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Philologos
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Joined: 21 Jan 2010
Age: 81
Gender: Male
Posts: 6,987

05 May 2011, 10:58 am

On the one hand, it is axiomatic, and I stand by it, that ALL knowledge and ALL reasoning rests on unprovable premises which are taken on faith. Descartes says he thinks, and moves through the syllogism to sum [or if I am speaking est, of course]. He does not and cannot prove that he thinks, nor can he take "all that thinks exists" back to the turtles.

So far so good. But it would be wrong to sweep under the table the fact that a goodly percentage of believers affirm a distinct faith which is not the mind assenting to premises, any more than all the theist's data involve sensory inputs. We know [atheists and agnostics may substitute "claim" here and elsewhere] that God does on an individual basis reveal - as in the case of Elisha and the Syrian invasion or the Emmaus incident - what the senses do not pick up, or conceal [several incidents] what the senses ought to detect. This is not the same as you seeing the monkey in the puzzle tree that I cannot see, it is an interference with the senses.

And while I suppose it is possible for someone adopting the Divine Entity postulate and getting quite a ways from reasoning off that prime, the church in the widest sense has long maintained that Peter's insight, for example, rests on a differently sourced basis.

So yes. Parts of my faith and a portion of my data [and the rational structures I build theron] are qualitatively different from the premises and data off which Awesomely Glorious reasons [for that he reasons I neither doubt nor deny]. And it is to a degree reasonable that the atheist accuses "there ain't no such animal".

Hey, I was there.

But the rational scientist does not go "I detect nothing, ergo there is nothing to detect." Nor "my experimental results fail to match yours, so you are a charlatan.

I at least recognize that I am partially colorblind. Though I do occasionally as a pose scoff at other people's perception of undetectable colors.