But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification.

In epistemology, that would be assuming the classic foundationalist position. There are two other possible options - infinite regression and coherentism. I reject foundationalism because it's ad hoc. Foundationalism (like Descartes' famous cogito) got nuked during the Enlightenment by skeptics like Hume and later Kant and became an untannable position. If being ad hoc is allowed, then all argumentation and philosophical discourse about truth, existence and the good becomes impossible.

Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.

That's an appeal to irrelevancy and an appeal to authority/majority. Nothing about this has to do with the position being true or not.

You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong.

Sure, how we arrive to knowledge depends on our worldview but worldviews aren't equal. I already demonstrated how the materialist worldview can't justify it's basic principles and assumptions. The point is that the laws of logic and thought are objective. Just because I'm the one making the claim or the argument doesn't make it a subjective claim. If I can demonstrate that competing worldviews are incoherent, unjustified and lack explanatory power, while making the case that my worldview is coherent and grounds the things we all appeal to (reason, logic, meaning, purpose, free will, universals, etc), then my worldview is true.

You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves.

They may be dumb, but you still have to demonstrate why they're false. That something seems dumb or unlikely to you is not an argument about it being true or not. Atheists think all religious claims are equally dumb and made up. So what?

Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims? So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?

Saying we all believe in nature therefore belief in nature is the common ground doesn't work. Nature to a Christian is an entirely different concept than what nature means to a materialist, new age gnostic or a Buddhist. This is a word-concept fallacy - just because the same word is used (like God, creator, nature, etc) it doesn't follow that it points to the same idea. Nature itself is a metaphysical concept. How you interpret nature depends on things that are not found in nature itself - this ties back to what Hume is/ought problem and Thomas Kuhn's ideas about paradigms and theory-ladenness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness).

This is why broad generic theism (like perennialism, theosophy and freemasonry) doesn't work in making a coherent worldview because it's riddled with incompatible core beliefs. There's no "lowest common denominator God".

But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification.

In epistemology, that would be assuming the classic foundationalist position. There are two other possible options - infinite regression and coherentism. I reject foundationalism because it's ad hoc. Foundationalism (like Descartes' famous cogito) got nuked during the Enlightenment by skeptics like Hume and later Kant and became an untannable position. If being ad hoc is allowed, then all argumentation and philosophical discourse about truth, existence and the good becomes impossible.

Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.

That's an appeal to irrelevancy and an appeal to authority/majority.

You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong.

Sure, how we arrive to knowledge depends on our worldview but worldviews aren't equal. I already demonstrated how the materialist worldview can't justify it's basic principles and assumptions. The point is that the laws of logic and thought are objective. Just because I'm the one making the claim or the argument doesn't make it a subjective claim. If I can demonstrate that competing worldviews are incoherent, unjustified and lack explanatory power, while making the case that my worldview is coherent and grounds the things we all appeal to (reason, logic, meaning, purpose, free will, universals, etc), then my worldview is true.

You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves.

They may be dumb, but you still have to demonstrate why they're false. That something seems dumb or unlikely to you is not an argument about it being true or not. Atheists think all religious claims are equally dumb and made up. So what?

Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims? So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?

Saying we all believe in nature therefore belief in nature is the common ground doesn't work. Nature to a Christian is an entirely different concept than what nature means to a materialist, new age gnostic or a Buddhist. This is a word-concept fallacy - just because the same word is used (like God, creator, nature, etc) it doesn't follow that it points to the same idea. Nature itself is a metaphysical concept. How you interpret nature depends on things that are not found in nature itself - this ties back to what Hume is/ought problem and Thomas Kuhn's ideas about paradigms and theory-ladenness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness).

This is why broad generic theism (like perennialism, theosophy and freemasonry) doesn't work in making a coherent worldview because it's riddled with incompatible core beliefs. There's no "lowest common denominator God".