"Here the author admits what many Protestants try to deny - there is no real difference between 'sola scripture' and 'solo scripture'. Even if, as Matheson claims…"
I criticized Matheson's distinction years ago.
"at the end of the day what matters in Protestantism is one's private interpretation of Scripture, making individual (not the Bible) the final authority."
At the end of the day, what matters in Catholicism is one's private interpretation of Scripture, church fathers, church councils, popes, &c., to arrive at the conclusion that Rome is the One True Church®–making the individual (not the Magisterium) the final authority.
"I would simply ask - since St. Peter warned that people can twist the Scripture to their own destruction due to their ignorance (2 Peter 3:16), and if all we have is our private interpretation of Scripture, how can anyone know he does not twist Scripture to his own distruction?"
Based on your private interpretation of 2 Pet 3:16.
"If that is the case, there is no reason why one's private judgment could not be used to discern which books are inspired, since Protestants don't have infallible canon (merely 'fallible collection of infallible books' as Sproul, White and others admit)."
i) I've explained on several occasions how that's a simplistic view of how the books of the canon go together.
ii) The Tridentine Fathers were divided on the OT canon, and what came to be the official position only passed by a plurality, not even a majority–much less a unanimous vote. What does that say about the discernment of the Magisterium?
"Arvinger As far as I remember the Canon with Deuterocanonical books was affirmed unanimously, the division was regarding whether to attach anathema for denying it or not (I will check it out, I could be wrong)."
According to Metzger, in his classic monograph on the NT canon, "Finally on 8 April 1546, by a vote of 24 to 15, with 16 abstentions, the Council issued a decree (De Canonicis Scripturis) in which, for the first time in the history of the Church, the question of the contents of the Bible was made an absolute article of faith and confirmed by an anathema," B. Metzter, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1987), 246.
"But even if it was not, what matters is the official teaching of the Magisterium, not the way the Council technically arrived to it - personal opinion of an individual bishop or cardinal does not constitute part of the Universal Magisterium in any way, shape or form."
That matters to you. But it demonstrate how artificial the official teaching is. And you drive an irrational wedge between the conclusion and the process of reasoning by which the conclusion is arrived at.
In addition, the only intelligent distinction is between true and false opinion, not personal and official opinion.
"Arvinger We went through this before - every claim to the final authority is necessarily a presuppositional one whether it is the Bible of the Catholic Church."
i) To call it "presuppositional" doesn't make it true or furnish any evidence for your final authority. That's just an arbitrary stipulation on your part.
ii) And I don't grant the legitimacy of framing the issue in terms of authority.
"If you are willing to embrace the above statements, you have the point."
i) I'm not concerned with whether a "private opinion" could hypothetically be wrong, but whether, in fact, it is wrong, and evidence for the truth or falsity of "private options".
ii) Ultimately, it's up to God in his providence whether our beliefs are true or false.
"which is tu quoque fallacy by the way"
A tu quoque argument is not fallacious. You need to consult better resources. For instance:
"I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):
'This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man -- in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.'
"As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true."
"If one's private interpretation of Scripture is the highest level of authority"
You're stuck in the rut of "authority," and higher or lower levels of authority. Once again, I don't grant your tendentious framework. Moreover, it's getting carried a way with an architectural metaphor.
"with no authority capable of verifying it"
You keep assuming without argument that some "authority" is required to verify it. Good example of Catholic conditioning, where your incapable of thinking outside the box.
Moreover, you have, by your own admission, no means to verify your final authority. No means to verify that the Magisterium is legitimate. You might as well flip a coin.
"and Scripture teaches that private interpretation can lead one to destruction"
Based on your private interpretation of 2 Pet 3:16, which by your own admission, is self-refuting.
"Or is it merely a matter of probability - for example, Trinity being more probable than Unitarianism?"
Your only arguments for Catholicism will involve probabilities.
"It is merely a logical conclusion of a fallible canon."
No, it's a merely illogical conclusion.
For instance, the books of the canon aren't just a bunch of miscellaneous books. In some cases, the canon is a collection of collections. The Pentateuch doesn't consist of five random books, but a 5-part history by the same narrator. Same thing with Luke-Acts.
