Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[Belacqua]

 

And since we can't sense many things, it's almost certain that there are things in the universe we can't conceive of. The apophatic theologians are at pains to remind us that, in their opinion, some things about God are this way. Can't be sensed, and can't be conceived of.

But by what means are they aware of this god?  That's the crucial question?  The notion that there are some things about God that can not be sensed, implies that there are some that can.  By what means?

Reviewing the chat so far, I see I didn't respond adequately to this.

Theology doesn't posit that we can sense God. God is not a sensible object. From at least the time of Plato, God is said to be an intelligible object, not sensible. 

It is like a number -- we know of its existence by extrapolating from the sensible world, but it is not a sensible object. When we experience things in twos, after a while we can abstract from this the idea of two. They say that God is known in the same way. We know of the existence of two itself through various experiences of two things. We know of goodness itself through experiencing various examples of good things. God is said to be goodness itself, not an example of another good thing.

I didn't say that "there are some things about God that can not be sensed." Because according to this view, there are NO things about God that can be sensed. 

What I'm saying is that (according to this view) we derive concepts from sense experience, and we can then use these concepts to understand God. We don't know God through the senses. But since we get our ideas of two or good by abstracting from sense impressions, if there were qualities in the world which we couldn't sense, then we wouldn't be able to abstract those things into knowledge of the idea. And since God is said to be infinite and include all possible ideas, any idea which we couldn't extrapolate from nature would be a part of God which we could never comprehend.

Also, I looked at the Stanford Encyclopedia page on Rand's theory of concepts. I see that she is using "measurement" in a kind of unexpected way, to mean something like variation. The example given is that we derive the concept of red by knowing various examples of red things, even though these red things vary in how red they are -- an orangey red or a purpler red. It seems that Rand is calling this variation "measurement," and saying that when we eliminate the variety we create a concept. Is that right? 

It looks as though this would apply even to things that aren't measurable in the sense of quantifiable. So for example we can't quantify justice, but we can still derive a concept of justice by eliminating the variations (more just, less just) that we have seen in the examples we've experienced. 

I don't quite see why that's a great advance in philosophy. It's long been standard to say that the idea or concept of something (or Form, in Plato's language) eliminates contingent or local variation in favor of ideality. (This became artistic pedagogy in the 18th century -- you were supposed to go out and draw a thousand actual oak trees in order to see past accidents like broken branches, so you could learn what the True Oak Tree is like. Then you could paint true non-contingent oak trees in your pictures.)