The Insidious Isms (well, except for pragmatism)

A man was walking home one dark and foggy night. As he groped his way through the murk he nearly tripped over someone crawling around by a lamp post. "What are you doing?" asked the traveller. "I�m looking for my keys." Replied the other. "Are you sure you lost them here?" asked the first man. "I�m not sure at all," came the reply, "but if I haven�t lost them near this lamp I don�t stand a chance of finding them." (Richard Seel)
They say that at infinite density and infinite space-time curvature the general theory collapses. They say that quantum conditions of indeterminacy and nonlocality are indescribable. I'm not smart enough to grasp the math and physics which are applied to such assertions regarding our "early moments" and "deep structures" and thus, as a layperson, can't imagine why "in principle" a next generation Hawking clone might not contrive a theory of everything which makes the necessary corrections in the equations describing the special and general theories of relativity and of quantum mechanics.
Inveterate pigeonholer that I am, I systematize "my questions" into the subjects of who, what, when, where, how, why and that and into the objects of truth, beauty and goodness. In the domain of science, which is the realm of space-time-matter-energy(where-when-what-how), in principle, I cannot conceive of any questions which science cannot answer. I consider the realm of meaning (why) to be the domain of philosophy, the realm of ultimacy (who) to be the domain of theology and the realm of the existential (that) to be the domain of mysticism.
I find myself, as a subject, as a de facto scientist, philosopher, theologian and mystic, using these subjects of science, philosophy, theology and mysticism to confront those objects of truth, beauty and goodness with the questions: of truth, what can I know?; of beauty, what may I hope for?; and of goodness, what must I do? I have discovered that whether as scientist, philosopher, theologian or mystic, my language is always metaphorical and my presuppositions are inescapably metaphysical.
On my life's journey, my first question was "Is the universe friendly?' and my raison d'etre was discovering what I may hope for and then realizing those aspirations. My next question was "What can I know?" and, more precisely, "What can I know about what I may hope for?".
Answers to my questions came from a cacophony of voices, all claiming a privileged epistemology. Each epistemology had something to say about what I could know, what I may hope for and what I must do. Each epistemology sprang forth from a community structure which supported creed, cult and code: creed being their doctrines by which they sought to transmit the truths they'd discovered; cult being their rituals by which they sought to celebrate the beauty they'd discovered; and code being their laws by which they sought to preserve the good they'd discovered. Those community structures' creeds, cults and codes comprised worldviews which were undergirded by manifold and varied metaphysical presuppositions. In essense, the worldviews seemed derived from epistemological presuppositions which were themselves derived from ontological presuppositions.
What are the nature and grounds of our knowledge about truth, beauty and goodness? especially with reference to the limits and validity of that knowldege? Don't certain ontological presuppositions almost algorithmically yield this epistemology or that? And then, what's the distance from an epistemology to a worldview? Finally, which really comes first for most of us: ontology, epistemology or worldview?
Well, for most of us, worldview comes first, gifted us by our parents or society, immersed in this or that culture. Our worldview is the pilot flying the plane. Our epistemology consists both of the plane's windows and of the instrumentation with which we navigate (notwithstanding many are not instrument-rated and therefore don't fare well in much of life's stormy weather) and is pretty much taken for granted as all we've got upon boarding the plane. Our ontology is not flying first class and is usually in the baggage compartment (not the overhead within reach) if it wasn't left behind altogether or misrouted.
With all of that in mind, I return to the question: what can I know about what I may hope for? Do the worldviews have anything to say about these most insistent urgings? Well, of course, they do. They are the cacophony of voices I adverted to earlier, generally grouped as those of scientists, philosophers, theologians and mystics.
Okay, they have something to say but it might be useful to ask the following questions before we proceed: What, exactly,is science unable to answer in principle? What, exactly,is philosophy unable to answer in principle? What, exactly,is theology unable to answer in principle? What, exactly,is mysticism unable to answer in principle?
I believe that, in principle, worldviews are unable to answer ontological questions. Whether we frame up the question as that of body-mind, natural-supernatural, monism-dualism, materialism-spiritualism, the answer will elude us, and it is not a matter where some Kuhnian paradigm shift could help us find this lost baggage or lamp-light more area wherein we can search for these lost keys. However, neither is it a matter where we throw up our hands in surrender and give up our Kantian questions.
What are we to do?