Likewise, some books are naturally grouped by common authorship. Take the Pauline epistles.
2C apocryphal Gospels are necessarily forgeries because they're too late to be written by their putative authors.
I could discuss other aspects, but it illustrates your indifference to the internals of the canon. Catholicism fosters intellectual laziness.
i) Your solution fails to solve the problem you pose, for your alternative is just a paper theory. The fact that Catholicism lays claim to "absolute certainty" on some carefully circumscribed issues doesn't make that true or even plausible.
You yourself can't escape "private opinion" and "interpretations of historical data". Either unaided reason can be trusted or not. If unaided reason is an unreliable guide to point you to the Magisterium, then you can't use the Magisterium to backstop unaided reason. For your belief in that "infallible authority" is a fallible belief in your infallible authority source. It's reducible to your personal judgment.
ii) I don't fret over hypothetical scenarios that are beyond my control. What's the point of insisting on an unattainable standard of "absolute certainty"? That's an artificial bar, and it's self-defeating.
I content myself with the situation that God has put us in. That's the best we can ever do.
If, in God's providence, I'm mistaken about something, so what? We are all at the mercy God's providence.
Inventing a theory of "infallible authority" is just a chimera to satisfy an a priori demand for "absolute certainty". But why assume that reality must conform to your demand?
"During the deliberations of the Council there never was any real question as to the reception of all the traditional Scripture. Neither - and this is remarkable - in the proceedings is there manifest any serious doubt of the canonicity of the disputed writings."
To the contrary, from what I've read, the bishops subdivided into two equally traditional camps: those who took the position of Jerome and those who took the position of Augustine.
"It is not irrational at all, it is how the Holy Ghost operates within the Church. Council Fathers are not like puppets who have no free will and no personal opinion on issues…"
Actually, you are treating conciliar fathers as "puppets" because you think the Holy Spirit causes the truth of their conclusions to override the falsity of the justifications they provide for their conclusions. The conclusion is true even if the supporting reasons are false.
"As I said before, the statement that it is presuppositional is merely recognition of the fact that we can go only to a certain level in verifying the authorities we trust, without presuppositions we would fall into hard solipsism. There is always the highest authority which cannot be verified any further."
Transcendental arguments are just that…arguments. They're not merely stipulations that ascribe axiomatic status to a favored position. Take the following definitions:
"Transcendental arguments are partly non-empirical, often anti-skeptical arguments focusing on necessary enabling conditions either of coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability, where the opponent is not in a position to question the fact of this experience, knowledge, or cognitive ability, and where the revealed preconditions include what the opponent questions. Such arguments take as a premise some obvious fact about our mental life—such as some aspect of our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, or our cognitive abilities—and add a claim that some other state of affairs is a necessary condition of the first one."
"As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too. Moreover, because these arguments are generally used to respond to skeptics who take our knowledge claims to be problematic, the Y in question is then normally taken to be some fact about us or our mental life which the skeptic can be expected to accept without question (e.g., that we have experiences, or make certain judgements, or perform certain actions, or have certain capacities, and so on), where X is then something the skeptic doubts or denies (e.g., the existence of the external world, or of the necessary causal relation between events, or of other minds, or the force of moral reasons)."
You need to show that belief in the infallible authority of the Magisterium is required by something a person "can be expected to accept without question"–which he's in no position to question. But Protestants don't grant Catholic assumptions in that regard, so you have nowhere to start. No relevant common ground.
"But how do you objectively know whether something is true or wrong if you have only your private interpretation/opinion? You can't because your private interpretation is fallible."
Your skepticism is self-refuting. You can't argue for your alternative if you think reason is that unreliable. For you must use fallible arguments to reason for your alternative.
The abstract possibility of error doesn't create any presumption that I'm wrong. Moreover, beliefs aren't created equal. Some beliefs have overwhelming evidence.
"You have the same problem as an atheist - an atheist cannot know anything to be true, because everything he claims is based on his cognitive faculties the truthfulness of which he cannot verify."
No, the atheist is in a worst situation because he believes things (e.g. evolutionary psychology) that generate positive undercutters or defeaters for the reliability of reason.
