I'm traveling and without Gangadean's book, so I can't continue my ethics discussion at the moment. But I've been reading Plato and had a thought relevant to Gangadean's epistemology. One of the most referenced of Plato's dialogues among epistemologists is the Meno. In it, Plato considers what it is that makes knowledge more valuable or desirable than mere true belief.
Philosophers claim that not everything we believe counts as an instance of knowledge. For example, it is hypothesized that one can never know something that is false. You can't know that the earth is flat, just as you can't know that a triangle has four sides even though you can believe such things. Further, philosophers say that some of our beliefs, perhaps even a lot of what we believe, is actually false. So it follows that beliefs come apart from knowledge--the two are not coextensive.
Further, not even all of our true beliefs count as instances of knowledge again according to most philosophers. Suppose you are trying to get to the local grocery store. You come to believe a particular set of directions is the correct way to your desired location. Your belief might be true in virtue of luck in various forms. For instance, suppose that someone told you the correct directions to get to the local grocer. However, this person is a strangely mischievous informant who has meant to mislead you for kicks. Indeed, unbeknownst to you, they often lie about such matters, but you have no reason to suspect as much. Further suppose that this person fully intended on giving you false directions, but due to confusion on her part, wound up accidentally giving you the correct ones. If you take such a person at their word, because you don't know that they intended on misleading you, and form the belief that the particular directions they gave you are the correct ones, many philosophers have the intuition that you don't know the way to the grocery store. This is despite the fact that you wound up with a belief that is true i.e., you accidentally have a true belief about which way to go. Intuitive reactions to thought experiments such as this have lead philosophers to say that knowledge also comes apart from mere true belief. That is to say, not all of your true beliefs count as knowledge. Alternatively you might have just guessed the directions and on the basis of guessing come to believe the directions (you are unusually confident in your ability to guess such things). Your guess and attendant belief might be true, but there again, philosophers are inclined to say that such a true belief doesn't count as knowledge. For example, they think you need to have evidence or some sort of justification which accounts for why you have the true belief in order to have the pertinent knowledge.
Now there's a general meta-level issue here about the method by which philosophers have come to say what counts as a genuine instance of knowledge and what doesn't. At the heart of any such theory are gut reactions or non inferential judgments that philosophers call intuitions. These intuitions are taken as the relevant data and a theory of knowledge is considered good insofar as it can explain or account for them. And I think Gangadean is no stranger to this method. He claims that knowledge is (maximally) justified true belief as opposed to mere true belief, or mere belief, which may be false. But how he comes to such a theory of the nature of knowledge would be utterly mysterious if not for appeals to his own intuitions. This should set off some red flags---at least so long as Gangadean maintains that beliefs on the basis of intuitions are problematic or fideistic or whatever. The sharp reader will notice that this fully generalizes. Gangadean not only says a lot of things about eternality, causation, time, presupposition, reason, common ground, more basic vs less basic, but also uses his concepts of these very things to build upon. But at some point, he must ask himself what his method is for determining for example, what counts as the right or correct theory of eternality, or causation, or basic, or reason. I suspect that all of this will at some point, rest on raw intuitions, or observations regarding ordinary language usage, and the like. That is to say, something other than proofs, and ultimately fallible methods of inquiry.
Returning to the example of you coming to form a true belief about the directions to the grocery store: it seems like you'll get to the grocery store just fine because you've got a true belief about the whereabouts. This is despite the fact that the way you got it seems intuitively unstable. You fare no worse than in a situation where you have genuine knowledge of the fact. In other words, insofar as the aim of forming the belief is to get you to the grocery store, knowledge and mere true belief will serve you equally well. Again, intuitively, knowledge takes more than mere true belief. It's a special kind of true belief. It is filling in this "more" that will fill in one's theory of knowledge. That is, figuring out precisely what we need to add to a true belief so that it counts as knowledge represents much of the work of epistemology.
There are two related issues emerging. First, what exactly the difference is between knowledge and mere true belief. As I've noted, essentially this gets us into building a theory of knowledge. And we've discussed before that Gangadean has one such theory of knowledge. But he fails to motivate it properly. If you're going to offer a theory of knowledge as the correct one, given many alternative theories, you ought to explain why yours is the one others ought to accept. The problem here is that Gangadean, if he's being consistent with his own standards, shouldn't depend on the standard methods that philosophers employ to motivate theories namely, using raw intuitions as the data to be explained by a particular theory. As I've hinted at above, the method most often employed by theorists of knowledge is to appeal to intuitions that they have about the nature of knowledge. Often this concerns observing the conditions under which we attribute knowledge of some hypothetical subject. That is an appeal to how people talk and use the word 'knowledge' in everyday discourse. Importantly, this is nothing like proof of anything. There's no argument given at this level or at least arguments bottom out. Moreover, an appeal to language usage is far from infallible as a means of informing a conceptual analysis. After all one might be using the word incorrectly while being ignorant of this fact. This doesn't damn the whole practice of appeals to ordinary language usage--it just opens the door for rational doubt. It calls into question whether one's theories are infallible. Additionally, philosophers create thought experiments and simply ask themselves, does the protagonist of the sometimes fanciful narratives have knowledge or not. For instance, the example I presented regarding the directions to the grocery store. You read it and then have some sort of immediate reaction about whether the subject in question knows or doesn't know the directions. In other words, what philosophers do is consider their intuitive reactions to stories meant to probe one's view of a concept or the meaning of a word like 'knowledge' and use this to build a theory inductively, or better: abductively. Again, neither method should be used by Gangadean insofar as he thinks that the practice of relying on intuitions is simply unfit for philosophy and incompatible with his principle of clarity. And as I've mentioned before, if he claims to have special "rational intuitions" (he's told me this once before) that are particularly reliable and fit for such reasoning, then he's got to give a theory that explains just what makes certain intuitions rational in contradistinction to non-rational intuitions and he better not depend on more intuitions to do so on pain of circularity. I'm often surprised by the fact that Gangadeanians seem utterly ignorant of this background information about theory building in philosophy as it concerns theories of knowledge. It's almost as if they don't realize that since the birth of philosophy, philosophers have appealed to intuitions to build theories in just this manner--and Plato is certainly no exception, neither is their favored Aristotle. So much for the issue concerning theories of knowledge.
