Often online discussions devolve into endless block-quotes incomprehensible to anyone but the two discussants. Therefore, I’ll instead take the opportunity to summarize the lines of argument in ascending order of importance. Many of these criticisms parallel those made by others, and I fear I may well have failed to acknowledge all of them. My apologies in advance.

To remind ourselves, the most modern incarnation of the OTF is this:

(1) Consequently, it seems very likely that adopting one’s religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree. This is the religious dependency thesis.

(2) Hence the odds are highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is false.

(3) So the best way to test one’s adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to evaluate other religious faiths. This expresses the OTF.

(4) Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage. This is the religious diversity thesis.

(1) Ground clearing
(2) Making OTF1-3 valid
(3) Objections
3.1. Reductio and Atheist special pleading,
3.2. Good arguments and rude dialectics
3.3. Epistemic privilege and the insider test for infidels
(4) Conclusion

Ground clearing

As it stands the OTF seems to be trying to do too much, and in a garbled way. A lot of the talk about ‘taking the OTF’, the OTF versus the argument for the OTF and so on is hard to decipher, and criticisms, counter-criticisms and defences are often lost in a haze of not-quite-precise-enough philosophical verbiage. Some distinctions might be needed to clarify exactly what is being argued over.

The first three statements appear to be offering an argument about an epistemic pathology endemic to religious belief, and the fourth to give a cure. These can (and should) be separated for clarity – the fourth statement may still be a good epistemic norm even the foregoing argument doesn’t work, and vice-versa. Let us therefore distinguish between OTF1-3, the argument for epistemic pathology in religious belief, and OTF4, the proposed cure. We will focus on OTF1-3.

Making OTF1-3 valid

A close reading of [1] suggests that [2] might be no better than a restatement. For [1] says

Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage. This is the religious diversity thesis. [Emphasis added]

This extra rider seems awfully like stating a dependency thesis. Which is what Loftus claims [2] is:

Consequently, it seems very likely that adopting one’s religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree. This is the religious dependency thesis.

So this all seems a bit garbled. But perhaps we can see what Loftus is trying to get at, regardless of infelicities in expression: that religious beliefs show this socio-cultural patterning suggests they are often driven by cultural inertia, and not some careful reasoning untrammelled by one’s socio-cultural milieu. So let’s give a new argument that does just that.

5) The demographics of religious belief are much better explained by a cultural inertia model (that is, where people’s beliefs are driven by their socio-cultural milieu) than any other.

6) The majority hold religious beliefs due to cultural inertia.

This makes the sort of move Loftus surely has in mind: inferring from the demographics of belief to the likely mechanism of belief formation. The move from [5] to [6] isn’t formally valid either. However, it is clear on what move is being made. Further, it should also be clear that this argument can be made by adding further premises, none of which would be remotely controversial. If that’s good enough for such august philosophers like Peter van Inwagen, it’s good enough for our purposes here.

A bigger problem is the move from [2] to [3]. For on it’s face it seems a straightforward use of the genetic fallacy: to conclude from the (epistemically disreputable) mechanisms that cause people to believe p something about p’s truth.

Loftus doesn’t think this is a big deal, and refers to Parsons. Yet Parsons cautious support of genetic-fallacy-esque arguments aren’t of the sort Loftus uses in OTF1-3. The key passage is here:

Theists counter that such an argument, if taken as supporting atheism, commits the “genetic fallacy.” You commit the genetic fallacy when you conflate two questions that should be distinguished: (a) What causal processes account for the psychological origins of a belief? (b) What rational grounds are there for thinking the belief true? Just because you can explain why somebody holds a certain belief (he learned it from his mother, say) doesn’t mean that the belief has no objective truth or validity. I might be “hardwired” to think that God exists, but, nevertheless, he might really exist, as arguments and evidence might show. As the saying goes, just because you are paranoid does not mean the people are not out to get you; likewise, just because you are wired to believe in God does not mean that God does not exist (Maybe, in fact, it was God who wired you to believe in him!).

