Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Revelation

  • John Henry Newman and the Problem of Private Judgment

    Onsi A. Kamel (First Things, October 2019): The issue of ecclesiastical authority was trickier for me. I recognized the absurdity of a twenty-year-old presuming to adjudicate claims about the Scriptures and two thousand years of history. Newman’s arguments against private judgment therefore had a prima facie plausibility for me. In his Apologia, Newman argues that…

  • Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning

    Steven Nemes sent me to his Substack site where he has an article entitled Theology and Philosophy in Roman Catholicism. His way of thinking reminds me of my younger self. What follows is a revised re-posting of an article of mine from September 2014 which explores similar themes. At the end of the re-posting I…

  • Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience

    "It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it. Imagine someone…

  • God Doesn’t Philosophize

    He doesn't need to.  We need to. But our neediness goes together with our inability to make any progress at it.  A double defect: need and inability.  The truth we need we cannot acquire by our own efforts.  It is this fact that motivates some philosophers to consider the possibility of divine revelation. Can they…

  • A Rule for Reading the Bible

    What we know to be the case constrains Biblical interpretation. For example, we know that an individual human life does not begin with its first breath. If any passage in the Bible states or implies otherwise, that passage may and indeed must be dismissed and cannot count as divine revelation. So much for Biblical inerrancy,…

  • The Question of Private Judgment

    I have commented critically on the Roman Catholic teaching on indulgences. One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Church on faith or morals may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church.  Two quick observations on this accusation. First, for…

  • Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?

    Of course not.  If everything in the Bible is literally true, then every sentence in oratio obliqua in the Bible is literally true.  Now the sentence 'There is no God'  occurs in the oblique context, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"  (Psalm 14:1)  So if everything  in the Bible is…

  • Ancora Una Volta: “Reasoned Mysterianism”

    Dr. Vito Caiati writes (minor edits, formatting, and bolding added), I thank you for your online response (Reasoned Mysterianism: A Defense of an Aphoristic Provocation) to my recent email.  In it you offer an impressive, rigorous defense of “reasoned mysterianism” that has impelled me to think more deeply on this subject, so much so, in fact,…

  • Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden

    This is a revised entry from over five years ago. I re-post it to solicit the comments of the Opponent and anyone else who can provide some enlightenment.  I am not a theologian, but theology is far too important to be left to professional theologians. …………….. An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site…

  • Comments on “Divine Fluidity”

    By Edward Buckner, here, at Dale Tuggy's place.  Ed's text is indented; my comments are not.  I thank Ed for the stimulating discussion. He begins: I have been telling the Maverick Philosopher here about Benjamin Sommer’s theory of divine fluidity, which is one solution to the problem of anthropomorphic language in the Hebrew Bible. The…

  • A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

    The suggestion was made that I give a little talk to the monks of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine monastery outside of Abiqui, New Mexico.  I thought I would offer a few words in defense of the monastic life, not that such an ancient and venerable tradition needs any defense from me, but just…

  • Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation

    There are tough questions about the possibility and the actuality of divine revelation. An examination of some ideas of the neglected philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916) from the Golden Age of American philosophy will help us clarify some of the issues and problems. One such problem is this: How can one know in a given case…

  • Geen Ketter Sonder Letter: No Heretic Without a Text

    The following quotation from Spinoza may serve as a sort of addendum to what I just posted anent Sam Harris and the idea of  divine revelation.   Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, Ch. XIV, Dover, 1951, tr. Elwes, p. 182: . . . a person who accepted promiscuously everything in Scripture as being the…

  • Sam Harris on the Very Idea of Divine Revelation as ‘Poison’

    Sam Harris is a liberal I respect and admire.  He has not succumbed to the PeeCee delusion and he actively combats it.  Although Harris is a contemporary, he is not a 'contemporary liberal' as I  use that phrase: he is a classical or old-time or paleo or respectable liberal.  But on religion and some philosophical…

  • The Need for Outside Help

    A human life is too short for the acquisition by oneself of the wisdom needed to live it well — or to end it well.  And the same goes for the appropriation of the hard-won wisdom of one's predecessors: the brevity of life militates against the needed appropriation as much as against the needed acquisition. …