I remember my first lecture in Moral Philosophy. I was gobsmacked. I was also introduced to the painful process of someone rubbishing my assumptions, neutralising my presuppositions and playing skittles with my convictions. In that first year I read Plato, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant and they'll do for starters. But I came to love moral philosophy, then took philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, and ever since have kept company with, and been in discussion and argument with, 'the philosophers'.
Philosophy was a process of owning my own faith, reconfiguring on a sounder basis my convictions, and becoming aware of the importance of assumptions and the equal importance of not allowing assumptions to become padlocks on all the doors that lead to new, deeper, more honest thinking. So when I come across a philosopher who writes like this, I know I'm in congenial company, and if I've any sense I'll keep quiet and listen, and perchance learn.....
"...the Bible is conspicuously lacking in proofs for the existence of God. Insofar as the Bible presents or embodies any method for comprehending the goodness of God or coming to God, it can be summed up in the Psalmist's invitation to individual listeners and readers: Taste and see that the Lord is good.
Whether we find it in the Chambonnais or in the melange of narrative, prayer, poetry, chronicle and epistle that constitute the Bible, the taste of true goodness calls to us, wakes us up, opens our hearts,. If we respond with surprise, with tears, with gratitude, with determination not to lose the taste, with commitment not to betray it, that tasting leads eventually to seeing, to some sight of or insight into God."
Eleonore Stump, 'The Mirror of Evil, in God and the Philosophers. The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason, T V Morris, Oxford, 1994, page 241.
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