However, the charge that atheists commit the genetic fallacy is both wrongheaded and disingenuous. Sometimes, indeed, the causal history of a belief has no bearing on its credibility: I may have originally accepted the Pythagorean Theorem because my high school geometry teacher pounded it into my reluctant head, but if I can now prove it, the history of how I acquired my beliefs about the Pythagorean Theorem is irrelevant to my current judgment about its soundness. On the other hand, there are times when the causal history of a belief is highly relevant to its epistemic merits… [Emphasis added]

In other words, the ‘genetics’ of a given belief is entirely relevant to the question as to whether so-and-so is justified in believing it. But it has no bearing at all whether that belief is, in fact, true. Thus the move from [2] to [3] – from “it seems very likely that adopting one’s religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree” to “the odds are highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is false”  is surely a genetic fallacy.

Does it matter? Not too much. We can renovate this bit of the argument by talking about justification or warrant instead of truth. For if indeed religious beliefs are culturally dependant (and granting something fairly uncontroversial about culturally determined belief being usually unwarranted), then it would follow that most religious belief is unwarranted:

6) The majority who hold religious beliefs hold them due to cultural inertia.

7) Beliefs held due to cultural inertia are not warranted

8) The majority who hold religious beliefs are not warranted in holding their religious beliefs

Now we have a renovated version of the Outsider Argument. Call it the ‘Demographic Defeater for Faith’ (DDF).

5) The demographics of religious belief are much better explained by a cultural inertia model (that is, where people’s beliefs are driven by their socio-cultural milieu) than any other.

6) The majority hold religious beliefs through cultural inertia

7) Beliefs held due to cultural inertia are not warranted.

8) The majority who hold religious beliefs are not warranted in holding them

This expresses the sort of moves Loftus wants to make in the first three statements of the OTF, but does so more clearly and more strongly. How does this ‘OTF+’ stand up to scrutiny?

Objections

Reductio and special pleading for Atheism

Consider these three beliefs:

1. “All life on this planet is descended from a common ancestor”
2. “There is no God”
3. “Skin colour is morally irrelevant”

Demographic defeater type objections could be levied against these. Loftus freely accepts that the OTF1-3 is really a more specific form of an OTB – for beliefs which are highly culturally plastic, one should wonder whether you really are being reasonable in going with the flow of your prevalent cultural milieu.

Surely there are a diversity of beliefs about evolution, Atheism, and racism. And surely these beliefs are culturally plastic. Displace me a hundred years or a thousand miles, and I’d probably believe different things about a-c. A dependency thesis follows soon after: it seems unlikely given this cultural plasticity that these beliefs aren’t formed by cultural inertia. So, more likely than not, these beliefs are unwarranted.

This is bad news. For Loftus and those who agree with him overwhelmingly accept a-c, and further take their acceptance to be reasonable as opposed to cultural brainwashing. Yet if they believe that their acceptance of Evolution, Atheism, racial equality and so on can be held despite that DDF style can be raised against them, then why can’t religious believers shrug off the OTF? In short, what gives this argument selective toxicity towards religious beliefs?

Those who support the OTF1-3 rely on tenuous distinctions to excuse them from the force of the OTF1-3. See Loftus’s explanation of why he doesn’t need to ‘take the OTF’ for Atheism:

When Christians ask if I have taken the outsider test for my own “belief system,” I simply say “yes I have, that’s why I’m a non-believer.”

They’ll ask if I am equally skeptical of my skepticism, or whether I have subjected my non-belief to non-belief, or my disbelief to disbelief. These questions express double negatives. When re-translated they are asking me to abandon skepticism in favor of a gullible faith, for that’s the opposite of skepticism—something no thinker should do. Even if having a gullible faith is desirable, which faith should we be gullible about? And how can we decide between these faiths? The bottom line is that skepticism is a word used to describe doubt or disbelief. It doesn’t by itself represent any ideas we’ve arrived at. It’s merely a filter we use to strain out the bad ones leaving us with the good ones. So we cannot be skeptical of doubt unless we think doubt is inherently wrong, which would leave us with mere belief in belief.

