Reply to W. Jay Wood:

  1. A carefully wrought analysis of the possible contribution of reformed apologetics to the ordinary believer's desire or search for minimal or permissive justification;

    1. in this "ball park"; I have no hesitation in regarding the Christian believer as morally justified in taking belief in God and an Scriptural authority as properly basic for him psychologically--I have even written that it is much more important that a person believe the right things than that he do so for reasons which are philosophically sound in the objective (positive epistemic status) sense;

    2. but I see a person like Kuyper as trying to transform this psychologically justified access into objective philosophical grounding--and this I sincerely reject;

    3. I am sure you are familiar with my published criticisms (in Resurrection and Reconstruction) of the sort of voluntaristic apologetics which (what you call) the Reformed position exemplifies--I will not go over that ground here; but I wish you would take a more detailed look at my approach in Reconstruction as a viable rationalistic alternative;

  2. My philosophical project occupies the context of an attempt to face off with secular, non-theistic world views in the arena of speculative thought--of course, I do not expect the "man in the pew" to be involved in this; but it is of the greatest importance from a world-view standpoint.

  3. My suspicion about the Reformed view (Plantinga, Wolterstorff), in the realm of religious world-views, is that this same sort of justification (whether permissive or epistemic status type) could be offered by a Bhuddist or a Hindu for the thesis that belief in the blessed Dharmakaya or the Nirguna Brahman might be at least as a properly basic as belief in the Christian God--and then where is Christian apologetics of a rationally objective sort to be found in all of this?

Thanks for an thought-provoking article.


P.S. I just don't like being classed as an evidentialist--that is really not my emphasis!