Thursday, March 01, 2007

Knowing and Believing

Michael Pahl posts on certainty vs. conviction--good stuff. I'm working through Kellenberger's The Cognitivity of Religion and finding much to appreciate about his 3rd perspective, mediating between those of Kierkegaard and Aquinas, for example. His thesis is that discovery-realisation knowledge is different from enquiry-based knowledge. What he's saying has a lot to do with the kind of conversion that Lonergan speaks of and also speaks to concerns that Torrance (relying on Kierkegaard) has. Most importantly, he focuses on belief as a matter of the will informed by cognition. Unfortunately, the perspective contains very little Christology--perhaps not a surprise, since the book is part of a series on theology & philosophy whose general editor is John Hick.