This doesn’t work, and the reason it doesn’t work is it equivocates between scepticism as epistemic caution and scepticism as a label for Atheism/Agnosticism. For “There is no god” is definitely an idea that we arrive at, and not just some passive heuristic for belief formation (and no, not some ‘lack of belief’ either). This game seems a roundabout way of asserting that Atheism is epistemically respectable by equating it with good epistemic method.

This is not the only example. See the reply to Reppert. Reppert offers a series of reductios, one of which is our beliefs about rape. Loftus’s response to that charge is this:

…

So can we apply this same skepticism to moral beliefs? Should I be as skeptical that rape is wrong as I am that rape is morally acceptable? No. Absolutely not. Again, look at the specific criteria I provided. I said:

The amount of skepticism warranted depends on the number of rational people who disagree, whether the people who disagree are separated into distinct geographical locations, the nature of those beliefs, how they originated, how they were personally adopted in the first place, and the kinds of evidence that can possibly be used to decide between them. My claim is that when it comes to religious beliefs a high degree of skepticism is warranted because of these factors.

That’s what I said, and so in this instance as with many other moral beliefs they do not suffer the same consequences from applying the OTF. Beliefs like the acceptability of rape are based on religious beliefs anyway, so they are subject to the outsider test precisely because of the nature and origin of those beliefs, as I said. I know of no non-believer who would ever want to defend the morality of rape, for instance, unlike believers in the past and present who do because of some so-called inspired text. We know rape is wrong, and we also know that this kind of behavior is sanctioned by religious beliefs, as is honor killing. The religious person who thinks rape is morally acceptable should subject that belief to skepticism as an outsider. And when he does this he will begin to doubt his previously held religious/moral beliefs, as I’ve argued. When it comes to Reppert, I think his moral belief that rape is wrong will survive his own skepticism, for there is evidence that as a father of a daughter he would want to help maintain a free society where she can go about her business free from being accosted. If Reppert wants to provide an argument where he can defend the morality of rape I’d like to see this. I would find it very strange if in order to escape the OTF Reppert must defend the morality of rape. That seems too high of a price to pay, but if that’s what he wants to do, then I’m all ears.

Yet, ignoring the large red herring about how religious beliefs apparently shelter rape acceptability, it seems our beliefs about rape tick the boxes of Loftus’s criteria (at least, the ones that distinguish anything) just as well as any religious belief you care to name. For surely beliefs about “when is it acceptable to have sex with a woman without her consent?” has a large number of ‘rational’ people who disagree, who are separated particular geographical and cultural ‘camps’, which were probably picked up from the prevailing cultural mores, and so on. So the argumentative weaponry behind the DDF are just as effective against these sorts of moral beliefs, amongst many others.

Good arguments and rude dialectics

Another approach when faced with a demographic defeater is to simply provide arguments in favour of the proposition in question. One may say we can prove evolution or racial equality and marshal all sorts of evidence in favour of these things. Whereas this isn’t true for something like Christianity.

Yet such a response just begs the question against all those people who want to provide reasons for their religious convictions. The reply usually is that the people offering these arguments are scrabbling around for them after the fact of their religious convictions – they aren’t really using them to guide them to their conclusions, but rather they find take them because they confirm these convictions. Once again, of course, exactly the same reply can be made whenever Atheists offer arguments for Atheism, racial equality, or whatever.

Of course, such an explanation of disagreement is logical rudeness, little different in application to a psychoanalyst whom explains disagreement with his theories as Oedipal conflict, or the Evangelical who locates the origin of disbelief in that disbelievers are blinded by sin per Rom. 1. One might find this accusation levelled against the religious implausible, even if it is granted we get nowhere far.