"It can be a fallacy in a specific context, if you use it to drive attention away from a question you cannot answer."
The question is whether your arguments are consistent.
"That does not men that I can't put forward historical or Biblical arguments for the truthfulness of the Catholic Church."
But that's your only bridge to the Magisterium. You act like, once you cross the bridge, you can burn it because you finally arrived at the safety of an infallible authority source that confers absolute certainty.
But that's an illusion, because it's just your fallible belief in the infallibility of the Magisterium. Your bridge never closes the gap. And that's exacerbated by your skepticism. You can't have "absolute certainty" in the Magisterium, because you can only arrive at your faith in the Magisterum via "private opinion". The Magisterium can never confer absolute certainty on any of your beliefs, because your underlying belief in the Magisterium is fallible.
"since all of these interpretations are fallible and none of them has any authority that the other doesn't have."
Your only explanatory category is "authority". You're hopelessly trapped in that simplistic paradigm.
We don't need authority to assess interpretations. Rather, we evaluate the interpretation by the quality of the supporting arguments.
If you think that's insufficient to verify truth-claims, then you've hamstrung your own ability to ever argue for the Magisterium. That's your intractable dilemma.
"So, you admit the doctrine of the Trinity is merely more probable than Unitarianism?"
What exactly would be wrong with that?
And if the evidence God has left at our disposal tilts in the direction, what's wrong with judging by the evidence God has given us?
"Of course a Unitarian can say the same thing for his position."
You still don't get it. If you think all arguments and counterarguments are equal, then you can never produce an argument for Catholicism that's better than an argument for evangelicalism or atheism or unitarianism.
Why do you keep wasting your time arguing for Catholicism, and arguing against Protestantism, when you simultaneously demean the value of arguments to prove anything?
Not to mention that you're a sedevacantist, so your alternative is riddled with tensions.
Comment has been blocked.
"Here the author admits what many Protestants try to deny - there is no real difference between 'sola scripture' and 'solo scripture'. Even if, as Matheson claims…"
DeleteI criticized Matheson's distinction years ago.
"at the end of the day what matters in Protestantism is one's private interpretation of Scripture, making individual (not the Bible) the final authority."
At the end of the day, what matters in Catholicism is one's private interpretation of Scripture, church fathers, church councils, popes, &c., to arrive at the conclusion that Rome is the One True Church®–making the individual (not the Magisterium) the final authority.
"I would simply ask - since St. Peter warned that people can twist the Scripture to their own destruction due to their ignorance (2 Peter 3:16), and if all we have is our private interpretation of Scripture, how can anyone know he does not twist Scripture to his own distruction?"
Based on your private interpretation of 2 Pet 3:16.
"If that is the case, there is no reason why one's private judgment could not be used to discern which books are inspired, since Protestants don't have infallible canon (merely 'fallible collection of infallible books' as Sproul, White and others admit)."
Deletei) I've explained on several occasions how that's a simplistic view of how the books of the canon go together.
ii) The Tridentine Fathers were divided on the OT canon, and what came to be the official position only passed by a plurality, not even a majority–much less a unanimous vote. What does that say about the discernment of the Magisterium?
Comment has been blocked.
Comment has been blocked.
"Arvinger As far as I remember the Canon with Deuterocanonical books was affirmed unanimously, the division was regarding whether to attach anathema for denying it or not (I will check it out, I could be wrong)."
DeleteAccording to Metzger, in his classic monograph on the NT canon, "Finally on 8 April 1546, by a vote of 24 to 15, with 16 abstentions, the Council issued a decree (De Canonicis Scripturis) in which, for the first time in the history of the Church, the question of the contents of the Bible was made an absolute article of faith and confirmed by an anathema," B. Metzter, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1987), 246.
"But even if it was not, what matters is the official teaching of the Magisterium, not the way the Council technically arrived to it - personal opinion of an individual bishop or cardinal does not constitute part of the Universal Magisterium in any way, shape or form."
That matters to you. But it demonstrate how artificial the official teaching is. And you drive an irrational wedge between the conclusion and the process of reasoning by which the conclusion is arrived at.
