At times I am struck by just how little we know (and I don't even put much emphasis on the "know"). I work, inter alia, in philosophy of time and I can't answer my six-year-old's questions about the nature of time. We humans really aren't very smart at all, except at asking questions.
It is not surprising that our ability to ask questions would outpace our ability to find answers. But it is, I think, surprising just how far it outpaces it.
And yet we can know the important thing: that we are made to know and love God.
Would you characterize the knowledge that we are made to know and love God as propositional knowledge?
ReplyDeleteOur lack of propositional knowledge doesn't surprise me. What's surprising to me is, on one hand, the depth and intimacy of our knowledge of the people we love, God included, and on the other hand, the astonishing amount of people who we will never know, both alive and dead. This seems to be a deeper mystery than our lack of discursive knowledge of facts. Perhaps both will we rectified in heaven.
Questions about the nature of time can be so difficult. I would be interested to learn what you think about the ideas of Julian Barbour a physicist who argues that time is an illusion. I am reading (and struggling to understand) his book The End of Time.
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