There are two ways of understanding this “you’re just accepting these arguments because they have conclusions you like” response. The first is the reply made is that Christians say are coming up with these arguments expressly to defend their prior commitments, and therefore these arguments are unpersuasive. That is obviously fallacious. The second reading is an epistemic one: that because Christians are coming up with these arguments to defend their prior commitments, they will still accept these commitments whether or not the arguments they have at their disposal were any good. So even if the arguments they have are good arguments, they still aren’t being reasonable because their convictions don’t track the preponderance of the arguments. This sort of reply does work.

Yet, once again, exactly the same move can be deployed against the Atheist trying to argue for Atheism, or anyone arguing for any moral truths ‘taken as read’ in modern liberal society. Even if we do have the right arguments for these things, that is just epistemic luck, in the same way a Christian would be lucky if they stumbled onto cogent arguments for their faith when desperately looking to shore it up. In neither case, it seems, are the actors behaving in epistemically respectable ways, and thus our DDF, even in its most charitable light, doesn’t give the nod to Atheism over Faith.

Epistemic privilege and the insider test for infidels

The only robust way to answer this sort of criticism is to argue for the privileged position of our particular socio-cultural millieu in contrast to others who disagree. That in fact our cultural lens is the best available to bring the issues into proper focus.

Take the theory of evolution. Affirmation of evolution is patterned, but patterned in a manner suggestive of warrant. It correlates with scientific training, educational level, and things like that. Likewise the beliefs of Doctors regarding disease and the medical laity. That there is disagreement patterned on communities need not mean they are all scrabbling in dark. It may indicate that some, but not all, have privileged access to the truth.

In the case of medics or scientists it is fairly easy to find evidence that they possess epistemic privilege regarding matters of health or the natural world: we can look to their past record of predictive success, how they exhibit particular epistemic virtues in excelsis, and so on. When confronted with the fact that we’d likely have very different attitudes about race if we brought up in 1890s Alabama or 1930s Germany, we should be thankful that we weren’t in these environments, for we think they would have led us away from the truth. Were we faced with a white supremacist or a Nazi, we take ourselves as having a dialectical advantage, that we would be able to provide a case they could not answer – and if they aren’t persuaded, it is simply because their view on these matters is impeded relative to ours. In short, we take our culture’s view on racial equality versus its detractors as privileged, much like the doctors on medicine or the scientists on science. The equality-generating cognitive environment is superior to the racist-generating cultural environment with respect to some set of epistemic norms.

Yet everyone believes their cognitive environment is superior compared to all those others that lead to people disagreeing with them. Doubtless the racists could come up with a story as to how their environment is superior relative to ours. The only way forward, it seems, to actually argue the point of issue, and see which side’s claims to dialectical superiority survive.

The same applies to belief and its detractors. Believers and Atheists will have their own stories to tell as to who has epistemic privilege. That Atheists assert – by their own lights – the atheist-generating cognitive environments are privileged compared to the believer-generating ones is no more than an insider test for infidels: for an Atheist to say religious ways of knowing are rather delusions and to urge believers to be rational and abandon them is no better than an evangelical talking about reason being a whore to satan and urging so-called ‘rationalists’ to open their hearts to Jesus. They amount to no more than assertions of epistemic ‘other’ness.

Both sides need to swallow their shrill assertions of epistemic privilege and settle down to trying to beat each other by the usual ‘rules of the game’ for debating these matters. For if Atheist has the better of the argument or has ‘facts on their side’, that would suggest she was right all along in asserting that the athiest-generating environment is better than the believing one. Yet doing so obviates the need for the whole DDF rigmarole in the first place: instead of presenting the DDF and demonstrating it is selectively toxic to belief by vindicating atheism’s epistemic privilege by showing it to be more reasonable, one can simply stick to demonstrating that Atheism is more reasonable. In short, this sort of argument has taken us in a long circle back to where we started.

