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Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People

Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People

List Price: $16.99
Your Price: $11.55
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Nonsense
Review: A book on epistemology it ain't.
Pity the poor soul to whom I gave my autographed copy to.
If I could remember who it was, I'd buy it back in order to burn it.
This is the kind of baloney being taught at a seminary(!) in Saint Louis.
Mrs. Meek (at least last year) teaches LOGIC!

I chose one star to rate it only because zero was not an option.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A lack of certainty does not outlaw knowledge
Review: A lack of proovable certainty does not mean that knowledge ceases to exist, it means instead that the relationship between a person and knowledge is more like a relationship between two people. Longing to Know suggests that what we view as "reason" (science, math) and what we view as "faith" or stuff outside the box (religion, and artistic talents) are really acts of coming to know with very similar major features. In other words, knowledge is a confidence (for example, that the floor will hold me when I walk on it; although I have confidence that the floor will hold me, the floor will not necessarily hold me) rather than a proovable certainty.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: But is it Christian or biblical?
Review: I agree with a previous review that an epistemology that says certainty is unattainable must be wrong, because it is self-refuting.

In recent philosophical literature, one school of thought contends that certainty about anything is unattainable, and that the best that we can achieve is probability. This way of thinking has influenced Christian thought, so that in the fields of Christian apologetics and philosophy, some people now follow the non-Christian philosophers in affirming that certainty is indeed unattainable, and that the best we can do is to draw probable conclusions.

Christians faithful to biblical revelation must resist this trend, since if our epistemology is such that we reject the very possibility of certainty outright, then knowledge of all that is Christian is reduced to a matter of probability and not certainty, including the infallibility of Scripture and the resurrection of Christ.

I think what has happened is that these Christians do not know HOW to attain or demonstrate the certainty of Christian truths, and therefore they have "wimped out" and settled upon a "lower" position. However, it is this "uncertain" position about knowledge that is impossible. The very idea of probability requires certain knowledge about something, since probability always has a stable reference point -- probable according to what or compared to what?

As theologians and philosophers like Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen, Gordon Clark, and Vincent Cheung have shown all NON-CHRISTIAN epistemologies cannot attain certainty about anything at all. Some non-Christian philosophers see this -- that by non-Christian principles they can attain no certainty about anything -- and from this they conclude that no human can attain certainty, without considering Christianity as the first principle that makes knowledge possible. It is a grave mistake, therefore, for the Christian philosopher to follow the non-Christian and assume the same conclusion, and then seek to defend Christiantiy from such an unbiblical position.

I...


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