Mapping Apologetics: Comparing Contemporary Approaches

The attempt to set up requirements for rationality that rule out belief in God are very likely to also rule out beliefs even the objector wants to retain.

We would have a great deal of trouble proving either of these, yet we and others accept them—and clearly, we are rational for doing so.

If it is rationally acceptable to believe those things without evidence, why can’t it be rationally acceptable to believe in God or Christianity without evidence?

We also believe the world was not created a few minutes ago with apparent age, rings in trees, memories intact and so on.

He pointed out that there are plenty of beliefs that we deem rationally acceptable even though we have little evidence for them.

Rather than accept the evidentialists’ requirements by attempting to construct a traditional argument for Christianity, Plantinga challenged the entire notion of traditional proof as the primary basis for belief.

Evidence can be divided into propositional and nonpropositional types, the latter being things like intuition or Calvin’s sensus divinitatis.

In epistemology, evidentialism is the view that rational beliefs are those that can be supported by reasons or evidence of some kind. It is broader than what is referred to as evidentialism in apologetics, which is the view that Christianity can be supported in a one-step strategy, by appealing, for example, to a body of evidence for the resurrecti

If that is the case, there is no such thing as neutral academics—a view he shares with Kuyper and Van Til.