From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Mar 29 2001 - 21:14:38 MST
At 10:59 PM 3/29/01 -0500, Mark wrote:
>To the rationalist, the fideist looks
>irrational placing so much evidence on interpersonal trust.
You need to have a person at the other end to do interpersonal trust.
Or do you mean I should trust my local pastor about the reality of this
unobservable and just possibly non-existent person?
>To the fideist,
>the rationalist looks inconsistent because asserting the supremacy of human
>reason can itself only be a matter of trust.
A matter of trust in exactly the same consistencies of the world that
underwrite almost all of the fideist's own verities.
A matter of trust employing the same limits to credulity that the fideist
sets in all matters aside from this extraordinary and improbable claim for
the reality of an invisible person who never responds in a publicly
testable fashion.
>Could we build a God III that
>we could not understand but who we could trust?
We could not *build* a God III--can't make head or tail of these
blueprints, Joe--but we might be able to kickstart something headed in such
a direction. If it emerged out the far end of the pipeline, could we trust
it? Well, we'd need to see what it did; by its fruits we shall know it. If
it was horrid to us, we'd be silly to trust it. `This hurts me more than it
hurts you' is the dictum of someone without much imagination or patience.
Damien Broderick
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