07-20-2024, 10:24 AM
(07-20-2024, 07:19 AM)Robust1 Wrote: Faith and a relationship with the Lord (entering into and staying under the protection of the covenant?) must be the prior condition before even trying to suss out "reality" ie epistemology.
Here's one angle you can look at it, if you want to speak the language of logic, based on what you're saying here. Regarding reason as the sole, or even as a powerful, tool for understanding reality, requires "conviction" in the sense that it's taken as a premise. One can have "faith" and assume the premise. If we believe in God, we at least have something residing outside and transcendent to logic that reason as an object could be legitimized. That would be necessary so we could say, as logicians, that reason is something that could be used legitimately after a fashion.
We at Radix Fidem might say that it's something the Lord gave us as a provision for our fallen state, to help navigate and manipulate the physical world for survival. It's can work fairly well in very limited contexts, but it using it for off-label purposes is a really bad idea. Saying all of that is still a conviction, but paradoxically we have an extra, logical "edge" over someone who doesn't have God in the picture at all.