This post elaborates on a comment I left on a post by Victor Ruppert concerning Reformed Epistemology. Reformed Epistemology is a school of thought that contends that belief in God is a properly basic belief; it's a belief that requires no additional argument or evidence to be reasonable. My post concerned William Lane Craig's formulation of this contention; it contained three difficulties I believe his formulation faces when used to demonstrate the reasonableness of belief in God.
William Lane Craig holds that the Holy Spirit ( the second person of the Christian God) provides an inner "testimony" to every individual person that God exists. Moreover, Dr. Craig contends that this "testimony" can outweigh defeaters (in the form of arguments or evidence) of God's existence. Dr. Craig gives the example of a man in Soviet Russia who only came to know what he believed about God through atheistic propaganda aimed at debunking theistic beliefs! Dr. Craig claims that the testimony of the Holy Spirit must have been very strong for the man to maintain his belief in the presence of all those defeaters. Moreover, because of the testimony of the Holy Spirit, this man was also rationally justified in his belief, despite not being able to respond to the atheistic line of argumentation.
Dr.Craig has used the argument that God can be a properly basic belief through the testimony of the Holy Spirit in debates, usually concerning the reasonableness of theistic belief. However, I don't think this line of argumentation is convincing in establishing the reasonableness of God's existence. First, the argument is inappropriate in a debate with an atheist because in order to make headway, there has to be a shared understanding (conceptually) or a mutually recognized piece of empirical evidence. Appealing to a private phenomenon (presumably one that the atheist does not recognize) does not meet this criterion and thus cannot be convincing. To put it more explicitly, imagine a debate concerning the existence of the Norse gods. If one participant makes the case that Thor personally told him that he exists, will the other participant be convinced? Not likely. Moreover, even if the debate concerns something more modest such as whether or not belief in the Norse gods is reasonable, there still would not be any convincing because of the aforementioned reasons.
Second, if the Holy Spirit does provide "testimony" then why does the Holy Spirit only reveal the truth of God's existence? Why doesn't the Holy Spirit reveal other important, yet verifiable truths such as how to revive the economy, cure cancer, or stop Lebron James? I see no reason why the Holy Spirit couldn't. Moreover, it's suspiciously convenient that what is revealed to be true, is not independently verifiable. The narrowness and non-verifiable nature of the alleged testimony, which stands in contrast to the vast body of verifiable truths that could potentially be revealed, suggests that the Holy Spirit does not provide such testimony.
Third, it seems that Reformed Epistemology, at least by Craig's formulation, unintentionally provides a case for atheists. If the justification of God's existence is based on such testimony, then it follows that without the testimony God's existence would be an unjustified belief, and symmetrically atheism would be justified. Now, Dr. Craig could respond that everyone does have the testimony, but just suppresses it or ignores it. Independent of the fact that this is most certainly false, this response would cause the debate to deteriorate as the atheist opponent would be in effect accused of lying or not seeking in truth. If this is true, what would be the point of having a debate in the first place?
These difficulties lead me to believe that the argument from Reformed Epistemology is weak in terms of its ability to convince of the reasonableness of God's existence. If convincing doubters is the goal, it should therefore not be prominent in apologetics.