In addition, the only intelligent distinction is between true and false opinion, not personal and official opinion.
"Arvinger We went through this before - every claim to the final authority is necessarily a presuppositional one whether it is the Bible of the Catholic Church."
Deletei) To call it "presuppositional" doesn't make it true or furnish any evidence for your final authority. That's just an arbitrary stipulation on your part.
ii) And I don't grant the legitimacy of framing the issue in terms of authority.
"If you are willing to embrace the above statements, you have the point."
i) I'm not concerned with whether a "private opinion" could hypothetically be wrong, but whether, in fact, it is wrong, and evidence for the truth or falsity of "private options".
ii) Ultimately, it's up to God in his providence whether our beliefs are true or false.
"which is tu quoque fallacy by the way"
A tu quoque argument is not fallacious. You need to consult better resources. For instance:
"I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):
'This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man -- in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.'
"As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true."
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/11/the-problem-of-evil-and-the-argument-from-evil.html
"If one's private interpretation of Scripture is the highest level of authority"
You're stuck in the rut of "authority," and higher or lower levels of authority. Once again, I don't grant your tendentious framework. Moreover, it's getting carried a way with an architectural metaphor.
"with no authority capable of verifying it"
You keep assuming without argument that some "authority" is required to verify it. Good example of Catholic conditioning, where your incapable of thinking outside the box.
Moreover, you have, by your own admission, no means to verify your final authority. No means to verify that the Magisterium is legitimate. You might as well flip a coin.
"and Scripture teaches that private interpretation can lead one to destruction"
Based on your private interpretation of 2 Pet 3:16, which by your own admission, is self-refuting.
"Or is it merely a matter of probability - for example, Trinity being more probable than Unitarianism?"
Your only arguments for Catholicism will involve probabilities.
"It is merely a logical conclusion of a fallible canon."
No, it's a merely illogical conclusion.
For instance, the books of the canon aren't just a bunch of miscellaneous books. In some cases, the canon is a collection of collections. The Pentateuch doesn't consist of five random books, but a 5-part history by the same narrator. Same thing with Luke-Acts.
Likewise, some books are naturally grouped by common authorship. Take the Pauline epistles.
2C apocryphal Gospels are necessarily forgeries because they're too late to be written by their putative authors.
I could discuss other aspects, but it illustrates your indifference to the internals of the canon. Catholicism fosters intellectual laziness.
Comment has been blocked.
Comment has been blocked.
Comment has been blocked.
i) Your solution fails to solve the problem you pose, for your alternative is just a paper theory. The fact that Catholicism lays claim to "absolute certainty" on some carefully circumscribed issues doesn't make that true or even plausible.
DeleteYou yourself can't escape "private opinion" and "interpretations of historical data". Either unaided reason can be trusted or not. If unaided reason is an unreliable guide to point you to the Magisterium, then you can't use the Magisterium to backstop unaided reason. For your belief in that "infallible authority" is a fallible belief in your infallible authority source. It's reducible to your personal judgment.
ii) I don't fret over hypothetical scenarios that are beyond my control. What's the point of insisting on an unattainable standard of "absolute certainty"? That's an artificial bar, and it's self-defeating.
I content myself with the situation that God has put us in. That's the best we can ever do.
If, in God's providence, I'm mistaken about something, so what? We are all at the mercy God's providence.
Inventing a theory of "infallible authority" is just a chimera to satisfy an a priori demand for "absolute certainty". But why assume that reality must conform to your demand?
"During the deliberations of the Council there never was any real question as to the reception of all the traditional Scripture. Neither - and this is remarkable - in the proceedings is there manifest any serious doubt of the canonicity of the disputed writings."
DeleteTo the contrary, from what I've read, the bishops subdivided into two equally traditional camps: those who took the position of Jerome and those who took the position of Augustine.
"It is not irrational at all, it is how the Holy Ghost operates within the Church. Council Fathers are not like puppets who have no free will and no personal opinion on issues…"
Actually, you are treating conciliar fathers as "puppets" because you think the Holy Spirit causes the truth of their conclusions to override the falsity of the justifications they provide for their conclusions. The conclusion is true even if the supporting reasons are false.
