It seems to me that a whole lot of what passes for “knowledge” in any society is acquired directly from the indoctrination processes in that society—especially subjective knowledge like politics, dress, mores, aesthetics, and religion. The “good reasons” you refer to are provided by the society and therefore are not independent of society. (e.g., Mormons have “good reasons” for wearing their holy underpants. It’s their epistemological basis for doing so.) I won’t go so far as to say all knowledge short of science and math is society-based, but it’s close. If you’re talking about some sort of “absolute truths” here, tell me what you think they are and how you know them.

A few points here:

1) Why do you think there is only "subjective" knowledge of "mores, aesthetics, and religion"? Do you think we can confer truth status on moral beliefs? Can there be real moral disagreement across cultures where one culture is right and another wrong? Or is everything up for grabs? What about revolutionaries like Martin Luther King, Jr? Were his moral beliefs simply subjective? If so, what right did he have to judge the dominant cultural moral system of racism as wicked?

2) This whole attitude of seeing just about every type of belief (almost including math and science!) seems awfully depressing, and the only conclusion I could see coming out of such a position would be global or near-global skepticism. On some views, the proper attitude in this case would be agnosticism on just about every important subject: ethics, politics, religion, etc. But you have read your William James. He basically argues that even if you find yourself in this position, you are epistemically entitled to pick a religious worldview and run with it to see how it actually works when you try to live it out. I am inclined to agree with him. Suppose I accept this type of near-global skepticism, but I want to make sure I have the right religious beliefs, even though I feel I don't have any way to properly adjudicate between competing religious claims. I then decide to step out on faith (as it were) and begin living a religious lifestyle and doing my best to accept a certain set of religious beliefs. Then, if I receive practical benefits from holding those beliefs and living that lifestyle, I am justified in those beliefs even if near-global skepticism is true! And there are many documented benefits of living a committed Christian lifestyle. This article discusses a study that confirms this. There are others.

3) Most models of skepticism of this sort are self-refuting, and yours is one of them. Here's how. Let's formulate near-global skepticism as S. Even omitting math and science beliefs, we have:

S: What passes for political, moral, aesthetic, and religious knowledge in society is culturally transmitted and any "good reasons" the members of that society think they have for holding those beliefs are provided by the society and thus dependent on it. Therefore all such beliefs are subjective and unjustified.

Now, I am assuming that since you are tempted to include math and science beliefs in the above formulation, you would also say that philosophical beliefs about epistemology fall into the same categories as the types of beliefs listed in S. That is, philosophical beliefs about epistemology are culturally transmitted, subjective, and that any supposed "good reasons" there are for holding those beliefs are not justifying reasons because they are provided by the society and dependent on it. In any case, I think that if you denied this you would be inconsistent.

The question then becomes: what about your belief in S? Is that belief immune from your near global skepticism? It seems to me that in current western society, this sort of argument is very prevalent in skeptical circles. I have read variations of it numerous times from skeptics and atheists, and it's a common meme on atheistic blogs and message boards. Therefore this belief is culturally transmitted and your supposed "good reasons" for holding it are provided by and dependent upon the society. So according to S, your own version of near-global skepticism, you ought to reject S. If you think your belief in S somehow escapes the dilemma, explain how it does.

I’m sorry that I ignored your argument almost entirely; I didn’t know what it was. But now that you’ve stated it, I’m confused. First of all, what are you taking as Dawkins’ epistemic claim? If you’re saying his claim is the same as what you say I believe, (viz. “that many religious adherents’ beliefs are unjustified because they receive them from authorities in their culture.”) . You’re in error. He’s not claiming that and neither am I. Neither of us has said that. Further, I think we would both answer “no” to all your questions about whether people are immune to acquiring various other beliefs from cultural indoctrination and so should summarily reject them as unjustified. I contend that all beliefs have to be evaluated on their merits, not their source.

