Epistemological: 'relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion'

The definition of epistemology given is accurate and standard. The implicit evidentialist challenge, however, rests on a contestable and now widely criticized epistemological thesis (strong evidentialism) rather than a neutral, agreed-upon standard. Alvin Plantinga's *Warranted Christian Belief* (1998, completing the trilogy with *Warrant: The Current Debate* and *Warrant and Proper Function*) argues, using mainstream analytic epistemology (reliabilist and proper-function accounts of warrant), that belief in God can be 'properly basic' — rational without being inferred as the conclusion of an argument from other evidence — in the same structural way memory beliefs, perceptual beliefs, and belief in other minds are properly basic, i.e., produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in the right environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth (the 'A/C model,' extending Calvin's sensus divinitatis). This does not mean Christian belief is immune from evidence or argument — Plantinga and others still engage natural theology extensively — but it does mean the demand that theistic belief meet a strict Cliffordian evidentialist bar, on pain of being irrational, itself needs independent justification, and Clifford's own principle notoriously fails its own test (it is not itself provable by sufficient empirical evidence).

A properly-basic-belief epistemology, combined with cumulative natural theology (cosmological, fine-tuning, moral arguments) and historical evidence for the resurrection, gives Christian belief multiple independent, mutually reinforcing epistemic supports rather than resting on a single fragile argument.