Mapping Apologetics: Comparing Contemporary Approaches

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

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.

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

Two events helped him resolve his doubts.

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

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?

I suddenly saw or perhaps felt with great clarity and persuasion and conviction that the Lord was really there and was all I had thought. The effects of this experience lingered for a long time; I was still caught up in arguments about the existence of God, but they often seemed to me merely academic, of little existential concern, as if one were t

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.