This essay originated as a reply to David Boles in the comments section of Saugstad’s first guest article, “Postmodernism and Christianity.” It is published here as a standalone essay with the author’s permission.
Dear David,
Thank you so much for your interest in my article “Postmodernism and Christianity.” Now obviously an article like this cannot answer all kinds of possible objections and questions. You ask very big questions and they deserve very big answers. Once again, your question is formulated in a highly intelligent way, but I am convinced that it can be given highly robust answers.
My Book and Future Articles
My book Christian Notebooks on the Power of Eternal Victory is to a great extent the philosophical diary of a Christian mystic, but it deals with very many advanced philosophical topics. In the form of aphorisms it intends to give an advanced outline of how such questions can be answered and should be answered. There are also essays and introductory material in my book that are related to your question. I would also like to answer your questions in future articles; that is, articles that I have wanted to write for a long time and that are connected to the questions you have raised in this discussion.
Christian Mysticism, Plantinga, Craig and Moser
But let me here try to give a brief sketch of how I think such objections should be answered. First of all, I write both in “Postmodernism and Christianity” and in the subsequent comment thread that Christian mystical experience is something extremely profound and sublime. There is a quality in Christian mystical experience that is radically different from all other experiences. When I testify about these Christian mystical experiences, this in itself is not a proof in the analytical or scientific way, but it does give a radical invitation to other people to seek out the truth that is found in Jesus Christ and the Bible. Alvin Plantinga, and William Lane Craig following him, both claim that the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit is “an intrinsic defeater defeater.” This means that the most foundational Christian religious experience is a kind of evidence that knocks out counter-arguments, even if you cannot answer these counter-arguments directly. For instance, in some cases it is right to trust in your own memory and in your own intellectual reasoning, even though everyone in the surroundings holds a very different opinion than you hold. One example that Plantinga and Craig mobilise here is a case where someone is the victim of a conspiracy and the conspiracy gives a detailed account of why and how that person is guilty. However, the accused person knows with absolute certainty that he is innocent and that the whole plot against him is a conspiracy, even though he cannot argue his case. This is an excellent example of how an intrinsic defeater defeater in your inner knowledge and awareness is so strong that you just know with absolute certainty that what you believe in and say is the correct thing. This is an excellent way of explaining the sublime and intrinsic evidential power of Christian mystical experiences.
Another important insight here comes from the Christian philosopher and epistemologist Paul Moser. He says that evidence for the existence of God and Christianity should be understood as “invitational evidence” and “kardia theology.” Invitational evidence is something you are invited into, and something different from merely spectator evidence. Kardia theology is the knowledge, comprehension and understanding you get through the heart and by an act of will, but it is still an extremely powerful kind of intellectual/cognitive knowledge, comprehension and understanding. This is my explanation of Paul Moser’s theory.
An Analogy to Music and Art
To illustrate this, I would like to give examples from music and art. Now I cannot prove to you that Bach and Händel are the two greatest composers in world history; I can just explain and testify about how much these composers have meant to me. I can invite you into the same existential, metaphysical, aesthetic and transformative experience. Another example can be the paintings of Edvard Munch. I used to spend a lot of time at the Munch Museum here in Oslo when I was a young student. Munch is not the most advanced technical painter in world history, but he is still one of the greatest artists in the modern world. So I can invite you into that realm of existential and philosophical experience, where Edvard Munch’s pictures have a transformative and empowering effect. His paintings are both relevant to existential philosophy and to depth psychology. I cannot prove this by analytical reasoning or the natural sciences, but it is still a rational and objective truth that Edvard Munch is one of the greatest artists in the modern world and that his paintings can help a lot of people. I can invite you into such experiences, just like I can invite you into a personal and existential loving relationship with Jesus Christ and the Bible. I can help people enjoy and broaden their horizon through music and art; and in a similar way, I can help people into Christian supernatural spirituality and Christian mysticism as a form of life.
