In this episode of Theology & the Art of Temptation, Doctor Freefall instructs his apprentice Slidefoot on strategic countermeasures against the deeply rooted conviction born of faith and divine certainty. By promoting reason, distraction, skepticism, and self-reliance, they identify ways to challenge the seemingly unshakeable beliefs of the opposition.
Edwards on Faith
There is such a thing as an appearing real, that is, a conviction of the reality of a thing, that is incommunicable, that cannot be drawn out into formal arguments or be expressed in words, which is yet the strongest and most certain conviction. We know how things appear that are real, with what an air; we know how those things appear which we behold with waking eyes. They appear real, because we have a clear idea of them in all their various mutual relations, concurring circumstances, order and dispositions—the consent of the simple ideas among themselves, and with the compages of beings, and the whole train of ideas in our minds, and with the nature and constitution of our minds themselves: which consents and harmony consists in ten thousand little relations and mutual agreements that are ineffable.
Such is the idea of religion, which is so exceedingly complex, in the minds of those who are taught by the Spirit of God. The idea appears so real to them, and brings so many strong yet ineffable marks of truth, that ‘tis a sort of intuitive evidence, and an evidence that the nature of the soul will not allow it to reject. This is the testimony of the Spirit, and is a sort of seeing rather than reasoning the truth of religion; which the unlearned are as capable of as the learned, and which all the learning in the world can never overthrow. - Miscellany no. 201
