I haven't watched the opening video, and I've been avoiding the thread because I was never going to watch the video, but I'm somewhat critical of the fideistic approach that seems to underly what little I've seen here of Penner's thought. Kierkegaard is lovely, though I think more as a taste of the existential side of faith than as a useful epistemology.
I think some of what
@muichimotsu has been saying in the last page here really highlights the intellectual assumptions of the modern period. We're no longer in an environment where theism is seen as self-evidently true, and the only question would be deciding between the various religious (or deism). His comments about the idea of a supernatural reality being nothing more than pattern seeking are particularly important--if someone truly believes this, then it's not fair to tell them that their question is the result of a secular and idolatrous modernist worldview. That would be begging the question and result in all manner of cognitive dissonance if actually applied.
I don't believe naturalism is true. I believe that theism (or at least idealism) is probably true. That's not a matter of faith--it's because a couple of Christian apologists actually managed to do their job (in conjunction with a fair amount of atheistic philosophy and a touch of Hinduism). Those who are not interested in actual evidentiary or logically based defenses of theism or Christianity do not need to engage in them, but trying to sabotage the whole project strikes me as ill-advised.
I don't think either A or B is completely appropriate. I have been a skeptic in the past, and it's a mindset that Christians often seem not to understand. I had someone try to convict me of my sin of not thinking his arguments worked before, and it was more than a little bit traumatic. Christian apologetics way too easily cross over into abuse, and that needs to be taken into account.
On the other hand, I don't think the reasons that one person believes, if based entirely on subjective grounds, is necessarily going to be of much interest to a second person. I think it falls into the same trap of "I talk, you listen." That's not a conversation. (Random in person conversations where someone asks you why you believe something are obviously different.)
I think the goal at a personal level should be to just get people thinking, which is probably best served by a Socratic method. Entire worldview shifts take time--you're not going to convince someone of anything in one sitting (or probably at all, since you'll be at most one factor), so the ego and savior complex needs to be checked at the door. Honestly, this probably goes for both sides, since evangelical atheism is a thing too.
Another fun factor is politics. As a leftist, I quickly learned to avoid American apologetic material, since many of the Evangelical writers (and some of the Catholic ones as well) are enmeshed in the culture war and open up their books by attacking the secular left. It was alienating to the point where I'd write someone off without even reading further, and it still annoys me in a sort of "get off my lawn and clean up your own house" manner. If American apologetics is about actually winning people over and not simply the Christian right engaging in some sort of self-congratulatory hate fest, they need to put considerable more thought into presentation.
). There were nice people there, but there were also a couple of fire breathers, and getting lectures about my presuppositions was... alienating, to say the least. Which doesn't mean that I didn't have presuppositions, but that's an issue I'm not even sure how to approach constructively.