You have mischaracterized Dawkins’ and my argument. You have stated both the premise and the conclusion wrong. The correct premise is: “Most religious people received childhood indoctrination in their parents’ religion”—period! The correct conclusion is: “It works. Almost every religious person follows in the religion of their parents as evidenced by geographical distribution. Cold logic and reason apparently are not big factors.” No reference was made to whether such indoctrinations reflect reality, whether any religions are true or false, or whether religious or other beliefs so acquired should be rejected simply because they were the subjects of childhood indoctrination.

So you are not committing the genetic fallacy. That's good. But in that case I don't see what teeth the argument is supposed to have against Christian theism. It may say something about how irresponsibly humanity conducts its epistemic affairs, but it has no power as an argument against the truth status of even the most basic religious doctrine. So I really don't see the point.

It may not be irrational to put a “person’s authority in the plank of the foundation” of your religious beliefs if you deemed that person to be perceptive, wise, virtuous or rational. However, since there are numerous people with these qualities among the advocates for any religion you can name, how do you know which to believe? Could it be that you gravitate to the ones consistent with your childhood indoctrination? How many people in Arkansas even get a chance to be influenced by say, a Hindu? Or make the effort to study Islam? One of the unfortunate consequences of childhood indoctrination is, if it’s done cleverly and thoroughly, the kids may never know if they were duped because their ability to reason objectively outside the box may be forever handicapped.

I’ll stick to my assessment that religious indoctrination is clearly a major purpose of Sunday schools. I haven’t been to all Sunday schools, but I’ve been to a lot of them and I’ve never seen any that didn’t heavily proselytize the kids—lots of colorful models of Noah’s ark and the animals, cutouts of angels, candy with religious stuff printed on the wrapper, groups of tykes singing praise songs, pageants and plays, and memorizing feel-good Bible verses. It’s definitely playtime with a purpose. And yes, atheist parents probably do indoctrinate their kids like everyone else. And no, none of this is relevant to the truthfulness of anyone’s beliefs, but it is relevant to the source.

This view sounds good on the surface, but there are numerous problems lurking nearby.

1) Earlier I said that a good church will offer the best arguments and evidence to its children for Christian belief. But even then, children are not really ready for this type of teaching until they reach adolescence. So I grant you that when it comes to small children, churches and Christian parents generally just transmit religious beliefs with no questions asked. But I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. What if I teach my child that racism is wicked? Do I need to let her decide for herself on this matter? Must I take her to a KKK rally so that she can see both sides? What if I tell her that it's wrong to tell lies? Must I also qualify it with, "Well, according to some worldviews, lying isn't always wrong. I'd better give you a few articles from the other side so you can decide for yourself"? If not, why is it necessary that I show her all sides of a religious issue but not a moral issue? Is there a certain class of beliefs that I do need to show her both sides on, and another class that I don't? If so, how do I determine which is which? Do I go by what the culture tells me? The state? Richard Dawkins? What's wrong with simply passing on to her what I believe is true, along with my own justification for believing that way? Isn't there something to be said for standing on one's own convictions and teaching those convictions to your children? Why must I be spineless about telling her my own beliefs? "Well honey, I believe this way, but let's go talk to someone who disagrees with me just to be sure I'm not 'indoctrinating' you!" That's no way to live, and no way to parent.

Additionally, we live in a worldview-charged culture, where every website, news outlet, TV channel, novel, comic book, movie, video game, teacher, newspaper, etc. will be bombarding my children with various worldviews. I would be plain stupid to think that I should somehow be totally worldview-neutral when I go to teach them how to live their lives. If I were to attempt to be wordlview-neutral when it comes to child-raising, the rest of the world will be there to fill in the gaps.

