Thank you very much for the reference to ""The Retreat To Commitment". I hadn't heard of William Bartley's book before.
Best regards
You are welcome. Believe it or not, that book and the epistemological constructions derived from it put quite a dent in Objectivist thought. Not that Objectivism is so terrible, but it does have a weakness or two that become more obvious after reading the book. There is quite a bit of irony that atheists have used a philosophy book written by a theologian to invalidate Objectivism as an epistemology. Bartley is generally credited with authoring the post-Objectivist epistemology, often called "pan-critical rationalism" among many other names.
The origin of Bartley's work was that he was trying to resolve what he (correctly) perceived to be weaknesses in the rationality of Christianity as pointed out by Objectivists et al. He agreed that the arguments provided by other theologians for the rationality of Christianity were technically poor, but considered that to be largely a reflection of the arguments rather than Christianity per se. He ended up developing an important new epistemological framework that is not only excellent from an academic/technical standpoint, but which provided a general proof that a belief in Christianity is not necessarily irrational. Which was his original goal, finding previous arguments to be technically unsatisfactory (which they really were).