re certainty and arrogance my last article included this quote if any substantial number of talk religion misc readers read some wittgenstein of the postings would disappear if they understood some wittgenstein would disappear michael l siemon someone called boundary wrote this quote seems a little arrogant don t you think there is a convention called a smiley which looks like this it is supposed to look like a sideways smiley face and indicates that the preceding comment is supposed to be funny and i ll note that i have participated on talk religion misc for over five years i d say mr siemon was not too far off in the meat of his reply mr boundary serves up an excellent example of what i meant by there is no way out of the loop i wrote that human brains are infested with sin and can be trusted only in limited circumstances in reply mr boundary wrote i would beg to differ with you here the properly formed conscience can be trusted virtually all the time which just moves the problem back one level how do you tell if your conscience is properly formed the only way to tell is to presuppose that you are capable of judging the formed ness of your own conscience in other words you can only be sure that your conscience is properly formed if you assume that your evaluation can be trusted assuming your conclusions saves you a lot of time i ll grant but it s not a valid way of reasoning unless you are infallible your judgements about your own thinking cannot be certain therefore it is not possible to be certain your conscience is properly formed whatever that is supposed to mean mr boundary then gives another paradigm example of the problem now you have hit on the purpose of the church it is by necessity the infallible interpreter of divine revelation without the church christianity would be nothing more than a bunch of little divisive sects the church is by necessity the infallible interpreter of divine revelation how do you know presumably you believe this because of some argument or another how do you know that the argument contains no mistakes you write therefore although our minds are finite and susceptible to error our competence in arriving at inductive insights gives confidence in our ability to distinguish what is true from what is not true even in areas not subject to the experimental method but there is a huge difference between confidence in our ability to distinguish what is true from what is not true and infallible i am confident about a lot of things but absolute certainty is a very long way from confident this discussion is about the arrogance of claiming to be absolutely certain really go check the subject line saying you are absolutely certain is significantly different than saying you are confident when you say that you are confident that invites people to ask why except in very limited circumstances when you say that you are absolutely certain it invites people to dismiss you as someone who does not have any idea of his own fallibility i have yet to meet anyone who believed in a knowably infallible source of truth who would admit the possibility of errors in his reasoning all of them every last one has claimed that he was himself infallible the result has been to convince me that they had no idea what was going on darren f provine kilroy gboro rowan edu this particular discussion may not be entirely relevant to the original criticism i get the feeling that the original poster regarded as arrogant the very idea that there are right and wrong answers in religion and that the difference can have eternal consequences when i say that i think there is a hell and that he is at least in significant danger of ending up there i will admit that as you say the reasoning processes i used to reach this are fallible thus at least in principle i could be wrong but these basic facts are clearly enough taught in the bible that i think it s unlikely that i m misinterpreting it in order to get this level of confidence i ve tried to frame my statement sufficiently carefully as to sidestep a number of the more controversial issues i haven t for example said that all non christians will definitely end up in hell and i haven t attempted to describe hell in any detail i have a feeling that my view is going to be regarded as arrogant and intolerant even though i acknowledge that i m fallible and so there s some chance i m wrong don t get me wrong i think there are a lot of genuinely arrogant christians and often criticism of us is justified but in at least some cases i think the criticisms constitute blaming the messenger if the universe is set up so that there are eternal consequences for certain decisions it s not my fault i m just telling it the way i think it is you may think god is immoral for setting things up that way it s one of the critiques of christianity that i find it most difficult to respond to but it s not arrogance for me to tell what i think is the truth clh
