Thinking about religious thinking

I’ve been reading Dr. Gottlieb’s Ph.D. dissertation, which he graciously emailed to me when I requested for it.  It’s fascinating. He talks about the need for studies not so much on the CONTENT of religious thinking (so much written about that already), but about the FORMS and PROCESSES of religious thinking.  For example:  How different is religious thinking — including, I guess, religious beliefs and knowledge claims — from, say, mathematical or scientific thinking?  In other words, as a judgment domain, how distinct is it from the others identified by Kuhn et. al.:  personal tastes, aesthetic judgment, value judgment, social truths, and physical truths.

I suspect reading Gottlieb will be a defining moment in my research experience.  There’s so much in there that I resonate with and that is quite provocative actually.  For now, I still have that lingering question in my head — or perhaps an insight about to be born — this whole relationship between religious belief, on the one hand, and Authority/Expert Knowledge and Certainty Knowledge on the other.  My hunch is that contrary to my initial guess, it’s Certainty Knowledge that is crucial to a more “sophisticated” religious epistemology, not Authority/Expert Knowledge.

But that, of course, is only a hunch.

Having My Cake and/or Eating It Too

I woke up at 4 this morning with two things running through my head:  First, of all things, LSS of that Korean hit, “I Want Nobody (But You).”  Cute but after the 99th repeat, I wanted to stuff my pillows into my mouth–all four of them!

Second content in my head was a bit more scholarly:  My half-baked research proposal, which I should finish cooking up today as I need to DHL it to Singapore tomorrow.