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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE ROLE OF THE PROPHET IN THE QUEST FOR

All serious inquiry, whatever the discipline, professes to be a quest for truth. Whether it is a court hearing a case at law, a biologist or physicist at work in the laboratory or a theologian reading the book of a biblical prophet, each one seeks the truth or to be conveyed in the respective contexts. Each also recognizes the complex of truth as, for example, about a fact, the comprehension of an or , kllowledge through per- sonal relationship or a combination of such things. 1

THE APPROACH OF PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy is traditionally the discipline that has classified the signi- ficant objects of truth as God (or ultimate ), man, and the world. And it has set the essential questions: What is? How do we know? How shall we act? The questions, in tum, govern three general divisions of philosophical study: , and .2 The divisions are interrelated, and the answer given to the epistemological question, 'How do we know?'3 pretty much deter- mines the answer given to the other questions.

Rationalism and

Modem philosophy offers, broadly speaking, a two-fold answer to the epistemological question: We know by and by .

I Cf. A. F. Holmes, 'Truth,' NDT 695£; G. Curry, 'What is Truth,' Churchman III (1997), 143-158: Aquinas, compared to , 'had a fuller understanding of truth because he lived in the light of Christ as truth' (158). 2 For more detailed divisions and diagrams of 'the parts of philosophy' cf. A. R. Lacy, 'Maps of Philosophy,' OCP 927-944: 'Questions that can be asked in phi- losophy may be classified under "Epistemology," "Logic and philosophical logic," "Philosophy of ," "Moral philosophy," "Political philosophy," "Philosophy of language," and "Philosophy of '" (929). 3 Cf. D. W. Hamlyn, 'History of Epistemology;' C. A. Kirwin, 'Problems of Epistemology,' OCP 242-245, 245-249; E. D. Cook, 'Epistemology,' NDT 225£ 256 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Before the work of Immanuel Kant4 it focused on this question and answered it in two ways. Philosophers on the European Continent emphasized through autonomous human reason,5 and British philosophers stressed knowledge through human experience.6 Rene Descartes (1596-1650), supposing that knowledge of reality arose from within one's own mind (or ), set forth the famous dictum, 'I think, therefore I am' (cogito ergo sum). From the fact that he could affirm or doubt his , he inferred the reality of his existence. Furthermore, from the starting point of the reality of his Ego, i.e. of individual Man, Descartes thought that human reason could then establish the reality of God and of the external world. 7 With variations, 'rationalist' philosophers followed his view of how we know truth. But another kind of epistemology arose in the British Isles that challenged Descartes' views. The Scottish philosopher, (1711-1776), developing the thought of others, especially of , argued that the source of knowledge lay entirely in experience in which sensations provide the basis from which are derived, ideas whose exter- nal reality was also uncertain. He may offer 'an early application in psychological idiom of the logical positivists' verification .'8 Hume's empiricism resulted in a , which was in fact an a priori assumption,9 both about the knowledge of external generally and about miracles in particular. The latter became more apparent in his essay on miracles in which any supernatural event in history was excluded. 10

4 I. Kant, Critique if Pure Reason, London 1929 (21787/1[ 781). 5 The early Continental 'rationalists' are often summed up by 3 writers: Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-1677) and Gottfried von Leibniz (1646-1716). Cf. OCP 188-192,845-848,477-480; ',' ODCC 760; NDT 224f., 656. 6 Representative of the early British empiricists are John Locke (1632-1704), (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-1776). Cf. OCP 493-496, 89-92, 377-381; ODCC 665. 7 Cf. E. M. Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics, Oxford 1978, 19, 168: 'So Descartes' ontological argument [for God] does, in the end, fail, though not, I think, for the usually advanced against it.' 8 So, P. Helm, 'David Hume,' NIDCC 490. Cf. Cook (note 3). 9 See E. E. Ellis, The Making if the New Testament Documents, Leiden 1999, Appendix VI, 435ff. 10 D. Hume, 'Of Miracles,' An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (GB 35), 488-497 (Section 10). For critiques of Hume cf. B. J. F. Lonergan, Insight, London 21958, 411-416; from the perspective of 'common ' cf. Thomas Reid, Works, 2 vols., Edinburgh 1852. Further cf. R. M. Chisolm, Foundations if Knowing,