Conclusion

Loftus’s project to undermine the rationality of religious belief is a failure. We can improve OTF1-3 to provide a better argument in the spirit of what Loftus has in mind, yet even this renovated argument remains unpersuasive. It is unpersuasive simply because demographic worries like the OTF attempts to exploit are endemic to beliefs we hold – were our environments different we would almost certainly believe differently, and many (perhaps most) of our beliefs are due to cultural inertia.

Against this, there is no means to put religious beliefs (over any others) under special scrutiny which isn’t question-begging nor tendentious. If demographic data is ‘good enough’ to undercut the rationality of religious belief, it is ‘good enough’ to undercut the rationality of Atheism, or most of our beliefs about science, or most of our ‘commonsense’ moral beliefs. To avoid accepting this, we say that our environment is privileged – that other cultures who differ with us see through a glass darkly, and were we transposed into this environment the different beliefs we have would be accounted for by some loss of epistemic virtue. Yet, again, these are precisely the moves a religious believe can make to defend their religious community from similar charges, and, again, there is no reason to dismiss one defence out of hand but not the other.

These defences cannot be evaluated without settling the question of whether the beliefs in question are true, or at least reasonable. Yet this is was exactly the subject under discussion. The OTF is a detour that takes us nowhere. Our time and energy is better spent otherwise.

The article to which I initially responded criticized William Lane Craig’s apologetic approach on the grounds of his plea to examine claims objectively. Objectivity is something the presuppositionalist deems impossible, and they subsequently deem that Craig in asking for such is leaving Christ on the sidelines while trying to show his existence.

I posted a quotation from J.P Moreland and one from Richard Howe. Bolt has chosen to respond to my comments in an article of his own, and it is this to which I am responding.

It would be prudent to note, firstly, that I have nowhere claimed that Bolt is an evil presuppositionalist nor have I claimed that presuppositionalism is evil. I have made clear my objections to the apologetic system but I do not seek to draw conclusions about the person professing the system. It may very well be that Bolt is a nice person, or perhaps he is evil. In any respect, I’ve not asserted one or the other.

As I’ve said, I made use of two quotations:

Take as an example the illustration of a map to Atlanta. In the order of being, there would have to be the city of Atlanta before there could be a map showing one how to get to Atlanta. Thus, in the order of being, Atlanta is first. However, in order to find one’s way to Atlanta, one might need a map. Thus, in the order of knowing, the map is first. In the theistic argument debate, the theist certainly sees that in the order of being God is first, since, if God is the creator of all things besides Himself, then, if there was not a God, there would be nothing else at all, not even an argument for God. But in the order of knowing, it might be the case that one would need a “map” to God, i.e., a theistic argument. Just as using a map to find Atlanta says nothing amiss about the metaphysical priority of Atlanta to the map, likewise, to use a theistic argument to find God says nothing amiss about the metaphysical priority of God to the argument. The presuppositionalist is wrong to think that if an argument leads on to a belief in the existence of God, this God could not be the God of Christianity… It does not imply that somehow the being of God is secondary. Presuppositionalists mistakenly assume that to have the argument first in the order of knowing is to tacitly deny that God is first in the order of being, it does not.

and

Even if one granted that human beings are estranged from god by virtue of man’s rebellion, it does not follow that human beings are estranged from reality itself. Surely even the most extreme Calvinist would admit that gravity affects the sinner as much as the saint. It is from this common ground of reality that the Classical tradition has built its natural theology.

Both quotations can be found in this essay. The former is attributed to J.P Moreland whereas the latter is that of Richard Howe.

Bolt takes issue with the first quotation. With regard to the statement that “in the order of being there would have to be the city of Atlanta before there could be a map showing one how to get to Atlanta” Bolt objects that this need not necessarily be the case. He offers an example of a map to Candyland.

There are a few problems with this objection. Firstly, the existence of CandyLand as espoused by his map is presumably not representative of an actual state of affairs. Similar to a map of Middle Earth, the plotted locations represent their co-ordinates in some possible world, the references need not be actualized. In this regard, his map to CandyLand and a map of Middle Earth are not necessarily false constructs, they simply represent a non-actualized reality, that of a fictional world.

