jeudi, février 17, 2005
is God a unicorn?
My philosophy of religion class gets pretty deep. Harvey is a good speaker, though, so it's really interesting. We have moved from the problem of evil (i.e. if there is a God, how can he/she allow such evil to exist) on to the issue of speaking meaningfully about "God".
We've discussed how the words we use to describe things in our own world cannot possibly be the right ones to describe God (Aquinas' theory of analogy). Either because they are not exactly right (for instance, is God "wise" the same way that John is wise?), or because we cannot sense-perceive God, and therefore cannot know what we are talking about anyway.
Today Harvey was elaborating on Hume's empiricist position. That is, all knowledge we have is based on our experiences of sense-perception. But there are two kinds of sensations: "lively impressions" (the aforementioned sense-perceptions), and then "ideas", which are the new associations we can formulate in our own minds based on the things we have perceived. For instance, we can take the concept of a horse and the concept of a horn, make an association in our minds, and conceive of the possibility of a unicorn.
Hume also maintained that even if we could not conceive of a particular idea, if we could sense-perceive the event in question, we can verify or falsify the claim. Harvey's example today was, "there is a penguin in the quad". Now, we know that there are not usually penguins in the quad, but if we went out to check for ourselves, we could verify whether the claim was true.
It is way more complicated than that, but the conclusion is that Hume believes that all claims about God are meaningless, because we can neither sense-perceive any God, nor can we associate any pre-learned concepts to create an idea of what God is. Claims about God are neither true nor false, because there is no way to verify or falsify them through perception.
THE END | ¶ 5:58 p.m.
We've discussed how the words we use to describe things in our own world cannot possibly be the right ones to describe God (Aquinas' theory of analogy). Either because they are not exactly right (for instance, is God "wise" the same way that John is wise?), or because we cannot sense-perceive God, and therefore cannot know what we are talking about anyway.
Today Harvey was elaborating on Hume's empiricist position. That is, all knowledge we have is based on our experiences of sense-perception. But there are two kinds of sensations: "lively impressions" (the aforementioned sense-perceptions), and then "ideas", which are the new associations we can formulate in our own minds based on the things we have perceived. For instance, we can take the concept of a horse and the concept of a horn, make an association in our minds, and conceive of the possibility of a unicorn.
Hume also maintained that even if we could not conceive of a particular idea, if we could sense-perceive the event in question, we can verify or falsify the claim. Harvey's example today was, "there is a penguin in the quad". Now, we know that there are not usually penguins in the quad, but if we went out to check for ourselves, we could verify whether the claim was true.
It is way more complicated than that, but the conclusion is that Hume believes that all claims about God are meaningless, because we can neither sense-perceive any God, nor can we associate any pre-learned concepts to create an idea of what God is. Claims about God are neither true nor false, because there is no way to verify or falsify them through perception.
THE END | ¶ 5:58 p.m.
