(June 6, 2015 at 5:55 pm)Randy Carson Wrote:(June 6, 2015 at 5:32 pm)pocaracas Wrote: I'm flabbergasted.... nothing about grace and truth in this piece you cited: http://www.catholic.com/tracts/grace-wha...at-it-does.
How does that grace give you some insight into what is true?
Actually, my question was "how would you know that what a particular religion claims is the truth?"
And you give me the presupposition that your religion's claims are representative of reality.
No, my question comes before the presupposition of the religion... How can you be sure that one of them is true?
And I said I know this by God's grace. But reason/logic and revelation play a role, too. Everyone may look at creation and discern God's handiwork - though not all do, of course.
I'd have to think about how revelation and grace are intertwined...
Any how, I thought the article was pretty clear on grace, but perhaps that's because I'm more familiar with the terminology.
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
GRACE: The free and undeserved gift that God gives to us to respond to our vocation and to become his adopted children. As sanctifying grace, God shares his divine life and friendship with us in a habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that enables the soul to live with God, to act by his love. As actual grace, God give us the help to conform our lives to his will. Sacramental grace and special graces (charisms, the grace of state in life) are gifts of the Holy Spirit to help us live out our Christian vocation.
I understand that that's the catholic view and this is the "ask a catholic" thread.... but you're evading the core of the question.
You're still presupposing the existence of a god prior to the acceptance that the very claim of existence of said god is true.
You see, I'd wager that, when you were born, you had no such presupposition. It should be the case with every person as any one can be molded into any belief system.
As you grew, the presupposition was embedded into you, probably by your parents.
How did you come to accept that presupposition as true? Hence, how did you come to discern which god/s are truly there?
Truth (or true) is a word I hear quite often out of believers'... sadly, what is true may not have any bearing on what is real. And reality is what we'd like to ascertain.
You speak the truth when you say all these things about grace and god and whatnot... You do. I believe you do truly believe that those things are correct representations of reality.
However, such usage of the truth can lead the ignorant to a mental pitfall.
For the common usage of the word truth implies that what is being claimed is aligned with our best understanding of reality.
And our best understanding of reality is coming to us through the usage of science.
Beyond wishful thinking and some altered mental states, there is woeful lack of (scientific) evidence for the divine, any divine.
If science ever comes to show that reality contains a god, then so be it... until then, we should abstain from pronouncing as true that which is not aligned with the known reality, lest we become intellectually dishonest.
So, while you believe you are speaking the truth... you are not really saying true things.
(and, with that, I've exhausted all my stock of philosophy for the rest of the week)
