Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God > Status Update

"The first tendency, rationalism (or a priorism), is the view that human knowledge presupposes certain principles that are known independently of sense-experience and by which knowledge of our sense-experience is governed. The second tendency, empiricism, is the view that knowledge is based on sense-experience. And the third tendency, subjectivism, is the view that there is no "objective' truth but only truth "for" the knowing subject, verified by criteria internal to the subject. These three tendencies correspond to the normative, situational, and existential perspectives, respectively. To the rationalist, knowledge is conformity of the mind to laws, to norms of thought. To the empiricist, knowledge is correspondence of an idea to an object. And to the subjectivist, knowledge is a state of the subject's consciousness.

When, like the majority of famous philosophers, people try to do epistemology without God, they must find an absolute somewhere else than in God. For such people it is tempting to try to make absolute, that is, to deify, one of the three elements of human knowledge-the subject (subjectivism), the object (empiricism), or the law (rationalism)-and to call the other two elements into question. In such epistemological systems there is no God to guarantee that the three elements will cohere, and so the philosopher must be prepared to make choices among those elements when there are, as in his assumption there will be, irresolvable conflicts."