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Originally Posted by BeaucoupFish
You're asking for and expecting theistic answers from non-theists.
Why would you expect an atheist to respond to being asked "who's your god" or "what god do you get your Ultimate Authority from?" with any god-like answer?
How would you know what I'm "expecting." I am asking a straightforward question, and the person that I ask the question to can answer it any way they want. In fact, I obviously would
not expect an atheist's ultimate authority to be "god-like" (if by "god-like" you mean a
person as the ultimate standard). Everybody who makes knowledge claims has an implicit or explicit ultimate standard (or authority).
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Any theist that thinks atheists need to provide theistic answers to their questions (so to name two: you and Lisle).
No, I don't expect a
theistic answer from an atheist. But, I do recognize that any non-theistic ultimate authority will fail in at least one of three ways: It will be arbitrary, it will be inconsistent or it will fail to account for the preconditions of intelligibility.
Here is quote (actually a paraphrase, since I don't know where the paper is) from an unpublished paper written by a friend of mine:
While there may be no rational argument for theism, there is no non-theistic argument for rationality.
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Epistemic justification (internalism vs. externalism)
The topic should be right up your alley, and is a required topic to understand epistemic justification. The difference between internal vs. external justification is night and day, which is why the switching between the two by presupp apologists is a big deal (regardless of intent). It will also address your Ultimate Authority concept.
Wiki's entry: link
Stanford's entry: link
If you prefer some audio to listen to, my favourite YouTube atheist philosopher (known as Ozymandias) talked about this topic in the following link, in responding to a question about JTB (for about 10 minutes starting from timestamp 1:29:45):
https://youtu.be/qagiQ_mepao?t=5325
Thanks for the links!