Kierkegaard wrote: “It would seem very strange that Christianity should have come into the world just to receive an explanation.”
The question of experience is in part a question of certainty. Is my experience a guise or is it genuine, is it friend or faux, or like many have pondered in this pomo-and/also-world, are the two in relationship? And if so what does that look like?
I question whether certainty is ever possible. Of course we’d have to define certainty… “Certainty” in my understandings more than a preponderance of evidence, and even more than a reasonable doubt. Certainty, has a definitive quality; an absolute quality about it.
Does certainty even need faith and reason?
We can sure see why much contemporary thought, claims that all truth is purely a subjective projection of cultural conditioning and that we have no honest alternative, “to paddling around in the pluralist soup,” (as Daniel Taylor suggests).
I think it is fairly safe to say that the goal of both faith and reason is truth, does that seem right?. Though my gut tells me that the pursuit of truth is a pursuit for meaning or even for something that is real.
And while philosophy came to its self-proclaimed “end” in the 20th century, having reasoned absolute certainty is entirely unattainable, the church seems to have dug in its heels Holding fast not only to the possibility of certainty but the possession of objective certainty. And in so doing the church is arrogant and a faithless atheist.
Ironically the insistence on certainty destroys its very possibility. Demand for certainty creates it opposite – cynicism.
Pascal (not my son) found faith incompatible with human experience. In his Pensées, Pascal writes:
“This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point… it wavers and leaves us… nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses. Let us therefore not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows.”
Blaise Pascal
While certainty is beyond our grasp – meaning is not, nor is reality.
Peace, dwight
