“Either first principles are axiomatic and self-evident, or there are no principles at all anywhere, including the nihilistic principle that there are no principles” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 82).
More Than Difficult
“Autonomous and humanistic epistemology is the ultimate exercise in picking yourself up by your own coat collar, lifting yourself by your own bootstraps, or standing in a bucket in order to carry yourself upstairs” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 82).
Magic Balcony
“Everyone wants to pretend that he can postulate a magic balcony upon which a finite creature can stand, and from which vantage that finite creature can survey everything in the cosmos that has any epistemological bearing or significance at all. Part of the deal is that everyone agrees not to ask too many questions about …
Proving the Proofs
“Finite creatures always have to begin from somewhere. Finite creatures have to start. God has created us in such a way as to be able to reason axiomatically, and for that to be the only way we could be able to reason. These axioms can be of pure reason (parallel lines don’t cross each other), …
Epistemic Weird
“Epistemology is like taking your eyeballs out to look at them. If your optic nerve were elastic, and you could pull your eyeballs out and point them at each other, what exactly would you see?” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 80)
Epistemic Turtles
“We want to start at the very beginning and we think that the very beginning is ‘How can we know anything at all?’ And, once we have answered the question of how we know, we ask how we can possibly know that. And as it turns out, it really is turtles all the way down” …
Faith Sits
“When a man sits down in a chair, he certainly has faith in the chair. But it is the chair that holds him, not his faith. The faith does not provide an iota of additional strength to the chair. But the faith still sits” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 76).
Inexorable Futures
“A child in the womb knows nothing of birth, a nursing child knows nothing of running around in the yard, a toddler knows nothing of falling in love, a man knows nothing of the resurrection of the dead” (Mere Fundamentalism, pp. 74-75).
Basic
“If God lives, then we shall live again” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 70).
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The Root Issue
“God is only unbelievable because God is unbearable—for He is holy and we are not” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 68).