God talk

  So today what we are looking at is the acquired knowledge of God and allied topics.   Before I start though, I am so happy that Spring is here.  I took this picture on my walk as it reminds me of Pilgrims progress.  The walk of faith has many roads, many mountains and valleys to climb.  This crack in the road reminded me of God's grace.  On page 72 Bavinck makes the point that in the past, what the innate knowledge of God was about is that actually we have been born with and have the capacity from our own being to know God, and acquired knowledge is basically comes to humans from outside of ourselves, externally by observation, and serves to augment and expand the former. Bavinck goes on to say that this isn't exactly 100% accurate. He says that all knowledge enters the human mind from without, innate only is a capacity for knowledge, but this innate capacity is only activated by the action and impact of the world within; while the seed of religion is i...

  Even before looking at Bavinck here, I know that in educational circles there are the ideas of nature and nurture.   Does our natural abilities from our DNA make us brilliant or do we learn to excel as we learn?    We found this bird on the floor of the garage but he is now fine. A Wiki writer gives us some of the history of this: “The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" was termed tabula rasa ('blank tablet, slate') by John Locke in 1690. A blank slate view (sometimes termed blank-slatism) in human developmental psychology, which assumes that human behavioral traits develop almost exclusively from environmental influences, was widely held during much of the 20th century. The debate between "blank-slate" denial of the influence of heritability, and the view admitting both environmental and heritable traits, has often been cast in terms of nature versus nurture. These two conflicting approaches to human deve...