5 - Aftermath
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2009
Summary
We have seen that the landscape of philosophy in general and epistemology in particular shifts significantly once we acknowledge the reality of purposively available evidence of God's existence (that is, evidence available only in keeping with God's perfectly loving character and noncoercive redemptive purposes for humans). We then become aware of a kind of elusive noncoercive evidence that philosophers and others have overlooked or ignored. In doing so, we become aware also of our own responsible role, particularly the role of our wills, in receiving purposively available evidence of God's existence. We then recognize that the relevant evidence of divine reality must be not only given to us by God but also willingly received by us, on God's terms of redemptive love.
By way of a general conclusion to this book, we'll clarify some of the immediate significance of human responsibility toward available authoritative (as opposed to spectator) evidence of divine reality, particularly in connection with the twofold human predicament of destructive selfishness and impending death – topics rarely considered in epistemology. Attention to this ongoing predicament reveals, among other things, that sincere questions about human knowledge of God's existence are urgently significant, and not just the stuff of casual speculation. Such attention should move us beyond philosophical parlor games to issues that truly matter. Accordingly, an adequate epistemology of human knowledge of a perfectly loving God should acknowledge the epistemological significance of human selfishness and death.
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- The Elusive GodReorienting Religious Epistemology, pp. 242 - 264Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008