A critical survey of the role of awareness in Plantinga's epistemology (with emphasis on God's role)

As the creator and generator of episteme, God in the root of Plantinga’s epistemology theory plays such a substantial role that overshadows the knower’s position. This approach will eventually mergesintonaturalistic episteme theories. According to Plantinga, awareness and duty should be removed from cognition process to solve Gotieh’s problem. The question is, however, whether byremoving them and the knower’s will, the theory solvesthe cognitive challenges as an extrovert reliabilism and virtue system or it just gives raise to another question. The present paper is an attempt to survey God’s position in proper function theory and answer the noted question. The study was conducted through library and theoretical review. The role of awareness in the elements of “proper function,” “proper situation,” and “desire”were elaborated through comparing awareness in Plantinga, Goldman, and Soza’s theories. The results showed that leaving God with the whole responsibility of the process of episteme development and removing the knower’s awareness from the structure of proper function of episteme forces, degrades human episteme to animal episteme. The outcome of adding the element of “desire” in the development of episteme is the conversion of episteme into something random and temperament in nature. Thereby and as to the element of “proper situation,” Plantinga needs to add the knower to the process episteme development.