Here emerges our third question of the Kantian triad: what must I do? As one might suspect, the worldviews are not lacking suggestions here either. None but nihilism abandon the journey altogether. All persevere in their pilgrimage toward truth, beauty and goodness. Rightfully so. This inability to answer the big ontological question is not a defect of science because it is not even a problem of science. At the same time, neither is it a defect or problem of philosophy (though it is a topic), theology or mysticism, at least not if we define problem as a testable hypothesis.
All good sciences, all useful philosophies, all great theologies and any authentic mysticisms (espeically mysticisms by their very nature), conceal by deliberate occultation that which belongs to mystery, that which is beyond the power to discover, understand or explain. Occultation is not, however, a closing of the eyes or an ending of the search. It simply recognizes that, due to the very fundamental nature of reality, human beings cannot fully embrace mystery but that we can penetrate mystery (and it us) and that while our search is not going to be for answers, still, it can very much be for clues.
I believe the case can be made that, for all of the great scientists, philosophers, theologians and mystics, the quest was their grail, the journey was their destination. There need be no artificial epistemological barriers then between science, philosophy, theology and mysticism. There should be no talk of exclusive domains or privileged epistemologies. Give 'em all a go at the time-honored Kantian interrogatories and test their clues in the crucible of life's experiences!
So, rather than look for the answer to our original question: "what can I know about what I may hope for?", we search for clues. Our search for clues reveals that most of the great traditions/worldviews (scientific, philosophical, theological and mystical) do give us clues that "hang-together" fairly well. Immersed as they are in mystery, shrouded as they are by occultations, the only way we can judge their clues as "hanging together" is by their internal coherence and external congruence.
What the masses seem to have found over the millenia is that individuals and communities can indeed make their way through this journey of life, pretty much successfully I'd say, by following the clues provided as regarding "what they can know about what they hope for and must do". These clues are transmitted through stories and are metanarratives consisting of myths which, literally true or not, nevertheless, seem to evoke appropriate responses to reality.
As human subjects we respond to these stories, inwardly attuned to their objects of truth, beauty and goodness. Each metanarrative is immersed in a cultural milieu and enmeshed in a plethora of anthropological, linguistic, social, political, economic and geograhical webs, inextricably intertwined and entangled, one in the other. They aren't just abstract ideas but ways of living, moving and having being in the world. Therefore, our ability to extract their clues is almost hopelessly dependent on the degree of our immersion in each respective metanarrative. Likewise, their efficacy in addressing the issues of theodicy, morality and aesthetics is also quite often related to the degree of one's immersion in the given metanarrative's cultural milieu. No small wonder we've described the voices as cacophonous. No small task is global dialogue.
Where do we go from here?
With so many options, perhaps our one of our main tasks is falsifiability. Let's look across the years and across the traditions, of science and philosophy and theology and mysticism, and search for common clues they ALL have given with respect to what paths NOT to take.
Avoiding the following insidious "isms", I believe, makes for better religion and better science and are all pretty much grounded in the notion that the great ontological question is occulted for all metanarratives leaving us all epistemologically humbled (except maybe for Hawking and Tipler). Having never established firm footing, ontologically, for our methodological presuppositions we especially eschew those presuppositions of substance (eg. materialism) even as we use our worldviews to substantiate our fundamental trust in uncertain reality so as not to proceed paradoxically and unsubstantiated. While humble, we can proceed confidently, largely due to the storytelling of our ancestors and the metanarratives they've nurtured.
The first "ism" that comes to mind, whether for the scientist or theologian, is *dogmatism*. Neither science nor religion has made great strides forward in elaborating efficacious metanarratives when arrogant. In articulating religious truth, doctrine too often decays into dogmatism. Science, for its part, knows the perils of *positivism* and radical *empiricism*; *skepticism* is dogmatism's bedfellow on the other extreme.
All worldviews, even science, have their rituals and cults, established forms and observances, ceremonials and formalities, which can decay into *ritualism* and magic. In following our rites and methodologies, we can encounter anomalies (difficult to explain phenomena). It is a perilous path to draw sweeping conclusions from anomalous experiences whether in religion or science: There is the "God of the Gaps" pitfall which can tempt believers while scientists often fall prey to making cursory and summary dismissals based on presuppositions of substance and not of method. Neither *materialism* nor *idealism* find universal acceptance among the world's great metanarratives, grounded as they are in a priori metaphysical presuppositions which are unknowable in principle.
All worldviews can "do" ethics and formulate moral codes. All can suffer the deterioration of laws into *legalism*. Deontologies can be authoritative or nonauthoritative, depending on intrinsic or extrinsic validating factors. Strict, literal and excessive conformity to religious and moral and legal codifications is decried as pharisaical and hypocritical and dehumanizing by most people of large intelligence and profound goodwill.
