Jonathan Edwards on Epistemology

Truth is the consistency and agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.
--Jonathan Edwards, Notes on the Mind

A few especially nice glimmers of Scriptural truth in Aristotle

Was reading Nicomachean Ethics and came across these quotes in Book VIII on friendship:

Now it looks as though love were a feeling, friendship [defined as mutual love here] a state of character; for love may be felt just as much towards lifeless things, but mutual love involves choice and choice springs from a state of character; and men wish well to those whom they love, for their sake, not as a result of feeling but as a result of a state of character. (Bk VIII, 1157b29-33)

For a man is not a king unless he is sufficient to himself and excels his subjects in all good things...(Bk VIII, 1160b3-4)

As regards the first, I am reminded of the well-known point of practical Christian ethics that love is a choice and not a feeling, and choices shape character. As regards the second, I think about how wonderful it is to have a King who meets exactly these requirements--the True King.

Fashion and Moral Realism

1. Skinny jeans on guys is just wrong.
2. THEREFORE, objective moral values exist.
QED

Humanism and the Terrible Twos

Christianity is more intellectually mature than humanism. Most humanists espouse a system which rejects the notion of an extrinsically existent God, and focuses on self-realization rather than obedience. When God-language is retained, God becomes not a person, but a shorthand for the most desirable good for ourselves. He does not exist in any meaningful sense except as a symbol for what we are not, but are trying to become. But of course, were we ever to become perfectly good, we should be deserving of worship and obedience, and then the whole process of denying our existence in order to achieve our autonomy would have to begin over again. It is really a matter of convenience that we retain just a bit of injustice. This is really the basis of the humanist system: to hold onto our own autonomy. We cannot bear to think that another Person may know better than us what our own good is. But this simply reveals our own immaturity. It is the two-year-old who always demands his own way. It is the adult who knows when to be silent and obey. The greatest lie that our society has engendered is that unquestioning obedience is always an evil. For if God is perfectly good and wise, and He tells us to do something, then by definition disobedience is error, and the only person who actually wants to be in error is the person who is too prideful to admit that he isn’t God.