If our logic is faulty on one subject, is it faulty on every other subject?

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If God were to reveal to us that our inference on one particular subject is faulty, would that mean our inference is faulty with all other subjects?

For example, if we believe absolutely what the definition of Love is…but then receive a revelation from God…God tells us our definition of Love is wrong.

Would that mean the definition we give all other terms be false as well?

“If I dont know what the definition of Love is, that means I cant know the definition of Hate, Greed, Lust, Truth, Charity, Pickels, etc”
 
No. You can have a faulty understanding of something, and have a good understanding of something else.
 
CatholicHere_Hi said:
Would that mean the definition we give all other terms be false as well?
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Only if our other definitions depended on the one subject we mis-define. (And even if so, we might get lucky and not mis-define the others.)
 
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Gorgias said:
Only if our other definitions depended on the one subject we mis-define.
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Ok.

The Church teaches that we cant know the true definition of ‘being in a state of grace’. Only God can know the true definition of ‘being in a state of grace’.

But The Church says we can correctly define ‘The Church’ and 'mortal sin". The Chuch says we can correctly define ‘grave matter’, 'deliberate consent ', and ‘full knowledge’

The Church says if any of those three are lacking, we are free of mortal sin, thus we are ‘in a state of grace.’

Isn’t there a contradiction here?

If we can correctly define ‘The Church’, ‘grave matter, deliberate consent, full knowledge’ and ‘mortal sin’…then how can The Church claim at the same time we cant correctly define what ‘being in a state of grace’ is?

If we accept we cant define ‘being in a state of grace’, wouldn’t that also mean we have to disbelieve The Church’s definitions of 'grave matter, ‘deliberate consent’, ‘full knowledge’ and ‘mortal sin’?
 
If information is complete or exhaustive then we should be able to make correct inferences on any subject based on that information.

Where information is incomplete we may make reasonable rational and logical assumptions but we can never be sure that we are totally correct. Sometimes however, I would suggest that we don’t always need to concern ourselves if we make assumptions without complete information unless the inference may lead to dangerous error.

But since I am not in possession of the information regarding specifics my opinion is simply in part a heuristic in itself.
 
The ability to completely define what a thing is and the ability to completely define in what conditions a thing exists are not the same. For a simple example, we cannot define perfectly what God is; He is beyond our limited minds. But we can still say with certainty that He is present in the world.
 
HopkinsReb said:
But we can still say with certainty that He is present in the world.
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This simple example you give isn’t so simple at all.
Personally I believe that God is present in the world but I doubt that people called atheists would agree that we can say with certainty He is present in the world.
🤔
 
I can say many things with certainty that others cannot say with certainty, by virtue of my extensive engineering education. That one can say something with certainty while another cannot does not make that thing any less certain.

The point is simply that not fully understanding the thing about which we are making some certain claim does not mean that there are no certain claims.
 
HopkinsReb said:
But we can still say with certainty that He is present in the world.
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You are saying that you personally can say something with certainty but in the above simple example you use the word WE as in WE can say with certainty, meaning plural US. That’s not correct. We cannot say for certain that God is in the world.
 
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You’re changing the subject. You get the point: just because we do not understand something fully does not mean we cannot say particular things about it with certainty.
 
Whether we can say particular things about something that we only have partial certain knowledge about would depend on the extent to which those unknown aspects or characteristics of the thing in question may or may not impinge upon the other characteristics we are sure about.

If we can be sure that the characteristics of the thing known do not affect the characteristics unknown then we could make statements about these known aspects with some certainty. However do we ever have perfect information which would afford us such certainty?
 
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CatholicHere_Hi said:
Would that mean the definition we give all other terms be false as well?
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If those terms were dependent on the faulty definition, yes. Its “fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine” in legal world. So if I have wrong definition of “ball” as “a square shaped object with 90 degree corners” then my definition of other terms “red ball” that employ the incorrect “ball” definition is also wrong
 
Lee1 said:
Whether we can say particular things about something that we only have partial certain knowledge about would depend on the extent to which those unknown aspects or characteristics of the thing in question may or may not impinge upon the other characteristics we are sure about.

If we can be sure that the characteristics of the thing known do not affect the characteristics unknown then we could make statements about these known aspects with some certainty. However do we ever have perfect information which would afford us such certainty?
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The way we come to understand things is by finding one thing we can say for certain, then another, then another, and eventually we synthesize those things into a more comprehensive understanding.

Modern thermodynamics didn’t develop because someone suddenly came up with a general theory of thermodynamics and everything flowed downhill from there. No, we observed a bunch of phemonena independently: entropy increases, energy is conserved, etc., and over time we figured out how to fit all those phenomena together. We don’t need to fully understand all of thermodynamics to say with certainty that when you put a cold roast in the oven, the oven gets colder and the roast gets hotter.

You seem to have your epistomology backwards. Rather than starting with general certainty and figuring out specifics, we start with specific certainty and figure out generalities.
 
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1ke said:
The Church teaches that we cant know the true definition of ‘being in a state of grace’. Only God can know the true definition of ‘being in a state of grace’.
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Perhaps he means the Church tells us that we can’t know the EXTENT to which we are in a state of grace, only God can know that.?
 
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As far as the existence of God is concerned we can’t be certain.

As I said, I believe in God for good reason but not due to certainties of the nature you imply or by any scientific method since those methods don’t reveal the existence of God to an atheist.

Actually I seem to remember starting out with hypothesis, a vague idea, scientifically testing it to reveal truths and ending up with some certainties.
You have implied that is wrong.
 
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But this thread was not about whether we can prove God’s existence. It was a logical question about whether our lack of full understanding of a topic precludes our being able to say anything at all with certainty about that topic. Forget I ever used the example of God’s existence. Instead focus on my thermodynamics example, because the point of this thread is not whether we can prove God’s existence. Stop focusing on one (perhaps poor) example I used and get back to the point.
 
Lee1 said:
Perhaps he means the Church tells us that we can’t know the EXTENT to which we are in a state of grace, only God can know that.?
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Let’s not talk about thermodynamics.

I think the OP has found an error in logic of the Church based on an error of his understanding of the teaching on the state of grace, as I have outlined in the above quote.

I think that is far more likely than the marvellous minds of the Church getting their logic wrong. But I can’t be certain.
 
We’re not talking about thermodynamics. We’re talking about logic and epistemology. It’s just an example of how we as human beings come to understand things: not by gaining a comprehensive understanding of the whole and then extending that to the parts, but by understanding a bunch of parts, one at a time, and then forming them into a comprehensive understanding of the whole (which we can then apply back to unexplained specific questions). This is true of both science and other things. We don’t come to understand Christianity by coming to understand the entirety of the Bible and the Magisterium and then applying it to individual topics. We come to understand Christianity by understanding specific topics, which when aggregated lead us to an understanding of the whole of the faith, which we can then apply back down as needed. But we still are always starting from individual points which we aggregate into a whole.
 
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