1)  I regard my paper as a further development of and contribution to the discussions on evidentialism found in George Mavrodes, "Jerusalem and Athens Revisited" in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Wolterstorff, "The Migration of the Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics" and Kenneth Konyndyk, "Faith and Evidentialism" in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Stephen J. Wykstra, "Toward a Sensible Evidentialism: On the Notion of Needing Evidence," in Philosophy of Religion; Selected Readings, 2nd ed., ed. William Rowe and William Wainwright (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989); and most recently John Zeis, "Natural Theology: Reformed?" in Rational Faith: Catholic Responses to Reformed Epistemology, ed. Linda Zagzebski (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

2) See Nicholas Wolterstorff, "The Migration of Theistic Arguments" in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Audi and Wainwright, and Alvin Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God" in Faith and Rationality, ed. Plantinga and Wolterstorff.

3) Plantinga identifies this sense of rationality with justification and distinguishes justification from another sense of rationality as warrant, where the latter is that quality or quantity--enough of which--is sufficient (or nearly so) to transform true belief into knowledge. See Plantinga, Warrant: the Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

4) See William Alston, "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification" in Alston, Epistemic Justification (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 145-151. Here Alston argues that the deontological view of justification lays down neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for justified belief.

5) For an explication of truth-conducive justification, see Alston, "Concepts of Epistemic Justification" and "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification" in Alston, Epistemic Justification, pp. 83-84, 143-152.

6) In fact, recent versions of the evidentialist challenge have been critical of deontological rationality. Keith Parsons, for instance, after pointing out the disparity between the deontological and truth-conducive conceptions, says, "It follows that the claim that the theist is within his epistemic rights in believing in God is a rather weak claim, and, in my view, is not terribly interesting philosophically" ("Is There a Case for Christian Theism" in Does God Exist?: The Great Debate, ed. J.P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1990), pp. 177-78).

7) For the only exception to this, see endnote no. 31.

8) For discussions on this debate, see Robert Raymond, The Justification of Knowledge (New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1979) and Alan P.F. Sell, The Philosophy of Religion 1875-1980 (London: Croom Helm, 1988). For a critique of presuppositionalism (specifically Cornelius Van Til's presuppositionalism), see R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley, Classical Apologetics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), chapters 10-20.

9) In this paper I will not enter into the question of how it is that theistic belief could be immediately justified. Theistic belief could be based upon the grounds of religious experience (such as developed by Alston in Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)), or alternatively it could be the product of a properly functioning belief forming mechanism, subject to whatever additional constraints are necessary along the lines of Plantinga's recent warrant thesis (See Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)). Since I am assuming a truth-conducive view of justification, there would have to be a reliability constraint, though this could be spelled out in different ways--reliable process, reliable indication, a wholly externalist theory, or a mix of internalism and externalism.

10) I will purposely avoid reference to John Calvin at this point. Although I believe one can find (at least implicit) support for a mediate natural knowledge of God in Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (and I argue for this conclusion in another paper "Calvin's Natural Theology: Immediate or Mediate?"), the explicit endorsement of theistic arguments (and a natural theology based on them) does not enter into Reformed theology until the development of Protestant Scholasticism under the likes of Girolamo Zanchi (1516-90), Theodore Beza (1519-1605), and Lambert Daneau (1530-95). Consequently, theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, William Shedd, Charles and A.A. Hodge, Robert L. Dabney, and B.B Warfield must be viewed as representative of a long-standing tradition in Reformed theology with respect to their endorsement of theistic arguments.

11) William Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (n.d.; reprint, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1980), pp. 221-222.

12) Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (n.d.; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), pp. 192, 202.

13) Augustus Strong, Systematic Theology (1907; reprint, Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1979), p. 71.

14) See Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), I, vii, 4 and 5.

15) Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, tr. J. Hendrik DeVries (1898; reprint, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1980), p. 129.

16) Ibid., p. 131.

17) Herman Bavinck, The Doctrine of God, tr. William Hendriksen (1951; reprint, Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), pp. 78-79.

18) See Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 3-8.

19) Calvin, Institutes, I, v, 15.

20) Ibid., I, i, 1.

21) Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 8.

22) I do not mean to suggest that Reformed evidentialists have not been interested in an apologetic which targets Pc-beliefs. But whereas Reformed evidentialists have buttressed such a Christian apologetic by historical evidences and natural theology (so-called minimal theism), presuppositionalists have questioned both the adequacy and propriety of such a method, in part for the reasons mentioned in the remaining portion of the present paragraph (in the text).