2) You are concerned with childrens' ability to "reason objectively outside the box." As a parent, I can testify that children lack objective reasoning skills. They are irrational from the start, and many people remain that way their whole lives. They make decisions based on emotion and intuition, and use bad logic and confirmation bias to arrive at the conclusions they want to arrive at. I'm convinced that most people arrive at their moral and religious viewpoints based heavily on what they want to be true. Or, they simply choose the conclusion that benefits them the most. Given this, why would I ever let my irrational child make her own decisions on the most important questions of life, like God and ethics? By presenting both sides of certain important issues to her (say, whether it's OK to have premarital sex), I'm basically encouraging her to use her bad judgment to make a bad decision. Plus, in that case I myself will seem like a spineless wimp who doesn't have the cajones to pass on his moral and religious convictions. You and Dawkins seem to be saying that parents have a duty not to pass on their beliefs about God and morality to their children. I say that it would be highly irresponsible if they didn't pass on those beliefs or, if you will, "indoctrinate" them into the worldview they believe to be the best. A family is not a democracy. Children do not have all the same rights as autonomous adults, and thank God for that. If parents refrained from passing on their convictions about right and wrong (and, for that matter, God and sin), the world might be a much more chaotic place.

3) Dawkins means to use "indoctrination" as a moral charge. That is, parents and churches are acting immorally if they indoctrinate their children into their religious belief system. But according to your own skepticism about moral and religious beliefs, no moral beliefs are justified anyway, since the "good reasons" one has for holding such beliefs are provided by the society and dependent upon it. So suppose I am considering whether or not to believe the following moral proposition P:

P: It is immoral for parents to pass on their religious beliefs to their children without presenting the other side of the issue.

According to your near-global skepticism, I'd better assume that any supposed "good reasons" I can conjure up for believing P are society-dependent and unjustified. Thus I ought to reject it or, at least, remain agnostic on whether P is true or not.

4) This leads to a final point. You seem to think there is some epistemically-neutral, worldview-neutral, and "objective" position from which I have a duty to raise my children. But no worldview is totally objective or neutral, so no approach to child-rearing is totally objective or neutral. All worldviews and epistemic methodologies have their own assumptions from which they start. There is no epistemic floating point from which I (or anyone) can fly above all worldviews and evaluate them totally bias-free. Any supposed "objective" starting point from which I teach my children will itself be charged with certain assumptions that can be challenged. In my opinion the most prudent thing parents can do is teach their children the best they can and pass on what they see as the best worldview. This goes for Christians, Muslims, atheists, etc. Science-types like Dawkins like to think that their position is the only worldview-neutral one, not realizing that even their methodology is thick with worldview-assumptions that are not themselves neutral.

I’m not sure if you’re talking about Dawkins’ or me or both, but neither of us has to make bad arguments to keep this case intact. Neither Dawkins nor I started out thinking religion was bunkum. Dawkins’ bio says he started out in the Anglican faith, began doubting about age nine, reconverted later based on the “Design Argument”, then fell out permanently after becoming disillusioned with the Church of England and learning about evolution which made supernatural design unnecessary in his mind. My experience is roughly similar.

I was referring primarily to Dawkins' bad arguments. Regarding the starting point of your arguments, I was talking about the logical starting point of the argument, not the temporal starting point of what you or Dawkins believed earlier in life.

In any case, I think we all agree that the validity of religion must come from an objective evaluation of it, not the indoctrination of the believers.

Agreed.

Therefore Brian, I look forward to your expanded description of: Christianity’s explanatory framework, good evidences and arguments for God’s existence (e.g., the good ol’ ontological argument perhaps?); historicity of the Bible; objective nature of moral facts; your own religious experiences; coherence of your world view, authentic God-encounters, and my personal favorite, whether you’re a fundamentalist. I hope you’ll use my definition, not Plantinga’s which, as you remember, was predicated on some sort of “sumbitch” argument—but either one would be better than nothing.

This is obviously a very large project, and I will get to it in future posts. Wait for it.

