Some questions are deceptively simple. For example: how do you know? The fancy philosophical word for this is “epistemology,” although that often takes it a step further to ask how do you know you know. Given that many powerful individuals are motivated by a Fundamentalist faith the question of how we know is more important than it might seem. Back in the days when faith commitments meant thinking such things through, theologians in the western world came up with three bases of knowledge: scripture, tradition, and reason. Anglicans, especially, favored this “three-legged stool.” If you removed any one of the three, the stool became unstable, topsy-turvy. The analogy worked well. It assumed that all three factors would be weighed against each other.
As time went on two developments occurred—the wider belief in science, and the work of John Wesley, a priest in…
View original post 300 more words
