A good post over on the Just Thomism blog. I’d be interested to hear a response from our friends who hold that scienctific knowledge is all that is worth learning. This post shows different.
Assume all of this is true: the sciences have reached a great many settled conclusions in a relatively short time while philosophy and theology, in spite of their several-millennia head start, have reached no such settled conclusions. The same debates repeat forever without resolution.
Inference: philosophy and theology are inferior and perhaps even failed ways of knowing.
But the fact is that settled questions involve our indifference to finding out the answers for ourselves. To the extent that some question is settled, we’re usually uninterested in going back and seeing the arguments for it, even when the arguments are demonstrative. But philosophy deals with the sort of questions that individuals want to answer for themselves – even where philosophy has demonstrations to give it still has to give them entirely from the beginning to each person in each new generation. Fundamental questions about God or evil or human goodness or the…
View original post 133 more words