Also, the Plantinga quote is not an argument. It's merely a tongue-in-cheek illustration of the wide range of flexibility with which the word "fundamentalist" is often used. I think he's right. Often the term is used pejoratively and without reference to how fundamentalism is actually defined or to what the designees of the term actually believe.

What is the essence of the arguments by Mackie, Martin, and Smith that caused you to wrestle with some of your beliefs?

Some of Mackie's arguments in The Miracle of Theism are strong, and sometimes in my more skeptical moods his error-theory about morals seems awfully appealing. All I've read from Martin is his book God, Meaning, and Morality. I disagree with most of his conclusions in the book, but he did force me to rethink how I deal with issues relating to human meaning and morality. As far as Smith goes, I'm of the persuasion that, given the the temporal beginning of the universe via the Big Bang, theism is the best available explanation (see: the Kalam Cosmological Argument). Smith has an argument that says the universe may have a temporal beginning, but that the first moment of the universe could be "past-open." That is, the universe does not have a beginning point in time, even though it did have a beginning, ergo it doesn't need an external cause. I'm not sure this idea is even coherent, but he does argue for it well. See his book with Bill Craig on this issue.

Did you get the e-mail I sent you with J.C. Grayling’s comments?

I assume you mean A. C. Grayling. I did, but I'm afraid I've lost it. If I recall, it had something to do with fundamentalism. But I have about as much respect for Grayling as I do for Dawkins. See here.

This is a lot of blogging over a peripheral subject. When are we going to get to meatier items like reasons for being a Christian (or whatever) and discussions of fundamentalism? These are things I’m hoping to understand better if possible. Maybe you could respond to my June ’08 comments and questions about your website where you talked about the “crystal clear waters of orthodoxy” among other things.

My original plan was to respond to your June comments, but you keep commenting on non-related posts and forcing me to respond! I agree that we need to leave these issues behind and get to meatier subjects. On my own reasons for believing in Christianity, I'd like to do a series of posts each dealing with a different topic (various arguments for God's existence, arguments for the Resurrection, coherence of Christian theism, criteria for evaluating worldviews, etc.), and then we can discuss each subject separately. It may take a while, and I'd like to respond to your June comments before I do that. And before that, I'd like to do a separate post answering some of your comments on religious experience.

Brian, I’ve re-read Dawkins’ Ultimate Boeing 747 argument and your 18-page invective on it several times and while it might be an interesting exercise to comment on the two viewpoints in detail, it would still be just an exercise in philosophical minutiae. I’d rather cut to the core issue and skip all the spidermen and trebuchets and Dr. Frankensteins, etc. The core view from the Dawkins’ camp is “Why believe in supernatural stuff as an explanatory agent when we don’t need to, especially supernatural stuff that contravenes all common sense, objective observation and experience. We don’t need God or fairies to explain how eyes came about or why wind blows. We have good natural explanations for such things, why invoke demonic forces when your Nissan Pathfinder fails to start? A dead battery is a much more likely cause. Strictly speaking, I suppose it could be a demon, but if I were you, I’d go get some jumper cables or you’ll be late getting to the library and won’t have time for a coke while reading Frederick Copleston—whoever he is.

As usual, a few points here:

1) Copleston was a Jesuit philosopher who famously debated both Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer. His 9-volume History of Western Philosophy is still one of the best multivolume works on the subject.

2) I find it difficult to answer your question, since it contains some assumptions with which I disagree. Consider some assumptions that are inherent in your question:

i. "Supernatural stuff" provides no explanatory power over any feature of the world. This is debatable. I happen to think theism provides a vast amount of explanatory power over numerous features of the world, explanatory power that naturalism and other religions lack. I think it provides the best explanation for a whole host of questions: why there is something rather than nothing, how the universe got its start, why the universe seems fine-tuned for life, moral properties, the reliability of human rationality, the human need for transcendence, the human desire for moral atonement, etc. I could go on. "But wait," you say, "I have arguments against all of those things!" Well, I have arguments for them. I suppose we'll get to these in the future. Wait for it.

