[February 1999 journal entry]
Re ‘experience’ as a criterion for concluding an idea is true/trustworthy -- (1) Only via indiscriminate experience can one come to the Job 42:7 approval of the thoughts/views the ‘scrap heap’ Job expressed to his three close friends. (2) If ‘God’ is ambiguous, then the function and importance of indiscriminate experience or judgment ‘from below’ increases. (3) The core hermeneutic task we face is to interpret our experience. (4) The ‘religious’ T/O paradigm reduces human experience to intention and eventually to divine intention (leaving no place for an experiential or statistical ‘from below’ interpretation). (5) ‘God’ is an inference drawn from and understood in light of the interpretation of experience. (6) What is analogous to the ‘null hypothesis’? Perhaps that there is no compelling meaning for the term ‘God’. (7) To disregard or remove from consideration all experiences that challenge the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm is analogous in statistics to imposing a bias on the study sample. (8) With little information, many inferences are possible; with increased information, many such inferences are weeded out.
Re ‘experience’ as a criterion for concluding an idea is true/trustworthy -- (1) Only via indiscriminate experience can one come to the Job 42:7 approval of the thoughts/views the ‘scrap heap’ Job expressed to his three close friends. (2) If ‘God’ is ambiguous, then the function and importance of indiscriminate experience or judgment ‘from below’ increases. (3) The core hermeneutic task we face is to interpret our experience. (4) The ‘religious’ T/O paradigm reduces human experience to intention and eventually to divine intention (leaving no place for an experiential or statistical ‘from below’ interpretation). (5) ‘God’ is an inference drawn from and understood in light of the interpretation of experience. (6) What is analogous to the ‘null hypothesis’? Perhaps that there is no compelling meaning for the term ‘God’. (7) To disregard or remove from consideration all experiences that challenge the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm is analogous in statistics to imposing a bias on the study sample. (8) With little information, many inferences are possible; with increased information, many such inferences are weeded out.