RE: Gallup Poll for 2022
June 19, 2022 at 2:47 pm
(This post was last modified: June 19, 2022 at 2:51 pm by Belacqua.)
(June 19, 2022 at 9:31 am)TheJefe817 Wrote:(June 19, 2022 at 7:14 am)Jehanne Wrote: They are scholastics, which is why they have a moden-day appeal. Once upon a time, all Western scholars thought this way; today, hardly any academician does:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_qu...ntellectum
Thanks for posting that. I was of course aware of this in concept, but not in terminology. I know I'm continuing to splinter us away from the original message of the thread as I post, but I had to follow up on this. When I clicked through, the first thing I noticed was that definitionally it is "faith seeking intelligence" (or reason) and not "faith seeking evidence". Interesting, and important, given that I could probably "reason" my way into an argument that my dog is a reincarnated Civil War general, but would never have evidence for that. Seems like all of intelligent design (for instance) falls here, in that it starts with creator and works backwards to reasoning but with no testable/falsifiable premise.
It's a useful term and spot-on. It describes a lot of the people I know. Actually, it's pretty generous to many of them. I have a lot of family members who just start and end with the faith part and never even seek the intelligence backfill. I guess to tie this into my gripe about clergy, I would say the primary reason for this faith (in tandem with reward/punishment aversion) is that they base it on the argument from authority. The pastor studied all this and understands it better than me, so I don't need to worry about it, right?
It's good to know the terms. Having the faith come first, and using reason to support it, is certainly a normal situation for Christians.
It's not sufficient to define someone as a Scholastic, however. Scholastics were a particular kind of theologian with a particular kind of training. Merely having the faith come before the intellect is not sufficient to be defined as a Scholastic.
If your pastor was a Catholic who engaged you in dialectic using strict Aristotelian logic, then he might well have been a Scholastic. Otherwise, not.
