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From: gtaylor@cornell.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Revelation Knowledge, The Impasse
Message-ID: <13@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-May-84 16:56:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.13
Posted: Tue May 15 16:56:22 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 16-May-84 04:41:27 EDT
References: <768@akgua.UUCP>
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept.
Lines: 36

Yes, Bob...but you're navigating toward rather trecherous
waters here by implying that what you refer to as "Revelation"
can or should not be discussed outside of the more traditional
categories of Rational/Empirical epistemology. I would imagine
that we'll have the net full for the next epoch or so with

a) Platonists/Kantians disputing your view of Rationalism

close shave with Occam's razor.

Just for fun, let's watch the brouhaha. While I think that
you're absolutely correct to point out that net.religion seems
full of people who sling mud on the basis of possible epistemic
misunderstanding or misrepresentation (it's possible that some
wag may even suggest we all slink off to net.Philosophy to ponder
this further), I'm not certain that producing a category of
Revelation out of the epistemic hat will help much. Both the
Empirical tradition and the Rationalist tradition have men of
serious religious conviction in their ranks who did not find
Revelation a separate category from their formulation of
the nature of knowledge (Kant and Bishop Berkeley come to mind
here). Besides which, you've left out both the Pragmatist
and the Existentialist traditions as well.

I heartily agree that there are some problems of language and
philosophical presupposition afoot here. I'm just not sure that
your formulation is either very helpful either in terms of
the history of Christian thought on the subject, or interms of
the philosophical distinctions among the armed camps on the net.

"If we are adjured to be 'wise as serpents', what constitutes
knowledge, serpentwise????"

your pal,
gtaylor