ii. "Supernatural stuff" contravenes all common sense. What sense is common? I think atheism contravenes all common sense. And if we use "common sense" in the true sense of the term, then the most common sense is religious sense, since most people on earth are religious.

iii. "Supernatural stuff" contravenes all objective observation. Well, what exactly is "objective observation?" Suppose I am trying to decide whether my experiences of the world are real, or whether I am just a brain in a vat (BIV) with false experiences being pumped in via a mad scientist's computer. What "objective observation" can I input into that question that will help me answer it? Likewise, I can't objectively observe numbers, propositions, other minds, logical laws, moral properties, and many other things.

iv. "Supernatural stuff" contravenes all experience. Not mine. I'm going to do a separate post on your views of religious experience.

Also, God, as the proponents of the many theistic religions describe him, seems much more like fiction than fact. In the utter absence of substantive evidence it’s very hard to accept a being that can track all the electrons in the universe, answer millions of prayers per second, arrange for supernovae in distant galaxies and still have time to help the Crimson Tide win football games. If you subscribe to the Jehovah version of God, you also have to accept resurrection of dead people, talking snakes and donkeys, a woman turned into sodium chloride, a person who stops the sun “for about a day,” and lots of other really far out stuff. And the other theistic religions make similar heavy demands on common sense reality. I’m only being a little bit facetious when I say that acceptance of Santa Claus or Paul Bunyan or Joseph Smith’s golden tablets would make about as much sense.

God doesn't help the Crimson Tide win football games, but I wish He did. I think He's neutral when it comes to college football, although it's pretty clear that He favors the SEC. =)

In seriousness, there are numerous issues at play here: the nature of evidence, believability, epistemic justification, worldview assumptions, issues related to the philosophy of science, issues related to probability, etc. How we ought to think about these issues can be very complex, and I think you, like Dawkins and many other science-focused types, greatly oversimplify them, opting for simple versions of evidentialism and/or scientific verificationism. Rivers of ink have been spilled debating these issues. Maybe some version of evidentialism or verificationism is the best epistemic option, but my point is just that it's not that simple. So I don't have an easy reponse, but I will make a few points related to these issues.

1) The believability of all those things you mention hinges first on whether you think the following proposition is true:

C: The physical cosmos a closed system of cause and effect. Nothing external to the cosmos can have causative power over the cosmos or anything within it.

Note that C does not say whether an external power has exercised causative power over the cosmos, but only that such a thing is possible. The question is: what evidence can we input into the question that will help us determine whether C is true or not? Really the only thing would be a genuine miracle. But what counts as a miracle? It's not very simple. In my opinion one's view of what counts as a miracle will be conditioned by whether one already holds C as a worldview assumption or not!

I'll try to explain what I mean. Some people will count just about anything as a miracle: the image of a face on a piece of toast, getting a bigger tax refund than they expected, etc. On the other side are people who would just about never count anything as a miracle. They explain away every possible miracle via naturalistic means. These are folks who could get carried to the very throne room of God and argue that it could all be an illusion or a cleverly designed trick of special effects by advanced aliens.

But what drives people to take the view of what counts as a miracle that they do? Their worldview assumption as to whether C is true or not! So we're stuck in something of an epistemic circle. We need some evidence for or against C that's independent of our own criteria for what counts as a miracle, since that criteria itself is conditioned by our own predisposition to believe or reject C.

What might that evidence be? I think we can have good reasons to accept or reject C, but those reasons probably aren't going to be in any sort of empirical evidential form that would be acceptable to scientists. For example, there may be rational (as opposed to empirical) evidence in the form of logical arguments for or against C. Most scientists operate via methodological naturalism anyway, so as an operating assumption they already accept C. I think that's a great methodology if your aim is merely to describe how matter and energy operate to form the features of the cosmos. But I see no reason to think that C should be taken to describe what is possible in all of reality. In other words, C seems pretty arbitrary if it's taken to mean that miracles and other direct causation by God on the universe are impossible. So I reject it, and thus I have no problem whatsoever believing that a woman can be turned into sodium chloride or that God can monitor and control every electron in the universe.