23) Richard Swinburne, for instance, takes up the question of the grounds for believing the claim that some particular book or creed contains revealed truth in Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). In "Could there Be More than One God" in Faith and Philosophy 5 (July 1988): 225-241, Swinburne argues from natural theology to the probability of God existing as a trinity of persons.

24) One such class of beliefs might be those with self-referential indicators, such as in the proposition "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savor" or "God is speaking to me" (when reading Scripture). Others, such as Gordon Clark (and possibly John Calvin), maintain that the belief that Scripture is the Word of God can only be produced by the illumination of the Spirit.

25) As a technical qualification, though I am focusing on immediate modes of belief formation, the same line of reasoning could hold for mediate modes of belief formation. It could be that some PES-beliefs are formed on the basis of reasons and are mediately justified. Here "privileged epistemic states" includes privileged doxastic grounds for belief. In fact this will generally be the case if beliefs based upon privileged immediate modes of belief formation form the (necessary) grounds for other beliefs in a Christian's noetic structure.

26) Throughout this paper I am assuming a source-relevant conception of epistemic justification, according to which the origin or psychological source of a belief is crucial to its being truth-conducively justified.

27) See Alston, "Two Types of Foundationalism," "What's Wrong with Immediate Knowledge," and "Level Confusions in Epistemology" in Alston, Epistemic Justification.

28) Ibid., p. 37.

29) This is by no means an uncontroversial thesis, but space constraints prohibit a defense. For a discussion on why epistemic beliefs cannot be immediately justified, see Alston, "Two Types of Foundationalism" in Epistemic Justification, pp. 23-32.

30) I believe that this sheds light on several of John Calvin's comments, which seem to suggest an ambivalence regarding the role of evidences vis-a-vis Christian belief. Although he speaks of belief in Scripture as the Word of God not being based upon reasons or arguments, he also speaks positively about Scripture being reliable and so on and presents arguments to this end. The latter proposition, though, is what I have been calling a higher-level proposition, so it is no contradiction to allow rational belief without evidence on the lower level but also maintain rational beliefs on the higher-level require (or at least have) evidence.

31) Note here that P* must be "based upon adequate reasons," but we need not think that the support mode requires a conscious inference of some sort. We must allow that grounds (reasons) for mediate justification can be possessed implicitly--though justifying P* would, of course, involve a justificatory argument exhibiting the inferential relations between P* and its supporting reasons in an explicit fashion. That would be the situation in apologetics.

32) In another paper, "Alstonian Evidentialism and Reformed Epistemology," I devote my attention wholly to the complex epistemological thesis envisaged here. There I argue: (1) Alston's multi-level foundationalism is compatible with Reformed epistemology (even in its strongest form), and (2) the form of evidentialism entailed by Alston's epistemology satisfies the cognitive desiderata which has inspired traditional evidentialism--internalism and reflective rationality, and therefore (3) Reformed epistemology is compatible with a strong form of evidentialism.

33) As a technical point, the sense in which Pt* is a reason for Pt, or the sense in which justifying Pt* provides a justification for Pt, is not truth-conducive. Justifying Pt*, though, does give us reasons for regarding Pt as truth-conducively justified. The rationale for deviating from truth-conducive justification at this point stems from the nature of apologetics. In apologetics some arguments can be useful even if they do not render their conclusions more probable than not, for it is possible to conjoin such arguments with others in the attempt to present a cumulative case which does bring a particular conclusion to the level of rational acceptability, to the level of being more probable than not. Higher-level positive apologetics, properly construed and effectively employed, will be part of a cumulative case apologetic.

34) Although in higher-level apologetics the justifying of the nonepistemic belief that Pt is mediated by the justifying of the epistemic belief that Pt*, the justifying of Pt* will, in turn, depend upon the justifying of nonepistemic beliefs b₁,. . .,b_n, for what the justification of Pt* depends upon are beliefs as to what in fact is the case (whether Pt possesses some property Q) and beliefs as to what principles of evaluation are valid (whether possessing Q actually confers justifictaion on Pt), not beliefs about some person's epistemic relation to these elements. Accordingly, (1) the belief that Pt* (Pt is immediately justified) is adduced as a reason for (2) the belief that Pt. But something like the belief that (A) Pt possesses a property Q and (B) possessing Q renders Pt justified are reasons for Pt*. In this way, epistemic beliefs rest on nonepistemic foundations. See Alston, "Two Types of Foundationalism" in Alston, Epistemic Justification, p. 29.