The first forum discussion provided us with numerous examples of the continuing presence and importance of archetypal characters in the stories we tell about ourselves in the world. These characters represent a kind of emotional truth about human experience, and stories (in whatever form or medium) continue to be our most popular means of dealing with questions of emotional truth. However, there are other kinds of truth in the past and present history of human culture that also pose challenging questions. While emotional truth pertains primarily to our interaction with other human beings and our internal experiences of that interaction, these other kinds of truth tend to deal with external questions: questions about the workings of the physical world and about its past and future; questions about human action and intervention in that physical world; and questions about the realities of human interaction outside of our emotional experience of them.

When it comes to these kinds of truth, it seems especially difficult in today's world to determine what truth is -- that is, how to determine what's true and what isn't in the stream of information that flows through our society (for example, newspapers, television news and talk shows, the Web, email gossip, etc.), and what to do about the fact that one's perspective on the truth can depend upon your vantage point (for example, who's a hero and who's a villain). So, in this forum, let's take a closer look at these other kinds of truth, especially at two of the most important ways that our cultural tradition has defined as paths to truth: reason and revelation.

Revelation

Let's begin with revelation, since it's probably the oldest truth-seeking tradition in human experience. According to some cultural and/or religious traditions, messages containing truth may be communicated directly ("revealed") by the god or gods to an individual who receives the revelation. Examples of individuals claimed to receive such revelations might be: the shamans of the central Asian nomadic tribes, the central African tribal peoples, or the North American tribes of the Great Plains region; the oracles of the ancient Greek tradition; the prophets of the Hebrew tradition; and, in more recent times, the religious mystics of the major faith traditions or even the charismatic, evangelistic preachers of our own time.

Those who experience the revelation must relate it (if it's to be heard) to other people who didn't receive the revelation directly. In turn, those who hear the message of the revelation by this indirect path -- if they're to treat it as truth -- must have faith that the message is really from the god or gods, and not the result of fantasy, madness, or deliberate deception. This presents a potential problem: in the realm of ordinary experience, the idea or the claim that someone is in direct communication with the god or gods goes against what we normally consider common sense. (Imagine, for instance, that your next-door neighbor comes to you and tells you that he or she has just experienced a revelation direct from . . . well, I think you see the problem.) The problem is compounded by changes in the context of language over long periods of time. The words in which a revelation is communicated at a particular time and place in history can, over time, change their meanings and connotations. This can make it difficult for later periods to comprehend the intention of the revelation.

Despite these difficulties, all of the major religious traditions of our world are built upon a foundation of revelation. Below is a list of readings in the textbook that you can use to familiarize (or perhaps refamiliarize) yourself with some of those traditions and their revelatory background (including excerpts from some of the sacred texts of those traditions):

Creation Tales (Book 1, pp. 13-15 and pp. 37-38)
Egyptian tradition (Book 1, pp. 19-22)
Hebrew/Judaic tradition (Book 1, pp. 47-53)
Hindu tradition (Book 1, pp. 59-61)
Christian tradition (Book 2, pp. 7-11)
Buddhist tradition (Book 2, pp. 12-14)
Islamic tradition (Book 2, pp. 46-50)

Additional, and more recent, examples of revelatory experience can be found in these discussions of religious mysticism:

Islamic Sufism (Book 2, pp. 55-57)
Christian mysticism (Book 2, pp. 94-96)

In the case of the Christian tradition, the textbook provides other examples of statements of faith that draw upon the revealed tradition of Christianity:

the Nicene Creed, the early Christian statement of faith (Book 2, p. 18)
Augustine, most influential of the early Church fathers (Book 2, pp. 19-22)
Pope Innocent III, one of the most influential popes (Book 2, pp. 97)
Martin Luther, initiator of the Protestant reformation (Book 3, pp. 126-129)

Reason

Juxtaposed with the tradition of revelation, or faith, is the tradition of reason. While revelation is held to come from divine inspiration, reason depends upon knowledge, which (within the reason tradition) is based on careful consideration of evidence and argument. This means that both reason and knowledge must conform to certain rules. Where do these rules come from? Well, in the Western cultural tradition, one of the oldest reason-based practices is philosophy, which originated with the ancient Greeks. Greek philosophy consisted of systematic thought about the "cosmos" -- the Greek word for the world and everything in it, including the natural world, the human world, and our behavior in it. One of its most important features, however, was that philosophy devised rules for itself. In other words, it didn't just look at the world in its search for knowledge -- it looked at the way that it was looking at the world. Philosophy was interested in (and is still today interested in) the processes of knowledge-seeking as well as the knowledge itself.

One of the outgrowths of the philosophical tradition is the practice that we today call science, which relies upon defined procedures for observing the world, recording the resulting observations, and reasoning from those observations to theoretical structures that attempt to explain the world that we experience. (This is the standard version, at any rate, of how science works.) In addition, those explanations are intended to make it possible for us to reliably predict what will happen in the world under certain circumstances. Anyone in the early 21st century with some measure of education knows that the scientific enterprise has experienced a great deal of success over the past 400 years.

Nonetheless, this success doesn't mean that science, philosophy, and the reason tradition don't have problems of their own (just as revelation and the faith tradition do). For instance, one area of philosophy -- called "epistemology" -- studies the nature of knowledge. It asks how truth and knowledge can be defined and how people know the truth when they see it. Notice, however, that the question "what is truth?" is a perplexing (and somewhat circular) one. The answer (almost by definition) needs to be true, but if those asking the question don't know what truth is, how are they to answer the question "what is truth?" Also, scientific developments of the 20th century have called into question some of the very same certainties of knowledge that the scientific revolution had, so it seemed, brought to fruition.

