re the arrogance of christians in a previous article dleonar andy bgsu edu pixie says do the words question authority mean anything to you i defy any theist to reply well despite what my mother told me about accepting dares here goes you have to be very careful about what you mean by question authority taken literally it is nonsense that which is authoratative is authoratative and to say i question to word of this authority is ridiculous if it is open to question it isn t an authority on the other hand it is perfectly reasonable to question whether something is an authority the catch phrase here should be authenticate authority once you have authenticated your authority you must believe what it says or you are not treating it as an authority the difficulty is that authenticating an authority is not easy you can perhaps discredit a claim to authority by showing logical inconsistency in what it teaches or by showing that it does not obey its own rules of discourse but the fact that i cannot discredit something does not in inself accredit it nor does the fact that i can convince myself and other that i have discredited something necessarilly mean that it is false i cannot accredit an authority by independantly verifying its teachings because if i can independantly verify its teachings i don t need an authority i need an authority only when there is information i need which i cannot get for myself thus if i am to authenticate an authority i must do it by some means other than by examining its teachings in practical matters we accept all kinds of authorities because we don t have time to rediscover fundamental knowledge for ourselves every scientist woring today assumes on the authority of the scintific community all sorts of knowledge which is necessary to his work but which he has not time to verify for himself in spiritual matters we accept authority because we have no direct source ofinformation we select our authorities based on various criteria i am a catholic in part because the historical claims of the rc church seem the strongest without authorities there would be no subject matter for belief unless we simply made something up for ourselves as many do the atheist position seems to be that there are no authorities this is a reasonable assertion in itself but it leads to a practical difficulty if you reject all authority out of hand you reject all possibility of every receiving information thus the atheist position can never possibly change it is non falsifiable and therefore unscintific to demand scintific or rational proof of god s existence is to deny god s existence since neither science nor reason can in their very nature prove anything mark baker the task is not to cut down jungles but aa freenet carleton ca to irrigate deserts c s lewis
