John Calvin On the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation it is a little odd that we are still talking about Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. For one thing, the sensus appears only at the beginning of the Institutes and is somewhat dismissed by Calvin as being inadequate for saving anyone. The sensus is also a species of innate idea. But ever since John Locke’s Essay forced a retreat by nativists, talk of innate knowledge of anything has remained largely a niche activity. More recently, however, some philosophers of religion have proposed interpretations of Calvin’s sensus that do not entail innate ideas and thus do not fall foul to Locke’s criticisms. Although…
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Knowing Me Knowing You
I exist. Am I sure that I exist? Well, as sure as I can be. I think I exist. Isn’t that enough to assure me that I exist. If I am thinking, I must exist. And so goes the familiar logic of Rene Descartes. Descartes proceeds in his pursuit of knowledge from the following starting point: “When we apprehend that we are thinking things, this is the first notion which is not drawn from any syllogism; and when one says, I think, hence I am, or I exist, he does not conclude his existence from his thought as by a force of some syllogism, he must beforehand have known this major, All…
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Faith: Harris or Calvin?
American a-theist in residence, Sam Harris, says that faith is “the permission that religious people give one another to believe things strongly when reasons fail” (listen to the speech here). Harris seems to think that faith is something one does after all else falls short, a final leap in the dark, a punt. It is as if we can only get so far on our own steam and have to guess at the rest. And, having made the leap, we keep each other bolstered by excusing ourselves from rationality. There may be many religious people who think this way, but by no means all. Christians have other, better ways to…