[...] –Parchment and Pen [...]

Interesting and relevant post by Victor Reppert on his blog as to why and how wrong beliefs can be held yet one can nevertheless arrive at a correct / appropriate response:

“Jason Pratt, of the Christian CADRE, explains Lewis’s important point about literal and metaphorical language in the chapter of Miracles entitled Horrid Red Things. One of my favorite C. S. Lewis points.

“Lewis uses the example of a little girl who thinks that poison, in any given substance, is “horrid red things”. She really believes that if she separated the poison out of ‘poisonous’ solids and liquids, the poison would really look like horrid red things. But an adult who attempted to refute her claim that lye is poisonous by correcting her false belief about what ‘poison’ looks like, would still be in for a nasty shock if he drank it! Indeed, with a little investigation he might have discovered that she did not believe lye poisonous because it contained horrid red things (which she knows she cannot see in the lye), but because her mother (who may have sufficiently accurate reasons for saying so) has told her the lye is poisonous and she trusts her mother. She thinks the red things are in the lye, not because she can see them, but because she already believes the lye is poisonous; therefore it must (as far as she is concerned) have those horrid red things in it somewhere. Her imagery turns out to be, upon fair examination, ultimately of little importance to the issue at hand: whether lye really is poisonous. If she was corrected about the nature of poison, it would probably not (nor should not) affect her belief about the toxicity of lye. She would know more, but she would not necessarily be refuted in her core belief.”

Regards,
#John

Hence, one can have core saving beliefs about Jesus, without those core beliefs being held “rationally” in the doctrinal or apologetic sense.

# 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42…you guys got it right.

I just read these verses tonight and wondered how they impact this conversation. I don’t remember any one else bringing them up in this thread but didn’t read back through it to be sure.

“and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.” I Corinthians 2:4-5

The chapter goes on to speak further about the Spirit of God revealing the things of God to us.

These verses seem to me to speak of the certainty of our faith being given to us by the power of God rather than by having to think deeply through all of these issues and “deconstructing” our faith in order to make it strong or to truly believe.

Thoughts anyone??

[...] Parchment and Pen: All the Right Beliefs for all the Wrong Reasons [...]

Propositional knowledge is the knowledge that such-and-such is the case. It is commonly expressed using the schema “S knows that p”, where “S” refers to the knowing subject, and “p” to the proposition that is known. The analysis of this form usually consists of a statement of the following form: S knows that p if and only if – -. The blank is to be replaced by the list of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient.

In a step by step logical arrangement, the “justified true belief” analysis of propositional knowledge it can be written out as:

S knows that p iff (“iff” = if and only if)

i. p is true;
ii. S believes that p;
iii. S is justified in believing that p.

Why not say simply that knowledge is true belief? The standard answer: a belief that is true just because of luck does not qualify as knowledge. This gets at the lede’s point about having the right beliefs for the wrong reasons.

Indeed, in 1963 Edmund Gettier presented two effective counterexamples to the “JTB” analysis in his paper, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”.

Is a belief that is true because of luck or some other process (as set out by Gettier) still knowledge?

Because of Gettier, we have had to rethink our previous, western analysis of knowledge. So we return to the basic question: What turns a true belief into knowledge?

An alternative approach to analysing what turns a true belief into knowledge is based on the reliability of the cognitive process that produced the belief. The paradigmatic example is our knowledge of the physical environment. How do we know it’s raining? We see, hear and feel the rain through sense experience. Theses sense experiential processes are, at least under normal conditions, highly reliable and there is nothing accidental about the truth of the beliefs these processes produce. Thus what turns true belief into knowledge is the reliability of our cognitive processes. Obviously, the same argument can be made for other reliable cognitive processes, e.g. introspection, memory, and rational intuition.
Consequently, the burning in our bosom will produce knowledge if it arises from a properly working sense of the divine and it is true.

The Christian with a burning bosom has a belief that is both true and formed on the basis of a properly working function; the Mormon has neither of these.

In Fides et Ratio (“Faith and Reason”) the pope put it this way, “The basic idea is that faith and reason are two separate sources of justified or warranted belief: “there exists a knowledge which is peculiar to faith, surpassing the knowledge proper to human reason, which nevertheless by its nature can discover the Creator”. Alvin Plantinga is in basic agreement with the pope.

We do not need reason to hold justified true beliefs.

regards
#John

Truth #42-

Sorry, that was not my intent. Your comment just brought to mind further, potential tension with CMP’s post- but not that you were advocating that.

I am totally with you on those other comments, especially John #39.

Rick,

That’s fine. Just don’t misrepresent my comments for your purposes. Address them directly to CMP.

Personally, I like Amy’s comment in #36 and John’s comment in #39.

Truth #40-

What I am actually doing is processing out where “grace” and “faith” are placed in lieu of CMP’s thoughts. Does his emphasis on “a method of inquiry that has integrity” displace these other sources of belief?

Full disclosure- I am one who has long advocated the deeper understanding/learning that CMP has been championing. I just want to look at where those two forces (grace/faith and knowledge/inquiry) meet, relate, and/or possibly conflict with each other in the spiritual growth of a Christian.

Rick, #38,

You’re extrapolating a wrong inference from my answer.