Posted by Theosophical Ruminator under
Philosophy,
Relativism,
Theology
[15] Comments
We find ourselves in a world in which religious truth-claims have been demoted to private, subjective opinions or values. Religious knowledge is not considered “real” knowledge. In fact, religious truth-claims are not even testable, and thus must be taken on blind faith.
How did it come to this? Here I offer a very condensed, if not simplistic path to how we privatized faith, drawing largely on Dr. James Sawyer’s work in this area.
It started with Renee Descartes. He demanded that what we claim to “know” we know with the same level of certainty as mathematical principles. This drove a wedge between faith and knowledge, because religious claims cannot be known with that degree of certainty (virtually nothing can).
Then came the opposite extreme offered by David Hume. Hume argued that there are no innate ideas or truths that serve as a foundation for knowledge. The mind is a blank slate upon which our sense perceptions are received, and from which we gain knowledge. Knowledge, then, does not correspond with reality, but is simply a well-ordered, coherent system within our minds created by sense perception. This left no room for the idea of truth. There is no correspondence between reality and what we perceive to be reality. Each person’s perspective is as valid as the next person’s perspective (relativism).
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