The Sermon That Made Me An Agnostic
"We sit outside and argue all night long About a God we've never seen, but never fails to side with me." - Primitive Radio Gods, Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand |
I delivered a sermon once in which I described four categories of understanding, or knowledge columns as I called them. The purpose of these columns, as I'll explain in more detail later, is to address the question of how well we understand god, his will, doctrine, and how we understand ourselves in light of all this. I came across some old notes from that sermon - notes from a sermon I preached in the year 2000 - and that got me thinking about the intellectual and spiritual journey I've been on since I preached this sermon over a decade ago.
I began my sermon by explaining the dichotomy between the noumenal and the phenomenal in Immanuel Kant's epistemology (Sounds like I was a boring preacher, I know, but it actually wasn't as bad as you might think). Noumena refers to the "thing in itself" (Ding an sich), or reality as it is independent of our experience of it. Phenomena refers to the appearances which constitute our experiences. Put roughly, the noumenal is reality as it actually is, whereas the phenomenal is reality as we perceive it.
I began my sermon by explaining the dichotomy between the noumenal and the phenomenal in Immanuel Kant's epistemology (Sounds like I was a boring preacher, I know, but it actually wasn't as bad as you might think). Noumena refers to the "thing in itself" (Ding an sich), or reality as it is independent of our experience of it. Phenomena refers to the appearances which constitute our experiences. Put roughly, the noumenal is reality as it actually is, whereas the phenomenal is reality as we perceive it.
