Status Updates From Some New World: Myths of Su...

Until relatively recently it was not uncommon for university courses in the history of philosophy to leap from the ancient Greeks to Descartes as if nothing of philosophical import had been transacted in the intervening eighteen centuries.

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that first-century Jews, Christians, and Pagans, like Biard's Mi'kmaq, had no conception of belief either, at least in our modern sense. ... We are more distant from past believers than we think, and the idea that we share with them a common epistemological vocabulary arises out of mistaken assumptions about the stability of meaning of terms like 'faith' and 'belief'.

"If we are prepared to countenance the prospect that our religiously inclined forebears, the myriad adherents of religious traditions, and the vast bulk of past philosophers, are not our intellectual inferiors, we have good grounds for questioning our present naturalistic commitments."

A secular myth: Humanity is inevitably, successively progressing away from it's dark, animalistic origins toward a golden age of universal science, reason, prosperity, and felicity, but to do so, it must collectively learn to throw off the shackles of ignorance especially characterized by superstition (both primitive animism and religion).

Word of the day: corpuscular.

Harrison traces the philosophical rise of methodological naturalism (assuming for the sake of neutrality and natural science that God is not involved).

A long, interesting, but kind of rambly chapter about the classic apologetic "proofs" for God's existence.

"For those who regarded reason as an instrument of calculation – reason as ratiocination – rational religion might be understood as a minimalist religion consisting only in those truths that were rationally comprehensible and supported by argument." This led to the rise of the "Deists" and to a new, very rational form of Christianity.

For the Church Fathers (channeling Platonism), reason and true knowledge came about by the soul being taught by God (the Sun's illumination of the soul, in Augustine's famous analogy). "When the mind makes a true judgment, it is in contact with something that is eternal and unchanging." Thus reason, as with any other source of knowledge, was seen as both intertwined with and subordinate to revelation.

The Reformers reacted strongly to the Roman Church's understanding of "implicit faith" (for good reasons) and set out to re-Christen Christiandom with explicit knowledge of true doctrine. In so doing, however, they both individualized and intellectualized the concept of true faith, setting off a chain reaction that is still reverberating today.

Harrison traces the meaning of "pistis" (Greek) / "credo" (Latin) through Church and philosophical history to explain how and why the word(s) changed meaning from "trust/allegiance" to "belief/faith" (to be understood in the modern parlance of "assent to spiritual propositional truths").

He places the blame primarily with the introduction of Aristotle and his logical definition of true knowledge in the Middle Ages.

Past the intro and the first chapter.

I'm going to enjoy this book. It's speaking my heart language.