Precisely because of worldviews' deep immersion in cultural milieus, interreligious dialogue participants discourage any thoughts of a false *irenicism* (easy peace and reconciliation between worldviews) or facile *syncretism* (a blending of worldviews to a wimpy least common denominator).
Neither do they applaud *indifferentism* which concludes that all paths are equally efficacious because, in the first place, they are so culturally-immersed and "jumping" from one worldview to another can therefore jeopardize a religious "hopper"'s psychological equilibrium. Additionally, such an attitude offends the principles of "right speech" and humankind's perennial search for the clues to our existence with its desire to always get to the most nearly perfect articulation of those clues we can possibly find.
As scientists and philosophers, theologians and mystics, we seek satisfaction of all of our needs: intellectually, emotionally, aesthetically and morally; we pursue truth, beauty and goodness. Whatever our endeavor, we move forward with head and heart, seeking to avoid various imbalances. Our ways of knowing can come from the via positiva or negativa, from the kataphatic or apophatic approach, from verifiability or falsifiability. We can approach from the head or from the heart, the speculative or the affective. Among the worldviews, universally: we are admonished to avoid an overemphasis on the speculative and kataphatic: *rationalism*; we are admonished to avoid an overemphasis on the affective and kataphatic: *pietism*; we are admonished to avoid an overemphasis on the speculative and apophatic: *encratism*; and we are admonished to avoid an overemphasis on the affective and apophatic:*quietism*.
Where do we go from here?
The question persists.
There's a lot of room for maneuvering, an ocean of mystery which we can swim in but not drink in fully. Most people on our planet will not chart new courses or plumb new depths but will remain afloat albeit anchored to their worldview of origin. They will drink from the wells of the time-honored and great traditions and, if they go deep enough, will find we are all drinking from one primal stream, from the "sacred depths of nature". If they go deep enough into their own traditions and, at the same time, avoid the insidious "isms" outlined above, they will resurface ready for authentic dialogue. They will awaken to our solidarity and compassion will ensue.
Perhaps it will be that, in the very act of coming together to dialogue, we will create a new metanarrative of unity of mission and diversity of ministry. Perhaps we will strike the balance between eros (which asks: what's in it for me?) and ethos (which asks: what's in it for others?) guided by the logos (which asks for a balance between the two). In our pursuit of beauty and eros, of goodness and ethos, of truth and logos, we'll avoid extreme *hedonism*, severe *asceticism* and arrogant *gnosticism* which claims an esoteric knowledge not readily available to others.
The worldviews are very much noted for their divergent and characteristic outlooks on being. The discussion above would suggest an ontological stalemate with respect to these outlooks. Be that as it may, I have no hesitancy in directly addressing the issue of whether or not humankind's search for meaning can be satisfied by an understanding of being that is immanent versus transcendent, existential versus theological, impersonal versus personal, natural versus supernatural.
Whatever the attributes of being might be, both our ancient and contemporary understandings of nature are sufficient to satisfy our search for meaning and transcendence. I say this for several reasons. Foremost, because of the occultation of the fundamental nature of being and the epistemological humility this fact of ontology elicits, we can confidently and with conviction continue our search for clues and no philosophy, ideology or worldview has the necessary metaphysical undergirdings to methodologically foreclose on our opportunities to wonder and to hope.
The quest remains our grail, the journey our destination.
Also, because we already have the proof of this assertion in the pudding. There have always been non-transcendent worldviews, admittedly of divergent ontological, teleological and eschatological outlooks. They have approached being only immanently, only existentially, only impersonally and only naturally (whether atheistically, nontheistically or pantheistically) and their creeds, cults, codes and community structures have "hung-together" quite satisfactorily; they've been internally coherent and externally congruent within their given cultural milieus.
Lastly, I personally come from a tradition of origin that views being immanently and transcendently, impersonally and personally, existentially and theologically, naturally and supernaturally, that approaches it apophatically and kataphatically, and that recognizes and affirms the moral goodness (read salvific efficacy) found in the other traditions and all people of goodwill. Through an anthropological theological method, my tradition imputes an implicit faith to peoples of these traditions, specifically, and to all individuals of goodwill, generally. It would take a cynical form of arrogance for my tradition to suggest, on one hand, that these traditions' approaches to meaning are, in a sense, sufficient, while, on the other hand, suggesting that the adherents of these traditions are nonetheless somehow dissatisfied.
And so, however insatiable my search may be for Being that is transcendent, personal, theological and supernatural, how can I deny the testimony of legions of others who tell me they have been satisfied, have thoroughly slaked their thirst for meaning with no need for supernatural constructs or abstractions of transcendence?
