” proposed by I. G. Gasparov as a solution to the problem of the “preamble of faith.” This model is built on the intersection of Alvin Plantinga’s reliabilist epistemological theory, his concept of the sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis), and Thomas Aquinas’s explanation of the presence of a vague conception of God in every person. However, the emphasis on the volitional element seems to contradict the fundamental (involuntarist) line of contemporary epistemology. Through the analysis of the “voluntarist model,” the author shows the vagueness of Gasparov’s proposed model. The reason for this vagueness lies in the ambiguity of understanding the direction of the voluntarist concept: I. G. Gasparov begins his reasoning with the problem of justifying the theistic belief but increasingly talks about the acknowledgment of the epistemic agent of the content of the theistic belief as the argument unfolds. The article concludes with a comparison of the categories of “justification” and “acknowledgment.”