Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Revelation

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

    In Philosophers Who Compartmentalize and Those Who Don't,  I drew a distinction between 1. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extraphilosophical and 2. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (by generating) a thesis or worldview that is not antecedently held…

  • 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.  They can…

  • The Original Christian Revelation: The Bible or the Teaching of Jesus?

    Richard Swinburne, Revelation, Oxford, 1992, pp. 102-103: . . . there has been a strain in Protestantism, with its immense reverence for Scripture, to write of Holy Scripture itself as the original [propositional] revelation; what was given by God was the Bible.  But that surely fits very badly with other things that those same Protestants…

  • Protestants, Catholics, Purgatory, Inerrancy and Related Topics

    My last post drew a number of e-mail responses.  Here is one, by Joshua Orsak.  Subheadings added.  The ComBox is open in case Professor Anderson, or anyone, cares to respond.   Purgatory   First I'd like to make a quick note on purgatory. Purgatory is found in the Apocrypha, the 10 or so books of…

  • More on Scriptural Revelation

    Joshua Orsak e-mails, I really enjoyed your recent post on various ways to approach revelation. I, too, opt for something like option C. It is similar to Karl Barth's position: that the Bible is NOT the revelation of God, but a record of God's revelation to mankind. I find that shift to be vital. Many…

  • Four Slants on Scripture

    Suppose you are a theist (classically defined) and are also open to  the possibility of divine revelation. Suppose further that you are  open to the possibility of a written revelation. Call the scripture of  a religion its 'Book.' The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism,  Christianity, and Islam, sometimes called 'religions of the Book,'  each have their…

  • Revelation and Miracles

    The question I want to pose and to which I do not have a firm answer — Nescio ergo blogo! — is whether every case of divine revelation is a miraculous event, or whether there are or can be cases of divine revelation that are not miraculous. To treat this question properly we need some…