"As I said before, the statement that it is presuppositional is merely recognition of the fact that we can go only to a certain level in verifying the authorities we trust, without presuppositions we would fall into hard solipsism. There is always the highest authority which cannot be verified any further."
Transcendental arguments are just that…arguments. They're not merely stipulations that ascribe axiomatic status to a favored position. Take the following definitions:
"Transcendental arguments are partly non-empirical, often anti-skeptical arguments focusing on necessary enabling conditions either of coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability, where the opponent is not in a position to question the fact of this experience, knowledge, or cognitive ability, and where the revealed preconditions include what the opponent questions. Such arguments take as a premise some obvious fact about our mental life—such as some aspect of our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, or our cognitive abilities—and add a claim that some other state of affairs is a necessary condition of the first one."
"As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too. Moreover, because these arguments are generally used to respond to skeptics who take our knowledge claims to be problematic, the Y in question is then normally taken to be some fact about us or our mental life which the skeptic can be expected to accept without question (e.g., that we have experiences, or make certain judgements, or perform certain actions, or have certain capacities, and so on), where X is then something the skeptic doubts or denies (e.g., the existence of the external world, or of the necessary causal relation between events, or of other minds, or the force of moral reasons)."
You need to show that belief in the infallible authority of the Magisterium is required by something a person "can be expected to accept without question"–which he's in no position to question. But Protestants don't grant Catholic assumptions in that regard, so you have nowhere to start. No relevant common ground.
"But how do you objectively know whether something is true or wrong if you have only your private interpretation/opinion? You can't because your private interpretation is fallible."
DeleteYour skepticism is self-refuting. You can't argue for your alternative if you think reason is that unreliable. For you must use fallible arguments to reason for your alternative.
The abstract possibility of error doesn't create any presumption that I'm wrong. Moreover, beliefs aren't created equal. Some beliefs have overwhelming evidence.
"You have the same problem as an atheist - an atheist cannot know anything to be true, because everything he claims is based on his cognitive faculties the truthfulness of which he cannot verify."
No, the atheist is in a worst situation because he believes things (e.g. evolutionary psychology) that generate positive undercutters or defeaters for the reliability of reason.
"It can be a fallacy in a specific context, if you use it to drive attention away from a question you cannot answer."
The question is whether your arguments are consistent.
"That does not men that I can't put forward historical or Biblical arguments for the truthfulness of the Catholic Church."
DeleteBut that's your only bridge to the Magisterium. You act like, once you cross the bridge, you can burn it because you finally arrived at the safety of an infallible authority source that confers absolute certainty.
But that's an illusion, because it's just your fallible belief in the infallibility of the Magisterium. Your bridge never closes the gap. And that's exacerbated by your skepticism. You can't have "absolute certainty" in the Magisterium, because you can only arrive at your faith in the Magisterum via "private opinion". The Magisterium can never confer absolute certainty on any of your beliefs, because your underlying belief in the Magisterium is fallible.
"since all of these interpretations are fallible and none of them has any authority that the other doesn't have."
Your only explanatory category is "authority". You're hopelessly trapped in that simplistic paradigm.
We don't need authority to assess interpretations. Rather, we evaluate the interpretation by the quality of the supporting arguments.
If you think that's insufficient to verify truth-claims, then you've hamstrung your own ability to ever argue for the Magisterium. That's your intractable dilemma.
"So, you admit the doctrine of the Trinity is merely more probable than Unitarianism?"
What exactly would be wrong with that?
And if the evidence God has left at our disposal tilts in the direction, what's wrong with judging by the evidence God has given us?
"Of course a Unitarian can say the same thing for his position."
You still don't get it. If you think all arguments and counterarguments are equal, then you can never produce an argument for Catholicism that's better than an argument for evangelicalism or atheism or unitarianism.
Why do you keep wasting your time arguing for Catholicism, and arguing against Protestantism, when you simultaneously demean the value of arguments to prove anything?
Not to mention that you're a sedevacantist, so your alternative is riddled with tensions.
Comment has been blocked.