Confessions of a Seminarian

It’s Raining Cats and Dogs…Run For Your Lives!!!

Consider this fictitious journal entry:

“I had a horrible day today.  This morning I lost my job.  I went out to lunch with my girlfriend, and when I began telling her about it, she interrupted me and told me she wanted to break up.  On my way home from that wonderful lunch, I lost control of my car and spun off the road into a ditch.  To make matters worse, it was raining cats and dogs.” Read more »

Why Do I Care?

In a conversation on De-Conversion, Pat (comment #15) said

“I would like to see a post on your blog as to why someone would follow God.”

This is a very good question and one that needs to be asked by Christians and non-Christians alike, but often goes unaddressed in Christian circles. I will endeavor to provide a generic answer to the question here. However, before we can start to answer why someone would follow God, there are a lot of underlying assumptions about God and our knowledge of Him that we must first address. By doing so not only will we all be on the same page regarding certain terms and concepts, but we will be able to follow the logic used (hopefully) in answering this question from start to finish. Read more »

Magic Eye

Disclaimer: this post is an explanation of Ether Meek’s thesis in her book Longing to Know.  Most of the examples are taken from this book as well.

I have dealt with knowing in my two earlier posts about the need for certainty and the three epistemic options.  Meek offers this new definition: “Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues, to focus on a coherent pattern, and submit to its reality.”

Meek argues that knowing is a three step process.  First, we look at clues.  Then we struggle to looks through the clues, and finally we integrate the clues.  Confusing?  Let’s look at an example.  Think of those “magic eyes.”  One is shown above.  You are supposed to look at this 2D image and somehow you are able to see something in 3D.  Knowing is like coming to see this 3D image.  We are given a list of clues to how to see this image (http://www.magiceye.com/faq_example.htm).  Then we try to do it ourselves.  For the longest time I couldn’t get the stupid thing Read more »

Three Epistemic Options and Garden State

In my last post, I tried to outline how the need for certainty leads us to believe we cannot know anything at all. The bar many of us set for truth is so high nothing seems to be able to pass it. Sometimes it seems reason leads us to believe there is no reason (in the old model’s definition). So what the heck do we do with this?

We really only have three options. We can stay in the old model. We can admit that nothing can be known (what I call epistemic nihilism). Or we can scrape the old model and save knowledge.
Read more »