God and Revelation 3


 In history events are recorded as fact and then it is recorded in books. The knowledge of this event is then mediated to the historian. Even relational knowledge of a married couple is mediated. In other words, the couple have an argument and this knowledge passes to the brain via the emotions. As far as knowledge goes the point that is being made is that all knowledge is mediated to some degree. Hence it is important to start by looking at Christian and Islamic epistemology.
To understand the world we live in, in terms of Truth, Goodness and Beauty; One cannot escape universals and particulars and how these relate. It is something that all philosophers and theologians need to wrestle with. Gunton gives us a helpful start;
1  'The question of the one and the many takes us to the very beginnings of philosophy and theology. The contribution it makes to the argument is most clearly set forth in the famous disagreement between Heraclitus and Parmenides. Our information about the teaching of these two founts of Western philosophy is fragmentary and often obscure, but it is as representative figures that they are of interest to us. Associated with the former is the view that everything is in flux, and that war is the universal creative and ruling force, reality being suffused by forces pulling in both ways at once, so that the basic fact in the natural world is strife. Although there is for this philosopher a world order and not a radical pluralism, Guthrie points out that for Heraclitus the fire that animates all things, the logos of the universe, is not a permanent substratum that remains the same in all its modifications, as it was for Aristotle. That would introduce rest and stability. On the contrary, Heraclitus is the philosopher of plurality and motion: the many are prior to the one, in such a way that there is to be found in nature no stability. Parmenides represents the opposite pole  of thought. For him, the real is the totally unchanging, for so reason teaches, contradicting the appearances presented to the senses. Reality is timelessly and uniformly what it is, so that Parmenides is the philosopher of the One par excellence.

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