Showing posts with label "analogous thinking". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "analogous thinking". Show all posts

Thursday, January 30, 2014

A Reply to Matthias on "Analogous Knowledge"

I continue now with my reply to Matthias McMahon. In the present installment, I explore some of the premises and implications of the Christian view that man’s knowledge is somehow “analogous” to the “knowledge” which the Christian god is said to have. Drawing on some points which I have made in previous responses to Matthias (see here and here for example), I focus on two major areas: namely the issue of metaphysical primacy (i.e., as it pertains to the relationship between the subject of consciousness and its objects) and the nature of conceptual identification.

In my blog Confessions of a Vantillian Subjectivst, I noted that “there are fundamental qualitative differences between man’s knowledge and the Christian god’s so-called ‘knowledge,’” focusing on the antithetical nature of their respective subject-object relationships (namely the primacy of existence in the case of man, and the primacy of consciousness in the case of the Christian god, given Christianity’s descriptions of it).

In essence, I argued that
(a) since man is neither omniscient nor infallible, he needs a means of gathering and validating his knowledge, and since the objects of his knowledge are not creations of his conscious activity or conform to his conscious intensions, he need to look outward at the world to acquire knowledge of these objects, which means that the method by which he acquires and validates his knowledge must be objective in nature (e.g., not based on his emotions, preferences, likes or dislikes, wishes, commands, imagination, dreams, etc.), and 
(b) since the Christian god is supposed to be both omniscient and infallible, it would not need any means of gathering and validating knowledge, and since the objects of its “knowledge” are supposed to be creations of its conscious activity and conform to its conscious intensions, it would not need to look outward for the content of its “knowledge”
there is therefore no analogous relationship between human knowers and the objects of their knowledge of them on the one hand, and the Christian god and the objects of its “knowledge” of them.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

A Reply to Matthias on Objective Knowledge vs. the Subjectivism of Theism

This is the fourth installment of a series of replies I’ve been writing in response to a comment (yes, I know, just one comment) posted on my blog Confessions of a Vantillian Subjectivist by Matthias McMahon of the blog Choosing Hats. While I realize that four rather long posts in reply to a single comment left on one of my older blog entries may seem to some as a bit “over the top,” I caution readers not to think I’m finished with this yet. There will be more – at least one, maybe two... who knows! As I read Matthias’ comment and examined the surrounding issues, so many important points have come to mind, and what better than to develop them and share them with my readers here at my blog?

In the present entry I take up the portion of Matthias’ comment where he sought to explain the varying degrees of knowledge between different knowers in an attempt to defend the view that man’s knowledge is somehow “analogous” to the “knowledge” Christianity claims its god possesses. In my blog Confessions of a Vantillian Subjectivist, I argued essentially that, given the objectivity of man’s proper knowledge (acquired and validated by means of looking outward at reality) as opposed to the overt subjectivism which Christianity attributes to its god (whose objects of “knowledge” are products of its own “thinking” – instancing the looking inward model of “knowing”), there can be nothing either metaphysically or epistemologically analogous between the two.

This is because there can at root be nothing analogous between
(a) knowing by means of looking outward at objects which exist independent of one’s conscious activity, discovering them as objects which are not already pre-known, examining them by perceptual means, and identifying and integrating them by means of concepts (which condense a limitless categories of data into a single unit so that man can retain it, given the finite nature of his consciousness); and 
(b) “knowing” objects by means of looking inward at the contents of one’s own consciousness (which is already omniscient – i.e., already knows everything and thus cannot learn more), creating objects from that internal content by means of some type of conscious activity which we have never observed and can only imagine, retaining the ability to alter the identity of those objects at any time by a similar act of will, and lacking any need to condense entire categories of data into single units in order to retain it in consciousness, etc.
I hope to bring out some of the implications of this fundamental antithesis between how man knows and what could only be the case for the Christian god given Christianity’s descriptions of it, in the following interaction with Matthias’ comments.