Christian Apologetics and Hard-Hitting Arguments
But if we want to go more into hard-hitting arguments and objective evidence, I would like to point out that the Christian worldview is much more rational than the alternative religions. This is not a very politically correct statement, but it is still completely true. There are extremely good arguments for the existence of God, the historical and physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the Christian worldview in general. Christianity rests on something that can be historically documented and verified in a way that all the other religions cannot be. See for instance Gary Habermas’s The Resurrection of Jesus and the Future of Hope, William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith, Richard Swinburne’s The Resurrection of God Incarnate, and Norman Geisler’s and Patrick Zukeran’s The Apologetics of Jesus. Christianity is also centred around the person of Jesus Christ God Incarnate, and I think he is much more profound and compelling than all the other founders of religions and philosophical schools. The doctrine of the Trinity is also extremely rational and sophisticated, because as great Christian thinkers like Richard of St. Victor, Richard Swinburne, Norman Geisler and Frank Turek all point out: the doctrine of the Trinity is the only doctrine that in the philosophical and theological way can explain why and how God is eternal love.
Finally, I think it is worth mentioning that Christianity has given the world so many extremely advanced cultural products that no other religious system has ever given us. As I said, you ask very big questions, and these questions deserve very big replies. I can here only give an outline of an approach to Christian apologetics, but I would like to refer you and all other potential readers to my book. I also hope to be able to contribute with many articles that directly and/or indirectly will be able to answer your questions.
The True Christianity and the Christian Web of Belief
Since you are an intellectual, liberal-left American, you live in a culture where the perception of Christianity has been systematically distorted by the religious right. In my book, I try to give an alternative to both liberal theology and the religious right political fundamentalism. I believe in the Bible as the Holy Word of God, the Church Fathers and Christian mysticism, and I combine this with the best insights from Christian liberation theology. Here we see that Christianity has existential, metaphysical, intellectual, moral/ethical and political resources that no other religion or philosophical system can match. So when we understand who Jesus Christ really is, what the Bible really says, what advanced Christian spirituality and advanced Christian thought really have to offer us, the distinction between Christian mystical experience and mystical experiences in other religions is certainly not just a matter of content. And the difference in content is also highly relevant for understanding why Christianity is the only rational and sublime worldview that can give us a total and satisfying explanation. As Willard Van Orman Quine always points out, experience is always connected to “the web of belief.” What I try to do in my book is to show that the Christian web of belief is a much more profound and powerful worldview than the secular web of belief that Quine tries to offer. I am also convinced that the Christian web of belief, connected to its sublime mystical experiences, stands out when compared to all the other world religions. Inspired by Quine, I always emphasize that Christianity is the inference to the best explanation (abduction). This is because Christianity has a much greater explanatory power and explanatory scope than all the other alternative philosophies and religions.
Concluding Remarks
It is important that people don’t read more into my essay than is actually legitimate. I have not defended a postmodern epistemology that is relativistic or anarchistic. As a Christian philosopher, I am convinced that even though you cannot be totally neutral, you can still have direct access to objective reality and objective truth. The idea that one cannot be totally neutral must not be confused with the idea that there is no objective reality and no objective truth. We start with faith, hope and love, and this can be connected with powerful, rational arguments that are extremely convincing. A careful reading of my essay above and my book should make this very clear.
Now that was a long reply, but you know philosophy is to go really deeply into things. Much more can be said about these topics. If my health allows me to do it, I hope to be able to address these topics and related ones in future articles and books.
Andreas,
Thank you for this generous and substantive reply. You have given me exactly what I asked for: a serious philosophical framework. I want to engage with it at the level it deserves, which means pressing where I think the argument is most vulnerable, precisely because I take it seriously.
Your deployment of Plantinga’s “intrinsic defeater defeater” is the strongest and most honest card you play, because it admits up front that the foundational Christian experience resists external adjudication. The conspiracy analogy is effective. An innocent person may know they are innocent even when every piece of constructed evidence says otherwise. I accept that as a real epistemological condition. But the analogy has a structural limit you do not address: the innocent person in Plantinga’s scenario is correct, and we, the readers of the thought experiment, are told so in advance. The whole force of the example depends on the narrator confirming the innocence before the argument begins. In lived experience, no such narrator exists. The person who “just knows” they are right despite all counter-evidence is sometimes the innocent person in the conspiracy scenario, and sometimes the person who is, in fact, wrong. The defeater defeater cannot distinguish between these two cases from the inside. That is the epistemological problem it was designed to solve, and it solves it by stipulation alone.