But is it possible for someone to map something that doesn’t exist at all? I’d argue not. I could pick up a sheet of blank paper and begin to map a small town, while this town may not possess actual existence it possesses existence in the form of a possible state of affairs. In this regard, the existence of this small town remains first in the order of being as it must be conceptualized prior to plotting, even if this world is fictional.

As such, in regards to the actual world, the city of Atlanta holds primacy over the map showing its location in the order of being. It just so happens that Atlanta exists actually and the map corresponds so in turn. The matter of a map representing an actual or a possible state of affairs is wholly besides the point. The fact is, to be plotted on a map the object/location being plotted must possess either actual or possible existence. In both respects the existence holds primacy over the plotting in the order of being.

Next Bolt objects to the statement that “in order to find one’s way to Atlanta, one might need a map. Thus, in the order of knowing, the map is first” by responding that:

Knowledge of Atlanta and knowledge of how to get to Atlanta are two different things. Moreland is equivocating. It has already been granted that in order to find one’s way to Atlanta, one might need a map. It has not been granted that in order to know that there is an Atlanta one needs a map.

But the weight of this objection is questionable. With specific regard to the map example, knowledge of Atlanta would necessarily entail knowledge of how to get to Atlanta at least in a primitive form. For the person who was not aware of the existence of Atlanta, in looking at the map, could at least discern that (i) Atlanta exists (ii) I either am in Atlanta, or must move to get to Atlanta (provided the person new their position on the map). But I fail to see the relevance of this objection. It is only relevant in light of his next criticism.

In response to Moreland’s claim that “…in the order of knowing, it might be the case that one would need a ‘map’ to God, i.e., a theistic argument”, Bolt states:

Moreland implies that presuppositionalists present no theistic arguments, which is false. He is also blatantly contradicting the claim of Scripture that everyone knows God without theistic arguments. The phrase “it might be the case” is false as according to Scripture it is certainly not the case.

The presuppositionalist does not just state that God must exist in order for there to be knowledge, but that God must be known. J.P. Moreland has never presented an argument for the existence of God which did not already presuppose the knowledge of God.

It is interesting to note here that Moreland does not claim that one needs a map to KNOW God, but rather needs a map to find God. This answers Bolt’s criticism that it blatantly contradicts scripture. Moreland, Craig and most Christian philosophers I am aware of all embrace the notion that belief in God is properly basic, that is to say, they accept Plantinga’s philosophical notion (which is consistent with the Bible) that belief in God requires no argument and is rather a gift from God Himself in the form of self-evidence. As such, Moreland is not claiming that one needs an argument to KNOW that God exists, but rather that one may require an argument to FIND God, or reveal such known knowledge. This is not inconsistent with Christianity stating that all men have an innate knowledge of God.

To briefly touch on the first portion of Bolt’s objection, it can be debated amongst philosophers as to whether or not what presuppositionalism provides meets the criteria for an argument, but if we are to grant that TAG is such a formulation it is true that presuppositionalism at least presents one argument. But this is not inconsistent with what Moreland has said, and rather it diverges into a separate discussion on whether or not the argument given by presuppositionalists is sound. I discuss this in my recent article, “The Case Against Presuppositionalism: Part III“.

Where Moreland states that:

Just as using a map to find Atlanta says nothing amiss about the metaphysical priority of Atlanta to the map, likewise, to use a theistic argument to find God says nothing amiss about the metaphysical priority of God to the argument.

Bolt says:

First, Moreland is equivocating as “finding God” must mean something quite different from “finding Atlanta” since both are not “found” in the same way at all, the one being a particular location. Second, Scripture does not allow any room for the view that people are able to “find God” through theistic arguments, as God is already “found” or known. Third, the necessity of theistic arguments with respect to some people results in all sorts of absurdities regarding those who lived prior to such theistic proofs were formulated and those who are intellectually incapable of grasping such proofs. Fourth, there is at the very least a claim that there is an epistemological priority of God to the argument which Moreland has not touched upon at all.

