Word: knowingly
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...predictable answer: yes. Even nonbelievers, Küng writes, know that an unjust world raises the question of morality and, in turn, religion...
...more respectable among philosophers than it has been for a generation to talk about the possibility of God's existence. The shift is most striking in the Anglo-American academies of thought, where strict forms of empiricism have reigned. "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know," declared Bertrand Russell. And A.J. Ayer, on behalf of logical positivism, decreed that "all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical." The accepted wisdom was that the only, valid statements were those verifiable through the senses...
America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God, Alvin Plantinga of Michigan's Calvin College, develops a related argument from one of the pressing issues in modern epistemology. Though it sounds strange to the man in the street, philosophers ponder how an individual can know that there is any creature besides himself who thinks, feels and reasons, or how he can know that anything ever existed in the past. How, for instance, can we know if another person is in pain? Plantinga answers that such knowledge is acquired through analogy, and in God and Other Minds (Cornell...
...religious circles, natural theology is not in vogue. Not all Roman Catholics can wholeheartedly accept the First Vatican Council's decree that "man can know the one true God and Creator with certainty by the natural light of human reason...
...persuasive, tell too little about the nature and will of God. Blaise Pascal, anticipating modern objections to natural theology, believed that one cannot worship a dry concept, only the living God. Though a genius in science and mathematics, Pascal believed that "the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know." But if in an age of science, faith in God can be more rationally grounded, as a growing number of philosophers now attest, then the reasoning soul who is so inclined can more surely and assuredly feel comfortable in moving beyond reason...