This excellent video by The Thinking Atheist definitely reminded me of my blog post from 2006 called A House Divided.
Another House Divided
Ironwolf
...And your third wish?
This excellent video by The Thinking Atheist definitely reminded me of my blog post from 2006 called A House Divided.
Hi Robert,
I’m sorry to reply in a completely unrelated fashion to this Another House Divided post but I couldn’t reply to the old posting that I stumbled across (no comments allowed) and, truthfully, having cruised around your blog site I guess I’m commenting on a lot of it’s content. If there is another, better way for me to get this to you and I have missed it I apologize. The old post I found which brought me here was Ten Christian Lunacies from 3/5/06. I can only imagine that this sparked a lively chat. At any rate something occurred to me while processing Lunacy #9 and I thought I’d share it with you. Maybe it’ll be old hat but maybe something new?
You seem to be saying that in order to be an intellectually honest skeptic one must be skeptical of the validity of the skeptic worldview and that the moment one stands in surety of said skepticism one has crossed over into lunacy. This sounds like a sad state of affairs but, as well as I am able to understand, it makes good sense. Everything that we know we receive by revelation; our senses reveal the physical world, histories reveal the past, the processes of logic reveal patterns and formulas, etc. Additionally these revelations are processed and either rejected or accepted according to assumptions that are formed, in large part, by previously processed revelation. This mess is a worldview and each one stands opposed to what really is according to how much revelation has been rejected or fabricated. Makes skepticism sound kinda reasonable but also dangerous because I might be tempted to reject a revelation just to keep skepticism alive (I don’t want to get sure of anything). Worldviews do not go gently into that good night.
Maybe the most fundamental worldview forming assumption choice is God/no God. It is interesting to note that if there is a God but if that God has not revealed itself then no one can honestly claim surety. If there is a God and that God has revealed itself in some fashion then only the theist has any logical claim to surety because it is possible that he has accepted some revelation and, thereby, has knowledge while the a-theist has no such possibility. If there is no God then, since there can be no self-revelation of non-existence, again all surety is rendered impossible. Without advocating any particular theistic position at all isn’t it interesting that the Theist who says he is sure actually has a logically tenable claim: He might be right.
peace,
mike