The Epistemological Implicates of Faith

Student: Peter Trần Ngọc Đức        Professor: Joseph Nguyễn Thịnh Phước, SDB.

The Epistemological Implicates of Faith

A athestic student asks a theistic student: "I see you go to church every Sunday and I think you believe in God. But What is God and how to know about His Existence?" the latter answers: "Oh, He is very important for my life. So I go to church every Sunday. But...I just know that He exists. Even though I could not express, I am sure that He is there." Normally, the theistic student claims that the term "God" has a very important significance for them, are making a definite knosledge-claim that must be considerd seriously though he do not has any extra-ordinary, direct, mystical communication with God. So the question is what kind of the knowledge of God he has. And what is the difference between this knowledge from scientific knowledge and from the knowledge of the mystic. In this paper, I want to discuss about the knowledge of the man who is call "ordinary believer".

What is the basis of the Claim of ordinary believer?

Claim knowledge of something needs a basis. So the claim knowledge of the Existence of God of the ordinary believer also has its own basis. It is based not on a logical argument from particualr premises to a particular conclusion, but on a much wider and deeper foundation than could ever be the basis of such a formal argument. The experience of God that he claims is not detached at any point from the rest of experience, but premeates this. As a man, all of us realize that it is necessary to make "tacit assumptions" to the effect that somehow or other life "make senses". We are able to "make sense" of life and all we need is the "tacit assumption". It always "lies behind" and also permeates the rest of our experience. And every philosopher who wants to express his thought about the human-life has to find out a "tacit assumption" on which his system of philosophy of human is based.

Therefore, the theist's view implies a claim to a kind of knowledge of God which is certainly not knowledge in the sense in which we use the term when we speak of knowing a house or knowing English, even knowing one's father or brother and they use the term "faith" to express it. And The term "faith" implies that the theist has really encountered God by himself.

Encouter in Faith Distinguished from mystical Experience

There are two important respects of difference between ordinary believer and mystical encounter. In the first place, the encounter in faith is frequent or constant, underlying all other experience, while on the other hand the ineffeable experience that the mystic claims is brief, lasting for an instant and not playing the same role in the general pattern of life as the kind of the former. In the second place, it lacks the poignant intensity of mystical experience and moves the believer's whole life. He finds himself constantly in the presence of God in his life. To the theist, the essential mystery is: God who is, to say the least, as omnipresent as space to us, is also a "subject" standing in a personal relationship to me, a relationship that is more personal and particular than that of father and son or husband and wife. Therefore, the relationship between the ordinary believer and God may be called generally is the relationship of faith and the act of faith entails a claim to a unique knowledge.

Verification of Fundamental Beliefs

The claim to the knowledge of God that belief implies may vary enormously as any claim to knowledge of anything because we could not have a total knowledge of anything. But what is the "proof" for our fundamental postulates for this claim? It is that they appear to be corroborated in our experience as a whole. The ordinary believer maintains in effect that his theistic view is corroborated in his own experience and that of others. In his mind, it is verified not only in the intergration of his own personality but in the working out of history. The traditional proofs of theism have been widely abandoned by religious philosophers but this does not mean that the intellectual respectability of theism is diminished. This means that the kind of verification of fundamental believes differs from the kind of verification which is used in physic or chemistry. And we realize that human's knowledge of God always limited even we were to be much better informed than we presently are on "scientific" matters.