THESE REFLECTIONS COME in response to John Shortt's attentive and comprehensive review of my book, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals,1 for which I am very grateful. In that book, I argued that the conviction that scripture is revealed by God comes through the experience of reading scripture, and is distorted when made to rest on a fundamentalist apologetic intent on demonstrating that the Bible contains no errors. Shortt builds on this argument and proposes that the belief ‘the Christian scriptures are revealed by God’ is justified immediately, without recourse to prior reasoning or evidences.2 In this he adapts the arguments of the Reformed epistemologists who defend belief in God as properly basic. It is argued here that these religious beliefs are not significantly like other sorts of belief that have immediate warrant to justify putting them in that category. This discussion has implications for the development and testing of beliefs in children.
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