The real religion?

[bennyboy]

The point of the conversation about 'is belief in God properly basic' (as opposed to just basic) centers around the fact that it is an intuition (not inferred--based on evidence) that God exists and therefore is warranted (as opposed to justified) to believe so. They only way to defeat this position is to show this belief to be false. Simply proposing another way this intuition may have developed is not a defeater. 

Correction-- the only way to defeat this position is to be disinterested in it and to find something else to do. The world of ideas isn't divided into God/not-God. It's divided into JHVW, Thor, Zeus, Buddha, Krsna, atheism, and indifference. If you don't want to assert something, then you are using a suspiciously large amount of words to do so. If you want to assert something based on your intuition, then you have the BOP of demonstrating that your intuition is somehow more valid than that of literally hundreds of different intuitions.

See, that's the problem with intuitions-- they aren't shared in a common objective framework. So unless you can find a way to share yours with me, then however much you value the experiences which you attribute to God, that God idea will remain irrelevant in my framework.

The conclusion of this line of reasoning is that you (the atheist) are not justified in complaining that a Christian's belief in God is irrational. While there is other evidence, none is required if belief in God is 'properly basic'.

Sounds like WLC to me.

Anyway, if a belief in God were properly basic, as I understand you to mean it, young children would have an unnamed belief in God, and would instantly recognize the thing when it was described to them. This is not the case. It is more the case that people of different cultures have various religious beliefs, which are not coincidentally those of those parents, but that as adults, they cannot recognize that their ideas represent cultural learning.

Here's the thing that for me sinks you entirely-- you have a nearly impossible 2-step process: 1) claim that your intuitions and feelings represent knowledge of reality; 2) demonstrate that the intuitions and feelings of dozens of other cultures and thousands of subcultures do NOT represent knowledge of reality. That you will achieve that second step seems highly unlikely to anyone who isn't already a Christian.