Stanley Fish is at it again, and so am I.
He wrote this, and I wrote this:
I love to read Fish’s columns, and I recently used my birthday money to buy my first Fish book. =)
I want to register my amazement that few commenters ever seem to understand what Fish is after. They retreat to their first principles to say he’s wrong and then act as if those first principles are not subject to his critiques of all first principles!
First principles are generally beliefs which cannot be empirically proven. Take the idea that empirical proof is the supreme requirement for truth—can that be proven empirically?
Fish points out in column after column that everyone views everything through the lenses shaped by these on-faith first principles. But then people with very noticeable coke-bottle glasses loudly swear in the comments that they have never viewed the world except with the unalloyed objectivity of 20-20 vision.
Jesus Christ is one of my first principles. The truth of the Bible is another. Am I any less objective than someone who has chosen naturalistic materialism as his first principle? If Jesus Christ is Lord of the world, then I have access to the only objective view.
That’s not to my credit; I have nothing that I did not receive. I see an ally in Stanley Fish not in believing as I do but in a defense of believing in general as a necessary function of living in a world where we don’t know everything.
Would you be willing to click over to the NY Times and recommend my comment with the button at the bottom? That is, if you agree with it! I am certainly not the best exponent of the Christian faith, but I’m hoping that some word from Christ’s representatives is better than none.
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