NATURAL MINDS AND DIVINE TRUTH: RETHINKING THE AUGUSTINIAN1 IDEA OF NECESSARY TRUTH
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Date
2012
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Ilorin Journal of Religious Studies (IJOURELS)
Abstract
Abstract
St Augustine of Hippo and the other fellow Augustinians, such as St
Bonaventure, argued that the human mind lacks the cognitive capacity to
attain the necessary, certain, and the immutable truth. This necessary,
certain, and the immutable truth, they argued, can only come through
divine illumination whose source is God. For this reason, many people
have recourse to religious places in search of this immutable and
necessary truth about nature and human beings. This paper argued that
discourse about truths reduces to discourse about language truth. If it is
true that language and meaning are natural and originate form human
cognitive faculty, then statements about the idea of divine truth, divine
illumination, necessity, and even every statement that purports to express
or implies the existence of God, are all, as a matter of necessity, natural
issues and are going to be product of man’s cognitive powers. No truth of
these statements can therefore be beyond the natural. The paper then
concluded that, seriously speaking, presumptuously what the
Augustinians are looking for might be termed human idols which are
invariably inherent in human cognitive faculty.