Friday, August 7, 2015

"No physical science without physical interference, no personal knowledge without personal intercourse; no thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think."

"to know real beings we must exercise our actual relation with them.  No physical science without physical interference, no personal knowledge without personal intercourse; no thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think. . . . We can know nothing of God, unless we can do something about him.  So what, we must ask, can we do?"
"Nothing can give substance to our thought of God but an experience which employs our activity in relation to God, where that activity is something other than thought itself."
"God would not be recognized as worshipful, save in relation to our worshipping.  If he is so recognized, there is something we can do about God:  we can worship him."

     Austin Farrer, Faith and speculation:  an essay in philosophical theology (New York:  New York University Press; London:  Adam & Charles Black, 1967), 22, 28, 26 (chap. 2, "The empirical demand").

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