Thread by @EveKeneinan

–I believe that P.
–Why?
–Because Holy Tradition teaches that P.
–Holy Tradition can’t warrant knowledge.
–Why not?
–All tradition is unreliable.
–Holy Tradition is inerrant, because divinely revealed.
–There is no revelation.
–Question nicely begged!

To assume the nullity of God or of divine Revelation or Holy Tradition or Holy Scripture is to commit oneself to the start to certain basal assumptions, which may, of course, be quite mistaken.

It is irrelevant that modernity arrived at other basal assumptions.

The usually reason for dismissing tradition is that it lacks the “universality” of e.g. mathematics.

But its SPECIFICITY is its strength, because ACTUAL EVENTS do not happen universally.

Can every actual event be subsumed under an ABSTRACT UNIVERSAL?

One HELL of an assumption!

It is plausible on its face that NO EVENT can be subsumed under an ABSTRACT UNIVERSAL, that every EVENT is, in fact, a PARTICULAR—each must be, at least in time and space.

So—and this is a point Nietzsche makes constantly—the scientific method gives us UNIVERSAL LAWS OF NATURE—THEREFORE it falsifies REALITY! Always. Necessarily.

I don’t believe this, since I am a Platonist, but it isn’t OBVIOUSLY false.

In fact, I think MOST people today would claim this to be true—not noticing it necessarily reduces science to “useful lies.”

The Greek philosophers went TOO FAR toward the Universal. Christianity horrified many of them by the so-called SCANDAL OF PARTICULARITY.

Talking of God or the One is one thing, but saying that The One … is this man, over there, eating some bread … that was just TOO MUCH.

Hegel repeated, in his historicist way, the Scandal of Particularity. He wanted to subsume EVERYTHING into the Universality of the Concept.

So it was necessary for Kierkegaard to hammer him over and over and over on this point.

Christianity is BOTH the universal AND the particular.

That is the MEANING of the Incarnation. One of its meanings.

IF God entered time, IF God became man, a man, at a time and place, and revealed truth to certain specific men and women then and there, this is what it is, and this revelation has an epistemological status ABOVE any human reasoning to the universal.

“Nothing is greater than human reasoning!”

Again, that is one hell of an assumption.