Moser’s “invitational evidence” and “kardia theology” interest me a great deal, and I think they are more philosophically fertile than the Plantinga line, because they reframe the question instead of claiming to override counter-arguments. The move shifts from “I can knock out your objections” to “step inside this way of knowing and see what becomes visible.” That is an honest and, I think, courageous epistemological posture. My question is whether it can remain coherent while also claiming exclusivity. You write that Christianity has “a much greater explanatory power and explanatory scope than all the other alternative philosophies and religions.” But invitational evidence, by its own logic, requires the invitee to have accepted the invitation before the evidence becomes legible. If I have not yet entered the Christian framework, the invitation looks identical to the invitation issued by Sufi mystics, Zen practitioners, or Hasidic rebbes, each of whom would testify to an interior experience of equal subjective intensity and would likewise invite me in.
This is where your art analogy is most revealing, and I think it undermines your exclusivity claim. You say you cannot prove that Bach and Händel are the greatest composers in history; you can only testify and invite. I find that persuasive as an epistemological posture. But notice what the analogy leaves out: you need not assert that Shostakovich, Coltrane, and Umm Kulthum are therefore inferior or irrational alternatives. The art analogy works because aesthetic experience is generous. You can love Bach without needing to declare that all other music fails the test of explanatory scope. The moment you move from “let me invite you into this experience” to “this experience is the only rational and sublime worldview,” you have left the invitational posture behind and returned to the propositional one, which then owes the full burden of proof that Moser’s framework was specifically designed to avoid.
On the historical apologetics: you cite Habermas, Craig, Swinburne, and Geisler as establishing that Christianity “rests on something that can be historically documented and verified in a way that all the other religions cannot be.” This is a strong and well-sourced claim within the apologetics tradition. But it raises a question you do not take up. Every one of those scholars begins from a position of faith and argues backward toward historical evidence. The secular historiography of the resurrection, as represented by scholars like Bart Ehrman, Gerd Lüdemann, or Dale Allison (who is himself a Christian and still finds the physical resurrection historically unverifiable), reaches divergent conclusions from the same documentary record. The existence of sophisticated arguments on both sides is itself evidence that the historical question has not been settled by the evidence, and that something other than the documents is doing the persuasive work. That “something other” may well be the mystical experience you describe, but if so, we have returned to the invitation, and the independently verified historical ground has receded.
Your use of Quine is inventive, but I want to note that it cuts in a direction you may not intend. Quine’s “web of belief” thesis holds that no individual belief faces the tribunal of experience in isolation; the entire web adjusts together. Quine himself drew from this a thoroughgoing naturalism and an elimination of the analytic-synthetic distinction. He was, as you know, no theist. When you argue that “the Christian web of belief” has greater explanatory power than “the secular web of belief that Quine tries to offer,” you are using Quine’s architecture against his own conclusions. That is philosophically legitimate; frameworks can be repurposed. But “inference to the best explanation” (abduction) requires a shared evidential base from which competing explanations are evaluated. If the Christian web of belief and the secular web of belief do not share the same evidential base, because the Christian web includes mystical experience as evidence and the secular web does not admit it, then the two webs become incommensurable paradigms, and abduction loses its footing between them. Thomas Kuhn would recognize this problem immediately.
I want to close with something I found both honest and moving in your essay. You write that you hope your health allows you to continue this work. I want you to know that this exchange matters to me, and that the seriousness you bring to it is rare and welcome. You are doing something I respect: you are making your strongest case without evasion, and you are doing it in the open where it can be questioned. That is how philosophy is supposed to work, regardless of where one stands on the underlying metaphysics.
I look forward to your future articles and to reading the English translation of your book when it arrives.
David