RE: Ramm's flood
Garry DeWeese (deweese@ucsu.Colorado.EDU)
Thu, 11 Apr 1996 15:17:07 -0600 (MDT)Jeffrey Mullins's reply to George Fisher was, I believe, right on
target. The "new hermeneutic" of Stanley Fish, et al., is firmly rooted
(or, rather, groundlessly awash) in a postmodern epistemology which
denies objective truth, deconstructs the received interpretation of the
text based on authorial intent in favor of reinterpretation within one's
own narrative, and makes power (i.e. politics) the most important
consideration in interpretation. This theory is self-referentially
incoherent, but the postmodern literary theorists seem to glory in this
irrationality.
Gene Godbold is right that Fish is a very smart man. His "First Things"
article was very perceptive. He clearly recognizes that without God
there can be no objective truth (about natural science, morality,
religion, whatever), and he denies that God exists. In this he is
perhaps closer to the premodern worldview (i.e. pre-Enlightenment, before
the birth of modern philosophy with Descartes) than to modernism. The
premoderns also believed that without God there was no possibility of
absolute truth, but they of course believed that there was a God.
Garry DeWeese