The notion of equivocating the term “finding God” is one where I see no problem, the map example is after all an example and similes are being drawn. Bolt’s second and third objection have been dealt with above. The question of the epistemological priority of God is the question of presuppositionalism as a whole, of course, and cannot be dealt with here. Just briefly, however, even the Classical/Evidentialist philosopher would agree that there is an epistemic priority of God for all existent things exist contingent upon God’s necessary existence. That is to say, not only could nothing be known without God, there would be nothing to know and nobody to not know it! I do not see where the non-presuppositionalist disagrees with this statement.

Where Moreland states:

The presuppositionalist is wrong to think that if an argument leads on to a belief in the existence of God, this God could not be the God of Christianity…

Bolt responds with the claim that the God in which Antony Flew believes cannot be the Christian God. It is true that Flew was led to belief in a God through argument, and that his concept of God is deistic. It is puzzling though, precisely how many Gods does Chris Bolt think exist? If it is the case that only one God exists, and that it is the Christian God then anyone professing belief in a God as a result of argument must believe in the Christian God insofar as the presented arguments are sound. They would simply fail to grasp his nature properly. This might sound peculiar at first, but it seems to logically follow from the statement that there is only one God. That is to say, there is not another God existing beside the Christian God whom Flew has been convinced to believe in as a result of argument. If the premises of the argument were sound, they must be expressing qualities of the existent God, and if that existent God is the Christian God then Flew is believing in him without knowing it, but believing in him to a lesser degree than say, a Christian would. In fact, it seems that any notion of God conceivable would at least grasp some quality of the Christian God (if the Christian God exists as the totality of all), for what positive quality could God lack?

In fact, the error is not one of the argument, but would be one of the person acknowledging the conclusion. Flew’s belief that he believes in God X is incorrect, but his belief in God X is not incorrect, just underdeveloped or misguided.

But does this then necessitate that God could be attributed false properties? Could an argument establish that God is evil and lead someone to believe in an evil God? How then would this be representative of the Christian God. Well, the issue is an interesting one to ponder but all arguments I know which have attempted to show that God is evil have failed miserably, they are horribly unsound. Evil is in fact a negative quality and God does not possess negative qualities. These attributions are in fact at odds with our basic philosophical notions of God as possessing maximal greatness.

So unless Bolt believes in a pantheon of Gods it is necessarily the case that any belief in God is a belief in the Christian one insofar as it is necessarily the case that the Christian God is the only God which exists! Miscategorizations or misattributions would be due to a sort of “seeing through a glass; darkly”, a fault not of the argument but of the interpreter.

But is it not the arguments fault for not attempting to express the full reality of God’s nature? I do not think so. In fact, I do not think that any Classical/Evidentialist Philosopher would seek to establish all the attributes of God with one argument, they present cumulative cases (that is except for proponents of the Ontological Argument). It is thereby unfair to extract these arguments from the set in which they are intended for delivery and criticize them on a one by one basis for not establishing a thorough enough conclusion. In fact, one could make one argument out of all of Craig’s arguments (for example), but what a long winded argument that would be and you’d probably need a degree to read along!

The quote which Bolt presents from Moreland is indicative of such usage of one theistic argument as a “magic bullet”:

In summary, it is most reasonable to believe that the universe had a beginning which was caused by a timeless, immutable agent. This is not a proof that such a being is the God of the Bible, but it is a strong statement that the world had its beginning by the act of a person. And this is at the very least a good reason to believe in some form of theism. (J.P. Moreland. Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity. Baker Books. Grand Rapids, MI. 1987. Pg. 42.)

This is representative of the pivotal first step in a cumulative case. One must walk before they run and it is difficult to see how one should be faulted for this.