To familiarize yourself with the development of the reason tradition in Western culture, review the following passages in the textbook:

Greek philosophy (Book 1, pp. 95-105)
Medieval philosophy (Book 1, pp. 113-116)
Scientific revolution (Book 4, pp. 75-83)
Philosophes and the encyclopedic movement (Book 4, pp. 103-107)
Kant's philosophy (Book 4, pp. 137)
20th-century physics (Book 6, pp. 3-4)
The new sciences (Book 6, pp. 129-130)

Below are some links that allow you to further explore some of the issues regarding reason, science, faith, and the evaluation of information. The information you'll find is in some cases challenging and difficult, in other cases fun and entertaining. I encourage you to spend some time at whichever of these sites most interest you:

Critically Analyzing Information Sources -- a website that outlines a process for determining the value and relevance of information sources for scholarly or academic purposes.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: a synopsis -- a compact summary of the ideas contained in a very influential book published in the 1950s by a historian and philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn.

The Puzzle of Peter: an Interview with Peter Vardy -- a thought-provoking discussion on faith and belief with a British philosopher of religion.

Dealing with Science -- an exercise in the logic of pattern-finding, an intellectual tool often called upon in the practice of science.

So you think you're logical -- a game to challenge and identify your own logical habits.

Battleground God -- an exercise that explores some of the quandaries and challenges inherent in the concept of supreme beings.

Your textbook makes clear that the history of the relationship between these two truth-seeking traditions -- reason and revelation (or faith) -- is full of tension. At times, faith and reason seem to work in concert. At other times, they seem to be in conflict. While most of us -- either consciously or unconsciously -- draw upon both traditions for guidance in our day-to-day lives, it can be difficult to know how to deal with those areas where they provide conflicting answers, or where neither one provides a satisfactory answer. After reading the above discussion and reviewing the associated material in the textbook, consider the following questions:

How do you go about deciding what constitutes a reliable source of information or knowledge? How, for instance, do you go about rating the reliability of what you see on television? read in the newspaper? see on the Internet? hear from friends? hear in your place of worship? learn from a book or in a classroom? How do you resolve for yourself the sometimes conflicting claims of reason and revelation? Or the sometimes conflicting claims of revelation and revelation? Or even the sometimes conflicting claims of reason and reason? Are you always satisfied with this means of resolution? As you read through the material in the textbook, you might have noticed that skepticism has played an important role in the history of the reason-based tradition of truth-seeking. How would you rate the importance of skepticism in your own navigation of the world and the search for knowledge?

Are there limits to what we can achieve or what questions we can answer with reason? Descartes (Book 4, pp. 80-81), for instance, sought to prove the existence of God in order to establish a reliable foundation for knowledge in a time when the foundations of human knowledge were being called into question. Do you think his argument succeeds? If you think he does succeed, do you think this solves the problem of reliable knowledge of the world? If you don't think he succeeds, then how might we solve the problem? In other words, how might we arrive at a mutually agreeable reference point for deciding what is knowledge and what isn't, what is truth and what isn't (especially in light of the fact that people around the world -- and sometimes even within the same culture -- can bring sharply differing criteria and vantage points to the question of truth)? If you think it isn't possible to all agree on a mutual reference point for knowledge and truth, then how do we go about living together in a world that gets smaller every day?

NOTE:  Please take notice that I'm NOT asking any of you to declare your own faith or your own doubts about faith, or to engage in arguments for or against either side of that question; that is for a different kind of discussion. I assume that most of you adhere to some form of belief, while some of you probably do not. What I'm asking you to do is to think about (and discuss) the complex navigation of truth traditions that depend upon different criteria, but which both (by necessity) exert influence upon our lives.

 
1) Prepare a response that presents a thoughtful consideration of at least some of the issues raised by the above questions and readings. Write at least one good-sized paragraph (about 150 to 200 words). Your response should be informed by the discussion above and by the material from the textbook readings.

2) Sometime before October 11, go to the WebCT discussion area and select the Topic called Truth. Locate my initial post (called "Reason and Revelation") and post your response as a Reply before the end of the day on the first due date for the forum (October 11).

3) Return to the Truth forum again after October 11. Read the posts that your classmates submitted in response to this assignment. You should then post at least two follow-up replies to your classmates, either to their original posts or to one of their follow-ups. Your follow-ups should show evidence of not only reading the post that you're responding to, but also giving careful thought to what it says. A valid follow-up to your classmates might provide additional evidence that supports points made in their original post, or it might provide a differing viewpoint or use information in the original post to draw an additional insight. Your first round of follow-ups should be posted before the end of the day on the second due date for the forum (October 18).  (NOTE: If you're reading multiple messages at the same time, make sure you use the Reply button goes with the message you want to reply to...usually, the one that appears immediately above that message, not below.)

4) Then, return again to the forum after October 18 to read my own follow-up post (called "Truth Follow-up"), in which I'll try to draw some conclusions from the first and second rounds of the forum and pose a new set of questions based on what you all had to say up to that point. Then post one reply to my follow-up. (The reply to my follow-up should attempt to address at least one of the new questions that I pose.) Also, post one follow-up to a classmate's reply to this third round. Continue to monitor and participate in the discussion until the concluding date for the forum. All follow-up responses must be posted by the concluding due date (October 25). You should have a total of at least four follow-up responses in addition to your initial posting.
 

Humanities 1301 -- Calendar

Humanities 1301 -- Introduction

Collin County Community College