Epistemology: Truth as Revelation & Faith
Thursday September 17, 2009
Both revelation and faith occupy unique positions among the various criteria of truth because of their religious character. Sometimes they are social in nature, as when we speak of revelations to a community or the working of faith in religious groups. Sometimes they are very personal and subjective, for example when a single person claims to receive a revelation or relies upon faith in the quiet moments of life.
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There is nothing wrong with revelation or even faith as long as it is understood to be hypothetical.
@ (2) John Hanks
Most, if not all of the faithful people do not look at their faith as hypothetical though if you hadn’t noticed.
@ (2)
How many people of the faithful do you know that understand their faith as hypothetical?
I once compared doctrinal arguments with people debating what shade of “red” Little Red Riding Hood’s cloak was.
When I was in the Church of Christ, they rejected personal revelation on the grounds that it would lead to doctrinal chaos–that we’d have a mess of Person A says XYZ, and Person B says -XYZ, and Person C says ABC, and so on–all claiming to have heard the voice of god. Their concept was that the Bible was the final word. Of course, that hardly solves the problem. But they believed, of course, that _they_ read it–but didn’t interpret it. _Other_ denominations *interpreted* it. That’s why all the confusion.
Someone just wrote in and described a fallacy they called the “I am the Universe” fallacy. And while we all are subject to this mode of thinking sometimes (generally we become aware when we meet someone who disagrees with us), religion takes the prize: “Anyone who reads the Bible in an unbiased fashion will get exactly the same meaning out of it that *I* do.”
The problem is that loads of Christians make this statement who disagree with one another about who’s *interpreting* vs. who’s *reading*. After studying communication in college, I finally realized that nobody “reads” anything without interpreting it. Certainly some texts lend themselves more to ambiguity than others. But anyone who claims their reading is in no way subjective is in denial.