jar writes:
Look at your accounts of your experience Phat.
What parts are actual reporting and what parts are pure inference?
I turned to an old friend, in order to better understand reports and inferences.
Language In Thought & Action writes:
Most of our knowledge, acquired from parents, friends, schools,
newspapers, books, conversation, speeches, and radio, is received
verbally . All our knowledge of history, for example, comes to us
only in words. The only proof we have that the Battle of Waterloo
ever took place is that we have had reports to that effect. These
reports are not given us bv people who saw it happen, but are based
on other reports: reports of reports of reports, which go back ulti-
mately to the first-hand reports given by people who did see it hap-
pening. It is through reports, then, and through reports of reports,
that we receive most knowledge: about government, about what is
happening in China, about what picture is showing at the down-
town theater — in fact, about anything which we do not know
through direct experience.
Critics could thus argue that the only knowledge that humans could ever have about Jesus Christ stem from first hand reports passed down through the centuries. Tangle likes to remind me that the only place the character could exist would be in reports and legends.
Let us call this world that comes to us through words the verbal
world, as opposed to the world we know or are capable of knowing
through our own experience, which we shall call the extensional
world .
I will say that though much of my initial understanding of Christianity was entirely through reports, (books I had read, people I had listened to) my passion began when I was Born Again.
LIT&A writes:
The human being, like any other creature, begins
to make his acquaintance with the extensional world from infancy.
Unlike other creatures, however, he begins to receive, as soon as he
can learn to understand, reports, reports of reports, reports of reports
of reports. In addition he receives inferences made from reports,
inferences made from other inferences, and so on.
Thus Hayakawa describes the charge made by Tangle and others that Christianity is entirely cultural and is based on reports and inferences. I argue that my passion began through extensional experience.
Reports are verifiable. We may not always be able to verify them
ourselves, since we cannot track down the evidence for every piece
of history we know...But if we
are roughly agreed on the names of things, on what constitutes a
“foot,” “yard,” “bushel,” and so on, and on how to measure time,
there is relatively little danger of our misunderstanding each other.
Even in a world such as we have today, in which everybody seems
to be quarreling with everybody else, we still to a surprising degree
trust each other's reports . We ask directions of total strangers when
we are traveling. We follow directions on road signs without being
suspicious of the people who put them up. We read books of infor-
mation about science, mathematics, automotive engineering, travel,
geography, the history of costume, and other such factual matters,
and we usually assume that the author is doing his best to tell us as
truly as he can what he knows.(...)We still have an enormous amount of re-
liable information available and that deliberate misinformation, ex-
cept in warfare, still is more the exception than the rule. The desire
for self-preservation that compelled men to evolve means for the
exchange of information also compels them to regard the giving
of false information as profoundly reprehensible. .
Now to be fair, many of you regard scripture as an entirely human created story. Thus I can give you information which lines up with scripture and you are still more likely to turn to science to verify the information or to place it in the context of critical thought. Granted, hayakawa states:
...At its highest development, the language of reports is the language of science. By “highest development” we mean greatest general usefulness.
But how, it may be asked, can there be agreement about even this much among people who are at each other’s throats about practically everything else:
political philosophies, ethical ideas, religious beliefs, and the survival of my
business versus the survival of yours? The answer is that circumstances compel men to agree, whether they wish to or not. If, for
example, there were a dozen different religious sects in the United
States, each insisting on its own way of naming the time of the day
and the days of the year, the mere necessity of having a dozen dif-
ferent calendars, a dozen different kinds of watches, and a dozen
sets of schedules for business hours, trains, and radio programs, to
say nothing of the effort that would be required for translating terms
from one nomenclature to another, would make life as we know it
impossible.
Which is a good argument to stick with Christianity and quit trying to introduce every god created!
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." ~Mark Twain "
***
“…far from science having buried God, not only do the results of science point towards his existence, but the scientific enterprise itself is validated by his existence.”- Dr.John Lennox
“The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.”
- Criss Jami, Killo
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.” — Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You
(1894).
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