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Originally Posted by DChristopher I'm a bit confused: what sort of justification for knowledge would you accept as reasonable? |
I think you mean what sort of justification for belief. Clearly, the objective revelation of the source of knowledge is the justification I would accept. The personal assertion of a subjective person who comes by their beliefs in a way they don't understand is certainly not a valid justification for anything.
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If someone "revealed" or "imparted" his objective knowledge to you (and how, by the way, did *he* come by it, since it is apparently so hard to get?), then how did he impart it to you? He told you, by means of a book? Then...you READ the information, right? In other words, you collected your data empirically--by means of reading.
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You appear to have missed my point entirely regarding
why God's revelation is a valid justification—it is because he does not gain knowledge from an external source, but all knowledge is internal to him. God is the originator of knowledge, and is thus the only qualified party for asserting something as true. We can only assert something as true inasmuch as we are echoing an assertion of God.
You also failed to recognize what I said earlier regarding empiricism. I deny that the physical event of my reading is in any way
causally connected to the mental (non-physical) event of my knowing. To believe such a thing would be, frankly, stupid. Rather, I affirm that there is a correlation between sense experience and knowledge: a correlation caused by God. On the occasion of sense experience, corresponding knowledge is imparted by God to my mind. I do not gain knowledge by some kind of power of my own, and neither is knowledge created by some kind of power of the external world. It is simply absurd to suppose that non-rational physical processes could give rise to rational non-physical cognitive processes.
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For instance, it is necessary, to me, to assume that what I see, basically, really happened. Denying this axiom would lead to all sorts of silly and unnecessary contradictions.
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Such as what?
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But existence of God? That's unnecessary. Denying it doesn't lead to any weird contradictions. Neither does affirming it.
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I just mentioned one, above: non-rational processes leading to rational ones. There are all sorts of arguments which can be made from the existence of reason which demonstrate any God-denying worldview to be inherently self-contradictory.