- The Spread of Views (Start here, then explore the two below)
- Evidentialism (Better) Explained
- Presuppositionalism (Better) Explained
There are schools of thought about how best to approach the task of apologetics. Two important schools of thought are related to the apologist’s problem of justifying her beliefs. The sort of justification we are talking about has to do with whether a specific belief that God exists is rational or true or not. To give a first approximation of this, let me oversimplify things a bit. On the one hand, there are a spectrum of evidentialists—a general classification for apologists—that think the way to approach this responsibility is to present various kinds of evidence, like the evidence found in natural theology, the evidence of religious experience and so forth in order to justify belief that God exists…and more particularly, the God of the Bible exists.
On the other hand, there are those talk about a spectrum of philosophical or epistemic justification for belief that God exists. Within that spectrum are presuppositionalists and those who hold that God's existence is a properly basic belief or a warranted belief given certain non-evidential, grounds for that belief.
The presuppostionalists have argued that everybody has to start with presuppositions, which themselves cannot be argued to, but simply argued from. They further argue, that other philosohpical positions (like naturalism or physicalism), whether they admit it or not, have their own presuppositions which they treat as starting points and if they can have theirs, why can’t we have ours? A similar but subtly different approach is taken by what I call the properly basic belief folks—they hold that belief that God exists can be held rationally without any evidential propositional arguments. They think the rationality of those properly basic beliefs doesn’t depend (as do some presuppositionalists) on whether others have such foundational beliefs from which they must argue or not, but rather they defend their particular foundational beliefs as within their epistemic rights to hold—they claim to form such beliefs, in certain circumstances, breaks no epistemic rules of belief formation).
These two broad positions are currently the two main groups; there are also those who occupy a place in the range between those two groups and thus form the spectrum between them. You’ll find as they approach the center of the spectrum, they get much closer to each other than what you might first think. Nonetheless, they are important to identify and important for an apologist to understand in order to “play her apologetic cards” in a consistent manner throughout. So, having a penetrating understanding of what these large options entail and the spectrum of positions that fit into them is very important to remaining consistent in your approach.