Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
But yet you believe the authenticity of Christ while explicitly denying that you have reason to --- yea, while believing it's impossible to have reason to. What's wrong with you?
I'm not denying that I have reason to believe in Christ's authenticity. What I'm asserting, and I think Mackie makes this clear, is that pure rationality cannot arrive at faith via
a priori reasoning. If you think faith is merely a subversion of the principles of understanding arising from the psychological processes of wish fulfillment, that's a rational conclusion. However, what can rationality do to rule out a separate and wholly distinct avenue of perceiving reality? That which provides the individual with superiorly authoritative knowledge of ultimate truth, something far more definite and immediate than the careful and tenuous calculations of the intellect.