Hi.
I am a doctoral student at the University of Chicago Divinity School
where I study theology and philosophy. I am currently working on
my dissertation which looks at the philosophical structures of how
knowledge is constructed—how we understand things—and then, given
that, how we can understand God.
My
thesis is that knowledge is a cognitive construct, or structure,
that we impose on the world in order to make sense of it. As Immanuel
Kant said, I can never know the tree as tree, but only the tree
as I perceive it. That is, I construct the tree from the integration
of the perceptible object and my cognitive concept of what a tree
is. The object that we name and understand to be “tree” is not a
tree unless we make it so. This means an object without a concept
is meaningless—literally unknowable—while a concept without an object
is blind. Our reality of knowledge then forms a kind of “horizon”—a
limit—under which everything that falls within it can and must be
known because of the concept-object congruence. Science, for example,
is built on these premises. Think of the first dinosaur discoveries
and the names given to the various species.
A
T-rex was not a T-rex until someone named it so. Hence, the problem
of God is a real problem. For God is clearly not an object, and
hence meaningless in this schema. Furthermore, God cannot be a concept
without being an empty concept. In other words, if God is going
to be the God that many say she is, then God cannot fall within
the horizon of knowledge. If God does so, then she is nothing more
than an idol, that is, an object matched with a concept. How, then,
is an authentic experience of God possible? I believe it is but
that would take too long to show in an introduction, let’s just
say it involves poetry and duct tape.
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