I'll Come Back to That???

Someone pointed out to me that I kept making statments that I would come back to things in my "Knowing" series and then I never did. I wanted to try to clear some of that up. I think I caught all of them, but I am not sure. One thing I should note: I really do plan on covering the topic "the Objectivity of Beauty" but will need some time to work on it. Here is what I found in the "knowing" series. Let me know if I missed anything.

"The point is that all knowledge is both subjective and objective. I will build upon these ideas in the next post"

I was not trying to say that I would spend more time on this topic, but that I would build upon what I said in the next posts. In other words, I will use this as a foundation to bring up new topics. In Part IV – I do build on it (and I hope the rest).

"Augustine also believed that faith is not arbitrary, but quite rational (although faith can be abused to naively accept false things). We will not believe what we don’t think is valid, as cited above. We simply cannot believe that something is both “A” and “not A” at the same time. The law of non-contradiction prohibits it. We will revisit this later on."

Here I have a failure to explain what "this" means. I am referring to what Augustine said, not the law of non-contradiction. I hope I don't need to labor the law of non-contradiction. Anyway, I do revisit Augustine (my mysterious "this") in Part IV.

"To think that all things came about by a blind, impersonal force, would be more costly than we might think. If we sacrifice purpose, relationship, and goal, we will sacrifice also logic, meaning, beauty, good and evil. To talk as if reason (or anything else in that list) came about by blind impersonal chance is difficult because we have no reason at all to think that what we are perceiving at all corresponds to reality. This is a point that I don’t have time to debate here, but will have to defend when discussing the existence of God in a future post. My point is simply that this world seems to be quite personal, which reflects a personal creator. Assume for now that this is true, and we can discuss it in detail in another post."

I admit that I did not do as great of a job as I could have with this one. I did address it in my arguments for the existence of God posts (Two and Four), but did not spend enough time on it. That is my fault. I wrote those posts for an hour long teaching session I did with high-school students. So, they needed to be abbreviated and a little more simple than I might present here. If you are interested (which you can let me know via posting) I can spend more time on these. Please remember that my arguments for the existence of God are neither exhaustive or adequate for proving God's existence. I hope you know that after reading the "knowing" series.