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So far as I can see, there neither are nor can be any such transcendental arguments for specifically religious or philosophical claims as such. All that one can offer transcendental arguments for are: (1) the existential affirmations that all specifically religious or philosophical affirmations as such somehow express; and (2) the metaphysical and moral affirmations that those existential affirmations in tum turn necessarily imply. But, then, I cannot agree with Gamwell's claim that "theology is bound to assert that the affirmation of God represented in the authoritative witness to Jesus as the Christ cannot be true unless it can be redeemed by showing that faith in this God is shared, at least implicitly, by all human individuals" (364).

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Indeed, I judge it to be caught in the same difficulty as was created by my own argument in the title essay of The Reality of God, which I recognized and addressed as such in the Preface to the second, paperback edition of the book. I sought to remove this difficulty by not only allowing but also insisting that "to establish 'the reality of God' in the distinctively theistic sense of that phrase [as distinct from the completely general sense in which it means the objective ground of our basic confidence] logically requires that one establish more than 'the realty of faith' and its objective ground." Even if our basic confidence in the meaning of life can indeed be critically validated by transcendental argument, the question remains "in what terms, theistic or some other, we can most appropriately conceptualize and account for it" (xi). And to answer this question, as well as, of course, the further question "whether any among the historical religions is justified in claiming to be its decisive representation or revelation," seems to me beyond the competence of any properly transcendental argument to answer (39).

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