The second issue that is emerging in the Meno is often called the value problem of knowledge. So not only does Plato hint at the problem of figuring out what the nature of knowledge is as distinct from mere true belief, but he also asks why it is that we should care about having/attaining knowledge over and above mere true beliefs. So he's assuming there is a difference between mere true belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other and then asking why we should aim at the latter over the former. And this is another issue that Gangadean largely ignores in his book and in my experience, Gangadeanians are by in large ignorant of. So the main epistemological questions to ask the Gangadeanian are two-fold. First, why should anybody accept their theory of knowledge that knowledge = maximally justified true belief, over other theories of knowledge? The point to press here is whether they can prove that their theory of knowledge is the correct one sans appeals to intuition. If you pay attention and keep pressing the issue, you will see that they ultimately depend on intuitions just like everybody else.
Secondly, even if their theory of knowledge is the correct one (a huge if), why should anybody desire to ever attain it as over above mere true beliefs? As it concerns God's existence, even supposing that one could know with certainty that God exists i.e., it's clear that God exists, it's a separate question whether one should strive to have such knowledge. After all, Gangadean claims that all people should know what is clear---and since God's existence is clear according to him, it follows that as he sees things, all persons should know that God exists. That is, they should know that God exists rather than have a merely true belief that God exists. This is why Gangadean claims that people who believe in God, but are unable to prove that God exists, are falling short in some fundamental way. Presumably Gangadean will say that such persons that believe in God for various reasons that are not the "proofs" that he offers, have a true belief that God exists, but they don't have knowledge. The value problem of knowledge suggested to us by Plato's Meno applied to Gangadeanian views brings about the following question. Why should anyone desire to know that God exists rather than merely having a true belief that God exists? That is to say, why does Gangadean think people are falling short in some fundamental respect for failing to have a maximally justified true belief that God exists?
From what I've heard, Gangadean often cites Romans 1:20 and the notion that inexcusability implies clarity. But this is no good. In the first place, any claims in scripture are unfit for the task at hand since whether we ought to know something or not is a much more basic issue than whether the bible is the word of God. The matter at hand is "logically" prior to whether a holy book provides the truths for salvation. After all, special revelation according to Gangadean presuppose a lot of more basic issues---you need to know that you're in need of salvation, and that you've sinned, and that God exists and that God is perfectly just and merciful, among other things, prior to coming to know that the bible is the word of God. This is because, as Ganagdean sees it, the bible is about redemption which presupposes that one needs redemption. It's just illegitimate then for Gangadean to appeal to the bible as authoritative on the matter of whether one ought to know that God exists rather than merely have a true belief that he does. I've also already explored more problems with this approach but am currently too lazy to add a link. A brief study of my blog will uncover them, though.
Even if we spot Gangadean the right to appeal to scripture to make his case, the glaring problem is that the bible doesn't distinguish clearly between knowledge and belief. In Romans 1:20, man is held inexcusable for unbelief. It makes no mention of knowledge. Sure if one knows that God exists this seems to entail that one believes that God exists, but the entailment doesn't hold in the other direction. So being held responsible for unbelief in p doesn't mean that one is held responsible for the lack of knowledge regarding p. When Paul speaks of God's existence being clear so that man is without excuse (for unbelief), we need to consider what makes something clear to believe. Perhaps Paul is saying that we all have sufficient reason to believe that God exists, but this need not entail that one has sufficient reason to know it let alone that one has sufficient reason to know it with certainty which is the even stronger claim made by Gangadean.
I'm not sure how then Gangadean can answer the value problem for knowledge. How can he prove that all persons must (are morally obligated to) know, with certainty, that God exists. Why can't we just have a true belief that God exists? From Gangadean's point of view, most Christians and theists have true beliefs that God exists, but they don't have knowledge, and this he views as a basic moral failure. But if knowledge is not more desirable or valuable or whatever, then it shouldn't be a problem for the rest of us to believe truly that God exists without knowing it. Of course this would threaten his entire ministry, his life's work. If Gangadean can't justify why all humans ought to know with certainty that God exists, then the purported clarity of God's existence is of little use.
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