[εις επαινον δοξης αυτου] New comment on Lived Sense, a Part of Rational Experience.
jeff has left a new comment on your post "Lived Sense, a Part of Rational Experience":
Hi Matt,
I will read the book when I finish my test (like I said on Facebook) but I'm getting bored of studying for the evening and as a non-physics intellectual diversion I'll make an effort to make preliminary comments on the passages posted on your blog.
I'm a little confused about the first paragraph here. I don't think a decision such as this would be made because of a feeling in the stomach; rather, there is a rational argument for why to not trust this mechanic.
Further, the difference between the "experience of God" and all of the other things listed here - "music, sunsets, childbirths... etc" is that all these other items interact with us through materialistic means. We see the sunset, we hear the music... we interact with them through our senses. "Bodily longings" aren't typically considered to have much epistemological virtue so far as I can tell, nor should they. Seeing the sunset and enjoying it tells us nothing about the sun. We can learn about the sun, but it's not done though our feelings. Further, having feelings about something not only doesn't tell anything about that thing, it doesn't even fix its existence. I can image a sunset right now and have feelings about it.
There are a couple of reasons we could trust a source of information. One is that there is a reason by which this source has expertise or credibility: our parents are older than us and have lived more life; our mechanic went to technical college to learn about cars. We might trust a book written by an expert, if we know who that expert is and whence came their expertise. Scripture, however, is sourceless in the traditional sense. The other reason we might trust something is because it has proven to be right repeatedly; the mechanic always fixes the car, so he will this time, too. Scripture could be trustworthy by this measure. But, if you divide claims made by the scripture into, say, advice on how to run your life in the material world and claims about the nature of God, you will find the former have been significantly upgraded with each passing generation of humans and the later unverifiable.
Imagine you have a Muslim friend and you both have broken cars. You agree to do the same thing: you both take your cars to the mechanic, because you both have found that mechanics fix cars. "Mechanics fix cars" is a verifiable claim. On the other hand, you do not agree about Scripture, because the claims made therein cannot be evaluated by either of you - at least not until you die, at which point your capacity to evaluate them may or may not be very limited.
Posted by jeff to εις επαινον δοξης αυτου at 6:04 PM
Hi Matt,
I will read the book when I finish my test (like I said on Facebook) but I'm getting bored of studying for the evening and as a non-physics intellectual diversion I'll make an effort to make preliminary comments on the passages posted on your blog.
I'm a little confused about the first paragraph here. I don't think a decision such as this would be made because of a feeling in the stomach; rather, there is a rational argument for why to not trust this mechanic.
Further, the difference between the "experience of God" and all of the other things listed here - "music, sunsets, childbirths... etc" is that all these other items interact with us through materialistic means. We see the sunset, we hear the music... we interact with them through our senses. "Bodily longings" aren't typically considered to have much epistemological virtue so far as I can tell, nor should they. Seeing the sunset and enjoying it tells us nothing about the sun. We can learn about the sun, but it's not done though our feelings. Further, having feelings about something not only doesn't tell anything about that thing, it doesn't even fix its existence. I can image a sunset right now and have feelings about it.
There are a couple of reasons we could trust a source of information. One is that there is a reason by which this source has expertise or credibility: our parents are older than us and have lived more life; our mechanic went to technical college to learn about cars. We might trust a book written by an expert, if we know who that expert is and whence came their expertise. Scripture, however, is sourceless in the traditional sense. The other reason we might trust something is because it has proven to be right repeatedly; the mechanic always fixes the car, so he will this time, too. Scripture could be trustworthy by this measure. But, if you divide claims made by the scripture into, say, advice on how to run your life in the material world and claims about the nature of God, you will find the former have been significantly upgraded with each passing generation of humans and the later unverifiable.
Imagine you have a Muslim friend and you both have broken cars. You agree to do the same thing: you both take your cars to the mechanic, because you both have found that mechanics fix cars. "Mechanics fix cars" is a verifiable claim. On the other hand, you do not agree about Scripture, because the claims made therein cannot be evaluated by either of you - at least not until you die, at which point your capacity to evaluate them may or may not be very limited.
Posted by jeff to εις επαινον δοξης αυτου at 6:04 PM
posted by Matthew LaPine at
6:04 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home