This is not to deny the metaethical question of whether or not all others can quaff deeply from the same nontranscendent metaphysical concoction and come away similarly satisfied. There will always be movies suggesting this is "as good as it gets" and beer commercials claiming "it don't get no better than this", but there will always be those shaking their heads claiming it's all nonsense. Therefore, it would also take a cynical form of arrogance to deny the testimony of legions of those of explicit faith who claim their search for meaning can only be satisfied by transcendence.
If not for my previously voiced objections to irenicism, syncretism and indifferentism, superficially it would seem like the natural course would be, for the sake of harmony and metaethical congruence, for Western Civilization to move progressively from exclusivistic Christocentrism to inclusivistic Christocentrism (which it truly has, in large measure) to inclusivistic theocentrism (and this game is very much afoot) to religious anthropocentrism to religious naturalism. The whole world (cosmos) could operate from the same meta-meta-narrative and meta-ethics would be a much more straightforward discipline. Yes, we could all simply learn more math and physics from Hawking et al and they could even reframe our philosophical and theological questions (beginning with why there is something rather than nothing; their answer seems to be that nothingness as a condition is unstable and has a tendency to decay into something).
Again, this is not going to happen for reasons I well-articulated regarding irenicism, syncretism and indifferentism. It is also not likely to happen because people of explicit versus implicit versus no faith at all are not similarly motivated to do good; they are drawn to truth and beauty, to be sure, but their reasons for "behaving well" are motivated by very disparate incentives, disparities resulting from very long-established, divergent worldviews and from different stages of moral development, not just individually but culturally.
This hasn't taken us anywhere other than to suggest that I predict that meta-ethical considerations will tend to dominate the discussions regarding whether or not nature is enough and Hawking and Tipler can succeed in making their physics normative.

Dionysian Triad Fractals and Epistemological Holism in an Integrative Methodology for Science and Theology - a constructive postmodern approach using a pre-modern mystagogy

Credo?

Credo, for me, is both verb and noun, a subject-predicate that is dynamic and not static, except in the sense that I sometimes articulate what some call provisional closures. My credo is a process, a journey, a quest. More on that later.
Beginning with "first things", I would have to say that I have provisionally closed as a pragmatist. I don't view this closure so much as a purposeful or even conscious event but moreso as an unconscious and de facto state of existence. Let me explain. I don't feel like I've ever answered Kant's first interrogatory (What can I know?) to my utmost satisfaction. Therefore, I feel I have lived my life in a state of epistemic suspense, behind a veil of invincible ontological ignorance.
Perhaps this veil is related, in part, to what Willem Drees calls the open space in Big Bang cosmology. Certainly, it is also related to what Heidegger termed the fundamental question of metaphysics: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Wittgenstein describes it well when he asserts: "It is not how things are but *that* things are which is the mystical." Best I can tell, this veil will neither be torn in two nor pulled aside, at least not pre-eschaton.
As to Kant's second and third interrogatories, regarding what I may hope for and what I must do, here is where I have provisionally closed as a pragmatist, perhaps wagering with Pascal, perhaps suffering Freud's infantile illusion, perhaps indulging Feuerbach's wishful thinking and anthropocentric projection, perhaps due to what I imbibed, as Russell would suggest, at Mother's knee? Without assigning probabilities to the possibilities (that is an altogether different consideration), Roman Catholicism, my native creed, perfectly articulates what I indeed hope for. In large measure, it has formed my conscience and I accept, almost axiomatically, much, but not all, of what it says I must do.
None of what I have said, thus far, is to suggest that I am especially dissatisfied at being thwarted, at the very outset, regarding what I can know. I accept that the "open space" is, apparently, part of my existential territory, however occulted. If it gives birth to my existential anxiety and angst, it also harbors my ontological hope. [I know some prefer the term innate anxiety, but I like to preserve Scott Peck's distinction between existential and neurotic forms of anxiety.] I agree with Avery Dulles, who says: "The Christian that thinks that his faith is sufficiently protected by his philosophy or theology or by any created
institution - such a one is really insecure in his faith. Faith does not possess what it affirms. It is ceaselessly poised over the abyss of doubt."
Now, admittedly, I haven't met many folks who approach their Catholic faith the way I do, or who seem to have struggled in the same way as I, but I do take comfort from that part of the history of Catholic Christendom which is filled with references to dark nights, trials of faith, aridity, desolation, to a comfortless vita abscondita, to a laborious searching which can have an oppressive and crippling character, and to an inner darkness of the encounter in the surrender of faith. Thus, when the mystics claim that the certitude achieved in faith is both luminous and dark, I would suppose they mean that the path is lighted even if the goal is obscure.
