Sylvia wrote:
>Now it is you who are oversimplifying.  No matter how you talk about our
>perceptual equipment, or that which is processed by it, you are still talking
>about phenomena.  What their basis might be in a possible transcendent reality
>is beyond our ability to know.

Then why post about the "stubbornness of everyday fact...?"  That which is
transcendent is also relative.  Something can transcend my personal
experience and something can transcend the usual and customary experience,
what you called the consensual.  I think we might all agree that there are
field dynamics, forces in the field, of which we are unaware; we learn of
them with the advancing of scientific inquiry and technological ability.
Does this mean that we are not still effected by these things, or function
in the field according to dynamics we do not yet comprehend? No. Our
awareness of something does not create that thing, and as our awareness
increases and our inquiry begins and our understanding grows we may reach a
point where we can say, "I know this phenomenon as..."  That is, it is not
beyond my capacity to know since I know it AS.  I experience and understand
my experience.  Furthermore, I compare my expereince to the experience of
others.  I know that we do not experience "the other" directly and so know
it absolutely as it is - that we experience other according to our capacity
for experience and we interpret our experience in various ways.  Merely
because I am interpreting doesn't mean I cannot "know" some things about
the field.  They are constructs, but it seems to me that through comparison
with the consensus and just practical humility before the "stubborness of
everyday fact" we might say that we can know SOME things.

>Your statement that "There is objective reality" is a statement of belief,
>just as the following paragraph in which you talk about God.  These are not
>matters of proof.  The second is a matter of faith, while the first is the
>best hypothesis we can come up with to explain certain problematic aspects of
>phenomenological experience.

This I find curious.  If everything is merely phenomenological, wouldn't
everything be a matter of faith?  Then the question becomes, "Upon what do
you base YOUR faith?"  I have argued that we can have such assurance of
some things we hold by faith as to reach the measure of knowledge, one's
ground about how the world works, but it's still all faith.  I believe
certain things, but when this crosses into the realm of the spirit, people
seem to automatically suspect the spiritual understanding, the
interpretation of experience given by those who say they have experienced
God.  I think it is one thing to hold propositions about God to be true and
another to say that one has experience of divinity.  It's not always easy
to separate the two, either.

Then, there is the whole issue of knowing something by faith, that is that
faith becomes the instrument of knowing.  In a training group, for
instance, a student takes that first step of working as therapist, and the
student believes in order to support him or herself in the moment.  The
student trusts the other people present and believes they have good will;
the student believes that they can "do it" or that no matter what, it will
all turn out for the good because even if they do their worst work, the
trainers will make good teaching use of it.  (You get the idea.)  Faith is
the means by which the student learns and comes to know the experience of
working as therapist, of putting one's self out in the group, etc.  Without
the faith, one would not take that step and find ground underneath.  Just
so in the spiritual realm.  One steps out believing God for something, and
then there is the experience.  One pushes back, against God, trusting in
the relationship, and then there is the experience, and it is a response
only those who are of the spirit can understand, because they are sensitive
to those particular forces in the field.  Some time ago J.I. Packer wrote
an interesting book, Knowing God.  In that book he contrasted merely
knowing propositional statements about God with having a personal
experience of God in which one began to learn what God is like.

So, Sylvia, for you to say that this is all phenomenological and that
something of what I said was merely a matter of faith is to me being
simplistic.

Phil