2) Elsewhere you have asked which version of God or religion ought people to believe in, because there are so many of them. Be careful with this type of argument, because it cuts both ways. I might just as well ask which version of skepticism (or philosophy of science, or naturalism, or whatever) I ought to believe in, or which arguments against theism I ought to accept, because there are so many of them. And just like in the case with religion, some of these views are mutually exclusive and contradictory.

The reason I bring this up is because there's a fine example of this relating to miracles and evidence for God. On one hand, you have Bertrand Russell saying that if he got to heaven and God asked him why he didn't believe, he would answer, "Not enough evidence, God!" On the other hand, you have Hume saying that even if you were confronted with something that by all accounts looked like a miracle (that would normally count as evidence for God), the probability that your interpretation of the event was wrong would be much higher than the probability that a natural law had actually been violated, so you would never be justified in taking it to be a miracle! So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The view from the Brian camp seems to be best summarized by your two statements ... To wit: “the religious believer needs no other justification for his God-beliefs than her [sic] own personal encounter with God” [doesn’t say which god], and “There are literally millions of people on the planet who can point to a similar encounter with God [again, doesn’t say which God] and this gives the theist a good reason to feel justified that her experience with God was veridical.” As near as I can tell, that’s it. (i.e., If you’ve had a God encounter then God exists—in whatever version you encountered Him, I guess.) This seems like a really weak argument for God, especially from a philosophy major. It doesn’t even have any consistent inductive support let alone evidence. People in different cultures have different God encounters. Some God encounters are very destructive; some are directly conflictive of other God encounters. All sorts of different gods are encountered. How can you tell a God encounter from a delusional episode? What role might psychology (state of mind) or physiology (endorphins) play? How valid can god encounters be when they can be induced with drugs or electrodes under laboratory conditions? How valid might they be when some woman in Texas drowns her five kids based on a God encounter she had. There may be such a thing as a genuine God encounter, but it sounds like a fish story and unless someone levitates or does something really unusual during one, I shall remain very very skeptical that they are anything other than delusions.

I'm going to do a separate post on your views on religious experience, so I won't address these issues now. For now I'll just say that the view that religious experiences can be justified and veridical has a pretty strong philosophical pedigree. See, for example, William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience.

Your only other argument for the existence of God really comes from the bottom of the polemical barrel, i.e., even though there is no evidence for God’s existence, and even though the claims for what he can do far exceed the bounds of sensible experience and observation, and even though the only case for His existence is so-called God encounters (which are virtually indistinguishable from delusions), then just haul off and declare that He’s “necessary”. Frankly, I can’t see where anything is “necessary”. Your example of 2 + 3 = 5 may not be “necessary” in the space-time warp near a black hole, or in the quantam world, or the 7th dimension of string theory, or in an Einsteinian relativistic paradox. Plus it seems to me that what you call “necessary” (forgetting that your example is probably just a tautology) would have been different if the Big Bang had been a zillionth of a degree hotter or the inflationary period had lasted a zillionth of a second longer, or the branes that caused the Big Bang had been a zillionth of a percent larger or more dense. And even if 2 + 3 = 5 is “necessary” somehow, that still doesn’t make God [in any of his many forms] “necessary”. And even if He is “necessary”, that doesn’t have to apply to any of the theistic versions. Along these lines, would you argue that the zodiac is the “necessary” element behind astrology?

1) I didn't claim that "there is no evidence of God's existence, and ... the claims for what he can do far exceed the bounds of sensible experience, and ... the only case for His existence is so-called God encounters."

