God, Santa, and The Tooth Fairy

[The Architect Of Fate]

The OP seem to embrace the notion that people cannot have justified true beliefs unless their beliefs trace back to some prior ideas that are unquestionably true (foundationalism) and are in that way justified. This type of epistemology is vulnerable to Pyrrhonic skepticism. That said, I don't take the critiques of radical skeptics very seriously, myself. I favor a normative approach to epistemology. There are many things people commonly consider true or existing, despite the fact there is no tangible evidence for them - other minds, non-spectral color hues, etc. My general rule is that things are as they appear to be unless shown otherwise by some defeater.

I also define evidence as observations that warrant belief. Typical Scholastic observations would be of a 'cosmic' level, such as that there is 'something rather than nothing' or that 'there are degrees of perfection'. Others like Thomas Benteley Hart, in the Orthodox tradition refer to mystical observations of Bliss and Pure Consciousness. In either case, the claim being made is that the known universe, taken as a whole, has features that warrant belief in a larger unobservable reality. That larger reality is not just another being in a world of beings. A chip of the Totality is not the Totality. This is why I consider it silly to compare mythological creatures, that are all supposedly beings in the world, with the God of Classical Theism, Being-Itself, that sustains the existence of all beings. That's just a category error.

So as far as I am concerned, my pre-existing sense that God exists is warranted by 'cosmic' observations such as those in the 5W but also the experience of Beauty with a capital 'B'. After that, I personally find the commonly proposed defeaters insufficient for a variety of reasons, such as failing to account for the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Translation -----I don't like you comparing the silly thing I believe to silly things I don't believe. You're a meanie!