Marc: Okay, I’ll jump in.
Chris D wrote:
==While living on earth in the body, I don’t see how physical senses such as the eyes (rods, cones, etc.) and brain (synapses, neurons, etc.) can be separated out from the invisible intellectual mind. There is something harmonious going on between them.==
Marc: Yet there are people who are completely without eyes and even without what most neuropsychologists would consider to be enough of a brain to function. The following are quotes from The Design of Life:
==In fact, there are reliable reports of people exhibiting remarkable cognitive function with very much reduced brain matter. For instance, anthropologist Roger Lewin reported a case study by John Lorber, a British neurologist and professor at Sheffield University:
“There’s a young student at this university,” says Lorber, “who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.” The student’s physician at the university noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest. “When we did a brain scan on him,” Lorber recalls,” we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.”
Or consider the case of pioneer microbiologist Louis Pasteur. As historian of science Stanley Jaki remarks,
“A brain may largely be deteriorated and still function in an outstanding way. … A famous case is that of Pasteur, who at the height of his career suffered a cerebral accident, and yet for many years afterwards did research requiring a high level of abstraction and remained in full possession of everything he had learned during his first forty some years. Only the autopsy following his death revealed that he had lived and worked for years with literally one half of his brain, the other half being completely atrophied.”==
David wrote:
==After reading your respons concerning the role of sensation in obtaining knowledge ,is it correct if I called your epistemics position as common-sense realism ?==
and
== And I think there is a parallel here between common-sense & free-will==
Marc: David, this looks like you are making a parallel between what you think Chris D believes and the heresy of free will. Are you saying that Chris D’s epistemics are heretical?
==So my conclusion is this : in your theology proper & soteriology you are always consistent with scripture ,but in epistemology you are suddenly “allowing” a human being [even the unregenerated-sinners] to obtaining/achieving the truth/knowledge by/through their fallible human sensation ,==
Marc: What I see Chris D doing is making a distinction between God’s giving knowledge providentially without the Holy Spirit and God’s giving knowledge graciously by the Holy Spirit. All knowledge is given providentially, but there is a subset of that knowledge that is given by the Holy Spirit. David, if this is not the case, then what is your alternative? Are you saying that human beings do not ever obtain/achieve the truth/knowledge by/through their senses? Are you saying that you do not ever obtain/achieve the truth/knowledge by/through your senses?
Agrammatos 