2) You have mishandled what I wrote. I didn't say that the claim that God is a necessary Being is some sort of argument or proof that He actually exists. My main point was just that theists have traditionally conceived of God as being ontologically and metaphysically necessary, and that Dawkins' discussion of the probability of His existence was philosophically incomplete, since he doesn't deal with the issues of necessity and contingency.

3) It's not uncommon for philosophers to take logical or mathematical truths to be necessary truths. Very generally, such philosophers take necessary truths to be (i) truths that can not fail to be the case, (ii) truths that, if denied, would entail a contradiction, and (3) truths whose negation can not even be conceived of. This is an oversimplification of how necessity is often viewed these days (necessity is, like every philosophical subject, a matter of debate), but it's a start. If we want, we can talk about stuff like paraconsistent logic, which denies logical necessity and attempts to incorporate logical inconsistencies, etc., but that stuff gets very difficult and very boring so I won't get into it now. For now I'll just say that the belief that mathematical truths are logically necessary is not uncommon at all, and it has a great philosophical pedigree.

Now, I find your claim that it might be possible for 2+3=6 "in the space-time warp near a black hole, or in the quantum world, or the 7th dimension of string theory, or in an Einsteinian relativistic paradox" to be very strange. If this were possible, then you would be admitting that (i) numbers and mathematical propositions are real abstract entities and that (ii) the physical universe can have causative power over such abstract entities. So, in a sense, you're saying that a black hole or a tiny difference in the initial conditions at the Big Bang might have causative power over abstract entities like mathematical propositions. I suppose someone could make a case for that view, but I wouldn't want to be that guy.

4) Yes, 2+3=5 is a tautology. Necessary truths are usually tautologous and analytic, and when we're talking propositions, I would say tautology, analyticity, and necessity are nearly the same thing. Again, that's an oversimplification of the issue and we could discuss it much further, but this is really just a side issue so I'll skip it.

5) I didn't claim that the necessity of 2+3=5 is some sort of proof for God's necessity. I was just using it as an analogy. I wrote that paper over two years ago, and if I was writing it now I would say some things very differently. I would, for example, talk about the difference between ontological necessity (God) and logical necessity (2+3=5, the law of non-contradiction, etc.), how they're the same, how they're different, etc.

What the case for God [in whatever form you specify] needs is a “good old-fashioned evidence encounter”. Had any? Has anyone had any? I would like to hear about them.

Yes. As I said, I'll get to this in the future. But of course we'll first need to discuss some foundational issues related to evidence, epistemic justification, worldview assumptions, coherence, etc. One's view of how evidence works and what counts as evidence will be conditioned by their worldview assumptions. I think we probably take different views on evidentialism.

Lastly, are you arguing for God in general or Jehovah in particular? Please define God for me and if it is Jehovah, please define your personal degree of fundamentalism/biblical literalism. And let’s get down to some meat instead of fussing over whether complex things can create things more complex than themselves or whether 2+3=5 is “necessary”.

Yes, I would argue for the Triune God of the Christian tradition. If you consider someone who believes the great doctrines of the faith to be a fundamentalist, then yes, I am a fundamentalist. The Apostle's Creed is a good statement of what I believe. But I take fundamentalism to describe more a way of believing rather than any specific set of beliefs. So you can have Christian fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Darwinian fundamentalists, Marxist fundamentalists, feminist fundamentalists, etc.

I also believe that the Scripture is inspired, inerrant, and tells a true narrative. But I also believe that it's not a science textbook and that we must greatly nuance what we mean by inerrancy and how we interpret it. Many critics totally misunderstand what evangelicals mean when we say that Scripture is inerrant. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy is a pretty good explanation, but I would nuance it even further than the Chicago Statement does.

As you've noticed, these discussions can get very long. At some point we'll just have to let our arguments rest and move to the next topic, so feel free to respond to some of these points but, for the sake of time, I'll probably let my comments here serve as my final arguments for these topics. My next post will address some of your statements on religious experience.