I agree with you that humans are all experts at rationalization, and that logic can't get us everywhere we need to go. (My favorite Greek philosopher is Parmenides, who couldn't logically explain the creation of the universe and concluded, therefore, that it didn't exist.)
But I don't see how we can get out of the predicament that we are forced to rely on our own subjective assessment of the world. There are, for example, countless people alive even right now who claim that they are receiving "Divine Revelation." (And some of them write to me!) Even if I accept the idea of divine revelation, I don't accept that all these people are actually receiving it. So I have to use some kind of criterion to judge whether something is divine or not, right? That criterion may not be entirely logic or entirely gut instinct, but whatever it is it's going to be subjective. (It may be something seemingly objective, like, "Was it approved at the Council of Carthage," but in that case I still subjectively determined that it's the Council of Carthage I give authority to and not the Council of Laodicea.)
So the very fact that divine revelation occurs is not, in and of itself, a way out of the "problem" of subjectivity, unless you are proposing that there is some entirely objective way to know if a given text is divinely revealed.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Human barometers
Date: 2005-06-08 03:00 pm (UTC)But I don't see how we can get out of the predicament that we are forced to rely on our own subjective assessment of the world. There are, for example, countless people alive even right now who claim that they are receiving "Divine Revelation." (And some of them write to me!) Even if I accept the idea of divine revelation, I don't accept that all these people are actually receiving it. So I have to use some kind of criterion to judge whether something is divine or not, right? That criterion may not be entirely logic or entirely gut instinct, but whatever it is it's going to be subjective. (It may be something seemingly objective, like, "Was it approved at the Council of Carthage," but in that case I still subjectively determined that it's the Council of Carthage I give authority to and not the Council of Laodicea.)
So the very fact that divine revelation occurs is not, in and of itself, a way out of the "problem" of subjectivity, unless you are proposing that there is some entirely objective way to know if a given text is divinely revealed.