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WHY YOU CAN KNOW GOD 

The following conclusions are presented in a progressive, logical order.

  1. The argument for believing in God is a lot like a court case and therefore it is the total weight of evidence from all three ways of knowing that should be considered when drawing a conclusion.
  2.  Pure reason as understood today does not exclude the possibility of God rather it points to the limits of what we can say with certainty.  Basically all knowledge is contingent.
  3.  Therefore other witnesses can be admitted even if they only produce partial evidence
  4. The order of the world suggests a creator.  All though Allen's rendering of the cosmological argument is as far as one can go with a positivistic approach, and a god of the gaps approach should be avoided,  there is warrant for both critiquing Hume's dismissal of the teleological  argument, and considering intelligent design arguments --  not as conclusive proof but as supplemental evidence.
  5. I find the argument for the trustworthiness of the New Testament compelling
  6. I find the claim for Jesus compelling
  7. As a self living in the world and hungering for hope, meaning and purpose, Kierkegaard Three ways of living in the world rang subjectively true to me.
  8. As a self living in the world, I am subjectively attracted to the Christian way of being in the world.
  9. Some knowledge is only gained through experience. As a self living in the world, I have had an personal encounter with God that appears to all my ways of knowing to be legitimate.
  10. Therefore, weighing the witness of the evidences above I conclude that my belief in God is both well founded and crucial. And so I wage my life on it's certainty.

Self Critique:
The two weakest evidences in my case are:

1. Partial use of the intelligent design argument - it could have been left out without diminishing (much) the strength of the overall argument.

2. Explanation of the fourth case of suffering.  I provide only super rational (a skeptic would say irrational) arguments.  Yet there is overwhelming (but not universal) evidence for the subjective arguments I give. This weakness however is common to most apologetics for the Christian faith.