Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Hmm …

… Maverick Philosopher: Five Grades of Agnosticism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

My own faith is, like Bill Vallicella’s, “a living faith, not merely intellectual assent to a proposition; it is something I live, and my living as I do attests to the psychological reality of my believing.” But though I can’t prove that God is, I have had experiences that have reinforced my faith and so cannot say I am agnostic. Wordsworth puts it wonderfully in “Tintern Abbey”:

… I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

No comments:

Post a Comment