Wednesday, March 11, 2020

What is "Street Epistemology"?

Street epistemology attempts to apply good philosophical debating approaches to ordinary conversations with people. Not a bad idea on the surface.

Where it comes unstuck is its definition of 'faith' when applied to Christians.

Their definition:
  • Faith: When given as a reason for belief, it can be understood as firm confidence in the claim in excess of what is warranted by evidence.
In Hebrews, faith is defined as: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (11:1)

Note, this is things not seen, not things for which there is no evidence. Christian faith is a response to evidence or the reasonableness of our belief. It is firstly confidence or trust in God through his word and the internal witness of his Spirit. Compare Hebrews 11:3.

This arises from our understanding of the Bible through textual criticism, biblical analysis, archeology, external historical records and the like. Our scholars bring us this information.

It next arises from the person and work of Jesus who rose from the dead (based on more good evidence in the texts, the church's foundational history, and biblical reasonableness based on Old Testament prophesy).

This then is founded in the action of God in history, and the explanation of our experience of reality that he comprehensively provides.

The classic arguments are those from Cosmology, Ontology, Teleology, Experience, Ethics.

If you want to get complicated, Alvin Plantinga has 24 or so grounds for faith.

Ask an atheist why his belief is reasonable (and, BTW, atheism is the belief that there is no god. It is not a personal "I don't believe in god, persuade me otherwise". It requires a positive ground for belief).

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has it:
This definition has the added virtue of making atheism a direct answer to one of the most important metaphysical questions in philosophy of religion, namely, “Is there a God?” There are only two possible direct answers to this question: “yes”, which is theism, and “no”, which is atheism. Answers like “I don’t know”, “no one knows”, “I don’t care”, “an affirmative answer has never been established”, or “the question is meaningless” are not direct answers to this question.


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