A Defense of a Christian Epistemology (Dr. Andrew Moon)

In this interview I am joined by Dr. Andrew Moon. In a previous interview linked below, he and I discussed how belief in God can be rational apart from arguments for his existence. This interview is a "part 2" to that discussion. We discuss how belief in the Christian God can be rational apart from arguments for the truth of Christianity. Our discussion is based on chapters 4 & 5 of Alvin Plantinga's book "Knowledge and Christian Belief." The link to the book is below.

Link to my previous interview with Dr. Moon on Reformed Epistemology

Link to Alvin Plantinga's book Knowledge and Christian Belief

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[HLMusic]

@ Crash Course Apologetics Andrew Moon is awesome! Thank you for having him on again!

[apologia]

Hi! When you will be filming this pluralism objection video with Eric and Tyler? Really good stuff, like your style to interview and host this show. Reformed epistemology is so hard, but important! Bless!

[ibperson]

Ive never found any Christian ontology. Physicalist monism is, to me, laughably impossible. Consciousness monism or idealism seem possible. Platonism or other dualisms seem plausible. Roger Penrose’s trialism seem even more so. But what Christians have outlined any ontology? (Note Im not using “dualism” in the other sense, meaning good and evil are equal and opposite).

[ibperson]

Demons don’t believe Christ is the Son of God.

[ibperson]

Demons don’t believe Jesus is the Son of God.

[dirtyfilthee]

Something felt really off about this argument to me. I’m not sure why it’s not just begging the question. “If christianity is true, then belief in it is rational”… I mean, ipso facto, you haven’t proven that Christianity is true, so you haven’t proven that it’s rational.

This meant to force the atheist to first prove Christianity is false before they can assert that it’s irrational, but I’m not sure why it doesn’t work equally the other way.


It also seems deeply counterintuitive to work backwards from truth to rationality, and not the other way round. Proving something is rational seems like the one of the steps you take on the way to determining if it’s true or not. You don’t proceed directly there. After all, the important part of a rational belief is that it tends to track the truth, at least imperfectly. In order to determine what is true, surely, we must first determine what is rational.

Additionally, couldn’t you make the same statements about anything? If Vishnu exists, it’s rational to believe in the existence of Vishnu. Is this really the checkmate-in-four-moves that stops me from claiming belief in Vishnu is irrational?

Taken as a whole, I’ve heard a lot of contradictory viewpoints on this channel. On one hand, God gives us enough evidence that it’s perfectly rational to believe in christianity, and on the other, divine hiddenness is only a problem because he doesn’t want to give us so much evidence that we’re “forced” to believe in him. I wish He’d make up His mind