Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age > Status Update
Andrew Meredith
is on page 135 of 488
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.
— Mar 29, 2026 11:39AM
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Andrew’s Previous Updates
Andrew Meredith
is on page 406 of 488
"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."
— Apr 10, 2026 06:09PM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 346 of 488
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).
— Apr 09, 2026 03:58PM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 217 of 488
Harrison traces the philosophical rise of methodological naturalism (assuming for the sake of neutrality and natural science that God is not involved).
— Apr 03, 2026 06:43AM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 198 of 488
A long, interesting, but kind of rambly chapter about the classic apologetic "proofs" for God's existence.
— Apr 01, 2026 07:03PM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 156 of 488
"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.
— Mar 30, 2026 11:19AM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 111 of 488
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.
— Mar 27, 2026 11:34AM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 94 of 488
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.
— Mar 25, 2026 12:02PM
He places the blame primarily with the introduction of Aristotle and his logical definition of true knowledge in the Middle Ages.
Andrew Meredith
is on page 50 of 488
Past the intro and the first chapter.
I'm going to enjoy this book. It's speaking my heart language.
— Mar 24, 2026 02:49PM
I'm going to enjoy this book. It's speaking my heart language.
This would eventually become a true dichotomy. We must take spiritual/heavenly truths (revelation) on faith, but natural/earthly truths must be measured by reason.
But that even started to erode as reason began to be used to weigh what should count as true revelation:
"What God reveals is undoubtedly true, Locke allows, but whether it is a true revelation ‘Reason must judge.’ With Locke, reason moves from being intimately connected to divine revelation to being an independent judge of what actually counts as revelation in the first place."