epistemology, objective reality, post modernism etc

[Robust1]

Around 2008 I entered my existential crises that eventually brought me back on the path of repentance and submission to God. A big part of that was the realization that nearly everything we've been taught and told about nearly everything is deception and lies. 

My path back to following the Lord Jesus started as what I called my "commitment to reality". This led me to studying post modernisms war on "objective reality" and learning a little bit more about philosophy, epistemology etc. Trying to organize my thoughts. This caused me great distress and drove me back to the scripture and the anchor that is steadfast and sure. Increasingly I'm trying to view everything through the filter of the biblical cosmology/unseen realm/ANE context of scripture.

I have to admit I'm a little uncomfortable with the level skepticism about "everything" that this path has engendered. I'm also a little uncomfortable with the idea that there is no objective reality I can really know. 

I'd like to think the reason I repented and submitted is in part because the biblical story coheres with the observable reality that exists outside just my experience of reality. A faith in real events that happened in real time that when believed draw you deeper into the truth ie reality. 

There is a question in there, I just cannot seem to articulate it though. Any thoughts on this rambling?

[Ed Hurst]

It’s a start. It’s not that our reality is totally dubious. It’s just very limited. Part of that limitation is that God can shift things around, and sometimes we get to see it and call it a miracle. Sometimes we don’t see it, but see something that indicates it. Sometimes we have no idea at all, and we just trust the Lord.

I started out as a hard-core Baptist fundamentalist way back in the 1970s, but the Lord began to move me, step by step. College and post-graduate studies (never could afford that master’s degree) planted seeds that eventually moved me to my current effort to discover and embrace the Hebraic outlook on reality.

I was already committed to whatever answers I might find. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to embrace the basic thesis of Unseen Realm. What I needed to see was sufficient evidence for a limited acceptance of external literature. If the New Testament authors clearly used outside sources, we need to use them in the same fashion — not as Scripture, but as a background that gives shape to the biblical narrative.

That leaves me still trying to tread that fuzzy line between what the Second Temple rabbis believed, which apparently found traction with the Apostles, versus the kind of nonsense Jesus rejected.

Does that give you enough to push farther with your curiosity?

[Robust1]

Yea, limited, that's a better description. Much of what I thought I knew turned out to not be so.

Maybe what I'm feeling is some alienation, the more I am immersed in the Kingdom of God the less connection and loyalty to the culture and political realm I feel. It's literally a little death.

Just have spent a lot of time in Jeremiah lately after spending a couple months in Isaiah. It's hard not to feel the impending judgement of God upon America. The frayed edges we're experiencing now are nothing compared to what's around the corner I suspect.

[jaybreak]

This sort of post is kinda up my alley.

The language of philosophy sometimes doesn't help the discussion, because it doesn't nicely explicate the relationship a believer has with God. Philosopher will tend to throw God into the "object" category because His essence is ineffable, despite how He has revealed Himself in scripture and to us personally. The "war" against objective reality you talk about with modern philosophy is probably a way of self-soothing after centuries of failing to correctly apprehend God with reasoning tools and the assumptions western minds have about what's knowable. Yes, God could be considered an object in the sense that He exists, but what does that tell us? Not much, and it's an assumption that an object such as God could be apprehended satisfactorily in the way philosophers want.

I think your crisis had something to do with the limits of language--you maybe had trouble explaining to yourself your belief in God, even though you "knew" outside of the constraints of your language what you believed? Your thoughts were English isn't set up very well to talk about the supernatural domain without the fallacy of being too precise.

[Robust1]

On occasion I go to Bruce Charltons blog and catch up on a week or two of posts since my last visit. Popped in there yesterday. There were a couple posts that were relevant and this comment he made resonated, echoing what you guys alluded to above.

"I have often argued here that epistemology has been an intellectual dead end - despite being the dominant philosophical mode since Descartes, exactly because it sets itself up as prior to metaphysics (indeed, typically, dismissive of metaphysics)."

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.

It is literally living by faith realizing that everything is contingent on the Lords will right down to the construction of reality we're experiencing currently.

Purging the materialist/physicalist presuppositions embedded in ones thought processes is easier said than done.

It requires crucifixion of the flesh and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of the King.

[jaybreak]

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.