Review of the previous post
The previous post continued the discussion and review of philosophical attempts to define God.
Preview of this post
This post continues the discussion and review of philosophical attempts to define God with a discussion of revalations.
III. Philosophical and Reasoning Attempts to define God
- B. Revelation
Revelation has included Devine encounters, prophecy, mysticism and miracle. The Bible is replete with examples of each of these instances. Once a person truly believes that God has revealed Himself to human beings, there would seem to be no room for discussion or analysis. It is a sensory experience and such experiences should be examined and analyzed on a case-by-case basis. However, such an exhaustive analysis is fraught with difficulty and is well beyond the scope of this essay. Hence, revelation will not be discussed in this series.
Reason and religious experience seek to define and place boundaries on God based on human understanding which is a dead end because that means the God depends on our understanding. We defined God, but God is, and should be, greater than that. Therefore, these routes to understanding God have led to highly disputable conclusions.
However, this impediment has not deterred people from trying to identify God and/or argue for His existence. The reasonings about God are innumerable. To start this discussion, a quick review of some of the more prominent arguments for the existence of God will be presented. Some scholars have broken these approaches down into a few categories with the various arguments concerning the existence and nature of God being variations of these categories[1].
Preview of the next post
The next post continues the discussion of attempts to define God with a discussion of religious experiences.
[1] See, Religion If There Is No God… by Leszek Kolakowski, published by St. Augustine’s Press of South Bend, IN in 2001 and Philosophy of Religion volume 1, by James Hall, published by The Teaching Company of Chantilly, VA in 2003.