The conundrum you present here is a hugely important one: which comes first, epistemology or ontology? (“First” in a logical or foundational sense, not a chronological sense.) I’ve wondered about it a fair bit. Taking faith as a starting point helps with a lot of things; especially with practice, the fact that you have to actually live your life and not just understand it. But if it’s faith seeking understanding (and in your case it’s hard for me to imagine it being anything else), you’re going to want to push further.

The way that I’ve most often seen the issue resolved is to acknowledge that, at the most fundamental level, mental constructs and objective ground are ultimately the same – which is basically to say an idealist view of the world, in which reality is mind. Hegel and Indian Advaita Vedānta tradition both go here, in different ways: Hegel seeing the ultimate objective ground as a world spirit developing in history, Advaita seeing it as an undifferentiated unity in which the subject-object distinction is finally transcended. (Ken Wilber tries to have it both of these ways.)

I’m not sure whether I buy either solution, but your comment has reminded me of one of the biggest reasons that lend plausibility to them. Right now I’m trying to do some reading related to foundational questions in epistemology and ontology before I try and explore my views systematically on the blog. (So far I think my posts have basically been nibbling at the edges of these questions. It probably would be good to take a deeper bite sooner rather than later.)

Philosopher A: “Any objective ground is a mental construct.”

Philosopher B: “Any mental construct presupposes an objective ground.”

And I can’t conceive of a solution to this chicken v egg conundrum. My response, and I hope it’s a dignified one, is to take the objective ground on Faith, but to restrict my conversation to the constructs. Is a more nuanced stance possible?

I think your interpretation of the Buddha is incorrect here, as well. I’ll grant that you are at least technically right on the first part that he did not explicitly and directly deny the ātman: he didn’t say “there is no self” per se. He did, however, speak of non-self all the time; and he was pretty clear that the non-self-ness of people and things was not among the “questions that tend not to edification.” We need to know that we and the universe are anatta, as we need to know they are impermanent and dukkha. This is knowledge about the arrow and the wound, not the man who shot it.

(All this is to speak of the Buddha as he is presented in the suttas, of course – some recent work discussed at the AAR suggests that Pudgalavāda was the most prevalent school in early India, so much so that we might wonder whether the historical Buddha actually preached it and not the non-self for which he is so familiar.)

Monogenism (descent from one set of parents) is taken to be a sine qua non of Original Sin. There can’t be Adam and Eve and Shlomo and Esther if there is to be an actual transgression whose stain is transmitted to all descendants. The word here is that the descendants of other than our first parents died out soon or something of the kind.

This is not so much a jurisdiction infraction as a mythos logos confusion. I mean myth in a positive sense and not just an untruth. A myth may be a way of focusing the mind on mystery.

Metaphysical systems play their part in the shepherding of being. They are like the thorn that is used to remove a thorn. Once the job is done both thorns are discarded. Yet there are predilictions. For instance I have never been even slightly persuaded by Idealism of any sort but at the same time I won’t say that the Vijnanavadin couldn’t be enlightened due to his shaky grip on reality.

Your comment raises many different issues, and I think they need to be picked apart from each other. I’m all for knowledge without certainty, a position I’ve become more confident about lately. But truth without objectivity seems rather a different prospect. Truth and knowledge have to do with a known object as well as a knowing subject, and neither’s role can be left out of the process; the philosophies that collapse the two (like Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta) really only do so at the ultimate level where all distinctions are collapsed, not in any attempt to think the everyday world. (Wilber takes a similar approach as far as I know: only at the highest level are things nondual.) We need the object in its objectivity.

Similarly, I have strong doubts as to whether or how a non-foundational theory of knowledge is possible. Theories of knowledge that attempt to be non-foundational (such as coherentism) still seem to require the principle of non-contradiction in order to argue anything at all; and that seems to make non-contradiction into a foundation.

I suspect I would agree, though, that thinking in terms of “religion” and “science” isn’t particularly fruitful. I’ve expressed my doubts about the concept of “religion” before. I find it more helpful to think in terms of philosophy, practice and community – but philosophy must include concepts from “religion” as well as from science, without a division formed between the two.