Monday, October 6, 2008

Timely discussion on faith

Great discussion about intellectualizing God over at Sand in the Gears. Actually worth slogging through the comments, but here's my favorite of Tony's retorts so far:

I suspect where you and I disagree about knowledge of God is that I don’t confine knowing to that which can be discerned by the senses. Christian belief is predicated on the underlying assumption that we can know by means other than the senses, i.e., by the action of the Holy Spirit, who generates throughout the Christian life epiphanies large and small, all of which go into a category of knowing that cannot be reached by sensory investigation.

The rationalist and the atheist rejects this out of hand, of course, and for understandable reasons — because all he has known has come to him, so far as he can discern, via the senses. Thus when he hears that there is knowledge to be had by some other means, he naturally rejects the notion. This is akin, however, to a man who has been blind for life, and who has been raised among the blind, asserting that there is no such thing as this mystical “seeing” that the so-called “sighted” claim to engage in.

No comments: