RE: Science, faith, and theists
September 5, 2014 at 9:12 am
(This post was last modified: September 5, 2014 at 9:28 am by Michael.)
Hello Tonus. A couple of points come to mind.
The first is that I don't see any problem of a logical syllogism pointing outside of itself. Inference seems a valid way of knowing to me, though I accept it carries some more risk, just as a scientist knows extrapolation is inherently more risky than interpolation. So we may ground a premise in what we observe but we can still accept inference to something we have not observed. And, I'm beginning to repeat myself here which I do try not to do, but I mentioned before that I think all we get from the Kalam argument is that there is a first cause, an unmoved mover. It doesn't tell us more about 'God' than that, so I see it as one small piece of information that adds to the total God picture. It points us to a creative cause and we call that cause 'God'; we then bundle that with other experience or thoughts to build our bigger picture of what we're calling 'God' (remember his Hebrew name was simply 'I am').
The second is that I don't hold the view that God is totally outside of our experience (Christianity is rooted in an incarnational view of God, for example). That's why I suggested a second possible setting for you guys to think about, and that is how we could tell whether the sense of the numinous pointed to a numen, or whether it was necessarily delusional.
The first is that I don't see any problem of a logical syllogism pointing outside of itself. Inference seems a valid way of knowing to me, though I accept it carries some more risk, just as a scientist knows extrapolation is inherently more risky than interpolation. So we may ground a premise in what we observe but we can still accept inference to something we have not observed. And, I'm beginning to repeat myself here which I do try not to do, but I mentioned before that I think all we get from the Kalam argument is that there is a first cause, an unmoved mover. It doesn't tell us more about 'God' than that, so I see it as one small piece of information that adds to the total God picture. It points us to a creative cause and we call that cause 'God'; we then bundle that with other experience or thoughts to build our bigger picture of what we're calling 'God' (remember his Hebrew name was simply 'I am').
The second is that I don't hold the view that God is totally outside of our experience (Christianity is rooted in an incarnational view of God, for example). That's why I suggested a second possible setting for you guys to think about, and that is how we could tell whether the sense of the numinous pointed to a numen, or whether it was necessarily delusional.
