VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, [10] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 17:48:53 04/22/01 Sun
Author: OPB
Subject: Re: But where does that leave one?
In reply to: Steve A. 's message, "But where does that leave one?" on 16:57:35 04/22/01 Sun

I suppose i should give some background: the lesson was on false spirituality as opposed to true spirituality ( a relationship with jay-sus) Apparently i'm not allowed to make certain observations about the physical world with any more certainty than they make observations about the spiritual world.

Certainty of any knowledge is unattainable; epistemologists finally realized that in the middle of the 20th century.
Once upon a time, starting with Descartes, it was thought that to be bona fide knowledge a certain item had to be known with absolute certainty; hence, Descartes' MEDITATIONS. But today, knowledge tends to be analyzed not as a perfect, undefeatable thing but in terms of degrees; i.e., if "absolute certainty" is a 10 on the scale, then 9 is slightly less than certain, while 1 is dubious. You can never reach 10; your knowledge could always be defeated by some future development.

Some things I'd say we know to a 9 degree: the existence of ourselves and some kind of world. Further, that this world of ours is a physical world describable by science would probably rate 7 or 8.

But to me, there seems that knowledge of the physical world would have to be more reliable, because we have more ways of apporaching physical assertations with anylytical and critical methods outside of experience-based "knowledge"

You're talking about justification of knowledge here. Given that knowledge comes in degrees, we should believe propositions that have the best reasons on their side.
But what exactly should count as a good reason to accept a proposition?

There are two broad answers. There are those who hold that "reasons" are really just a matter of a certain belief being formed by a reliable process--e.g., by the senses. This is a causal analysis of knowledge; external objects interact with our sense faculties to create beliefs about the objects. The second route holds that reasons should be based on evidence; knowledge is a conscious intellectual activity, in other words. If we investigate a certain thing and find that we're able to make good predictions about it based on past experience, e.g., that's evidence that the thing exists (at least). The inductive logic of science fits best with this second method.

But this is really beside the point where Xianity is concerned. The deepest error the YHWH slave makes is accepting the Bible as authoritative; because you can never be entirely certain of anything, accepting the Bible as God's One True Complete Revelation to man is a big leap, no matter what your supposed evidence. Even if you could prove every proposition that the Bible makes to the 9th degree, you still couldn't invest the absolute conviction in it that Xianity demands; your leap of faith would always be non-sequitur. In trying to take a scientific or rational approach to proving Xianty, you unwittingly undermine it.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Post a message:
This forum requires an account to post.
[ Create Account ]
[ Login ]
Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.