Date Posted:07:45:14 04/23/01 Mon Author: SM78 Subject: Christian Errors in Knowledge
(Good to see you back, OPB!)
I don't know if this is near what you meant by "epistemology changes the nature of the knowledge being observed," but it fits; in the act of investigating, we press our own models onto the world and try to make them fit--so that the end result (some theory or another) owes a lot to our psychology
What I mean is that epistemology itself cannot be objective because there are no absolute reference points by which we can judge knowledge or the nature of knowledge. While we can analyze statements and/or compare them to other statements, we can never say that A is absolutely true, particularly when we are examining a model rather than the thing itself.
Take Christianity, please. Seriously, Christians claim to have a relationship with God. Yet we, non-xtians view their "relationship" as a model, as a set of faith statements whereas they claim to know the thing itself, in this case God. They further claim to have the "absolute truth" of the Bible.
But what are xtians really saying and doing?
I assert that Christians confuse apologetics with epsitemology. They believe that their apologetics "prove" their faith statements, ergo apologetics as epistemology.
Of course, their method is a bastardization of epsitemology and they know it but will never admit it.
At best, they might defer to Kierkegaard to contextualize their leap of faith, and then only the liberals will do this. The conservatives define faith as a radical, truth-affirming act in the face of atheistic scientism -- and this is always the red herring, this matter of invoking atheism as a de facto religion. Thus, atheism and its challenge to xtianity is cast as a religious claim made by a false religion. Xtianity at this point cedes the epsitemological ground and collapses back into mere apologetics -- as if that vaildates their truth statements.
What occurs, then, is that by subjecting xtianity to the rigors of epsitemology we change it in profound ways. It can no longer be the "truth" and is instead re-cast as one of many belief systems.
Christians cannot stand this change and reassert their claims to spiritual hegemony. In particular, xtians conflate Jesus' historicity with his truth claims, i.e., they argue that because Jesus can be shown objectively to have lived that his claims, and those of Paul by extension, must be true: Jesus is the Son of God, and the only way to God. This is tautological, but so much of Christianity is, especially when it states its most famous, and most deservedly ridiculed tautology: the Bible is the Word of God because it says it is.
Whooo boy! Let's put that one in the bathtub and see if it floats!
That absurd tautology, believed by over a billion
people on the earth at this moment, proves Barnum's adage a billion + times over!