In response to the notion of reality being the common ground between the believer and the non-believer (where it was stated that gravity effects the sinner as much as the saint), Bolt states:

The unbeliever cannot account for the knowledge of something like gravity because she will not accept that Jesus is the Lord of gravity. Of course, Moreland might not either, and that is the problem pointed out in my previous post.

This brings us right back to whether or not presuppositionalism is a coherent philosophical system, and sadly Bolt misses the point. The common ground of reality affect both the believer and the non-believer, and this is a common ground from which dialogue may begin. Knowledge of gravity is not required for the effects of gravity. We do not see babies flying because they do not understand physics! The point is that reality is something that effects us all, God-fearing or not. The notion of whether or not one can “account” for gravity should be illuminated through sound, reasoned, argument. It is not difficult to see the move an atheist who experiences the effects of gravity may move towards establishing the existence of God. Perhaps it is the case that gravity exists and that gravity is a natural law and that the best explanation for the natural law of gravity is an intelligent designer. If the non-believer will accept such “natural” theological propositions, they have establish a creator of the Universe, the first step in what could be a cumulative case for Christian theism. I do not think such a move is warranted, but it is not impossible to work from common ground to belief in the Christian God as the presuppositionalist so states.

I have been asked to deal with an argument Bolt presented in his initial post on Craig’s argumentation:

(1)If the Christian worldview is true then Christ is Lord of all.
(2)According to Craig, Christ is not Lord of all.
(3)Therefore according to Craig, the Christian worldview is not true.

I think the issues have already been addressed. I shall grant (1), so the obvious issue is (2). It’s obviously untrue for anyone who has read Craig’s work, but the justification Bolt presents is shoddy at best. William Craig has said numerous times that he does not believe on the basis of argument. He is in agreement with Plantinga that belief in God requires no argument to be justified, as it is properly basic (a tenet of reformed epistemology). His arguments do not validate his faith, they only seek to demonstrate said rationality.

After Bolt’s argument, he says:

Now obviously Craig holds that the Christian worldview is true and he seeks to prove portions of it. The point here is not that Craig is actually an unbeliever, but rather that even before Craig begins his arguments he undercuts them all and concedes the debate with his methodology.

Bolt undercuts (2) on his own at this point. Thus, we cannot grant (3). What is really at discussion is whether or not Craig’s apologetic method acknowledges Christ as ‘lord of all’. Bolt says that it does not because he attempts to establish an objective ground from where to begin. But this does not necessitate that Craig has stopped accepting that his existence, and subsequently his thinking is contingent upon God. In fact, to establish this from his position Craig would have to make the fantastical argument that he exists necessarily rather than contingently. The presuppositionalist says that without God, nothing can be proven. It’s even more dire than that under Classical/Evidentialist apologetics as without God there is absolutely nothing. God is the necessary precondition for everything, the disagreement lies with how presuppositionalists attempt to show this.

When Craig makes his arguments he has not forsaken knowledge of Christ, which God does Bolt think Craig is representing? There is nothing inconsistent with Craig making the arguments the way he does, acknowledging that the unbeliever has an innate knowledge of God (he references this in his writings) and that they may need arguments to uncover or accept what they already know just as one needs a map to find Atlanta.

It is verging on incoherence to say that if one attempts to speak about God from a mutually accessible sphere (that of reality between the believer and unbeliever) that they have then undercut their position. It is perhaps even more absurd to say that no sphere exists, for surely, as said before, gravity effects both the believer and the non-believer in the same way. Even Paul himself offers evidentialist arguments for the Resurrection in his writing, did Paul somehow undercut his position?

No classical apologist that I know of denies matters of “presupposition”, if the presuppositionalist position just seeks to establish that without God, nothing could be demonstrated, then all classical apologists agree with presuppositionalism on the conclusion and disagree on the method. What differs is whether or not presuppositionalism formulates a sound argument for the existence of God and whether or not it is sound as an apologetic method.

All in all, I feel the points of Bolt’s argument have been addressed by my previous points, but as he requested I’ve added this previous portion to deal with it directly.