Prior Mind Structures

Probing the underlying structures of our own reasoning, assumptions, values, and beliefs is no different from anything else we can think about.

This is not just standard procedure in many other areas of thought. It is considered matter-of-factly necessary in relation to any area in which truth-claims must be adjudicated because of the implications of the possibility of error.

Design and verification issues always come up when something goes wrong.

The design and structure of the World Trade Center towers have been the subject of extremely focused, detailed, and complex analysis since 9-11, including retracing the reasoning for various design and construction decisions in that project.

So why then is straightforward analysis claimed to be unable to arrive at a reliably true position concerning God or even operational values common to believers and atheists?

More importantly, why is the unknowability claim considered true?

And the issue of God is by no means the only area that can be questioned in this way, as we shall see.

Finding Water

Religion uses a divining rod.

Philosophy uses a pick and shovel.

Law Spheres

Every part and aspect of nature can be isolated as a subsystem
governed by laws which are describable as functions of time.

Joseph Weizenbaum
Computer Power and Human Reason

Appearance & Reality

Ideas which at first seem obvious and simple are sometimes buoys marking out stormy channels in deep intellectual seas.

(1984)

Reaching

Intense vitality, joy in living, vigor of creative writing bring to bear on their owners immense happiness and acute suffering. The reaching upward and outward of the mind is at the same time the keenest joy and the fiercest pain.


Maisle Ward (1889-1975)
Quoted in The Instructed Heart, by Fulton J. Sheen

Blind Alley

For these people of today I do not want to be light, or to be called light. These I want to blind. Lightning of my wisdom! Put out their eyes! They arouse mistrust against great things, these subtle counterfeiters and actors---until finally they are false before themselves, squinters, worm-eaten decay, cloaked with strong words, with display-virtues.

Nietzsche
The Portable Nietzsche, p. 401

Ivory Ignorance

Even first-rate philosophers are often surprisingly ignorant of the relevant philosophical literature.

William Wainwright
Philosophy of Religion