To me, the path can generally be described as that of love, more specifically as that of awareness, solidarity and compassion. It is interesting that this is the path articulated by most religious traditions and ideologies. Whatever my degree of epistemic humility or of ontological insecurity, it seems good that I should walk it, even if I don't know where I am going. Each step down this path is its own reward. Each bend in this road is mysteriously but assuredly self-justifying (maybe this is my theodicy reference?). Finally, as one spiritual director puts it: "What gets in your way *is* the way."
Perhaps the certitude of faith lies in suspecting that the path is indeed lit? At any rate, the Church teaches that love is an intrinsic element in the certitude of faith (again, the path), that every act of love has no other basis than itself and that one cannot ponderingly search out a reason for this love. This is consonant with my experience that love is self-justifying, axiomatic, intrinsically rewarding. It seems possible, to me, that Dulles is speaking of this very path when he writes: "Revelation occurs when man, under the quickening influence of the Holy Spirit, correctly answers the questions of deepest import for his total
destiny, his salvation. " This would seem to hold for people of both implicit and explicit faith.
I sure *hope* so.
So, that is what I am hoping for and doing. Meanwhile, I agree with the notion that it is good that we don't all ponder the infinite but that some of us are plumbers because, otherwise, we'd all perish from cholera. But back to my epistemic suspense.
I rather hurriedly grabbed the label "pragmatist" because I could more readily identify with it *methodologically*. At least it seems to best describe why I do what I do, notwithstanding my perduring existential uncertainty and my cognitive dissonance regarding what I can know, in general, and what I can *substantively* know about both what I can hope for and must do, in particular.
Now, if faith is the confident assurance about things hoped for and the substance of things unseen, admittedly my own faith is as tiny as a mustard seed. If what I can know deals with truth, what I can hope for, beauty, and what I must do, goodness, then I can agree with the Stendl-Rast formulation that mystical encounters with truth, beauty and goodness are the core of organized religion: creed and doctrine articulating the encounter with truth, cult and ritual (or liturgy) celebrating the encounter with beauty, code and law seeking to preserve the encounter with goodness. I can affirm the community structure and cultural milieu which can hold creed, code and cult together as a tradition, or following Joseph Campbell, as a myth which, portions of it literally true or not, evokes an appropriate response to reality (ultimate or not). What I cannot affirm is a doctrine's decay into dogmatism, a ritual's decay into ritualism, a code's decay into legalism.
It is precisely all the insidious *isms* which swirl around the black-holish vortex of various ideologies that leave me in a state of perpetual epistemological vertigo. I won't list all the *isms* but can confidently say that their boundaries seem to be coterminus with the edges of the lighted path of love. By navigating one's way carefully between their shoals, I think one can move more quickly and safely on their way. Even if there were no peril to this hermeneutical approach or that, the dispassionate or naive observer must still note the manifold, varied and multiform epistemological and ontological positions held by so many different people, people of both large intelligence and profound goodwill. Is one not, therefore, prompted to ask: from whenceforth cometh each one's confident assurance in epistemological things hoped for, each one's conviction of ontological things unseen, or anyone's methodological exclusivism?
Still, what arrogance would be involved in my ascribing to others any epsitemic hubris!
Rather, it is my unwavering belief that, for at least the major ideologies and traditions, all are really on to something, something that engenders my unswerving dedication to methodological pluralism, that causes me to accommodate a variety of methodologies and to eschew any methodological exclusivism.
How does one construct a methodologically pluralistic epistemology?
Foremost, I look for episitemic capacities, whether described by Nancey Murphy or by Daniel Dennett, as viewed by B.F. Skinner or Carl Jung, as elucidated by E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins or by Eugene D'Aquili and Andy Newberg, as systematized by Thomas Aquinas or Konrad Lorenz or even Tipler or Whitehead. I examine the latest typologies, the ways of relating science and religion, of Barbour, Peacocke, Haught, Drees, Hefner, Peters and others. In such a search, initially, the complexities of harsh reality increase my epistemic humility. More importantly, though, they also enhance my epistemic hope that, if I stay with the struggle, my cognitive condition will eventually improve! I know this only a posteriori, by the way. <wink>
With all the discussion about foundationalism and non-foundationalism, my search for an Archimedean metaphysical ground remains elusive. It is so very reminiscent of a verse from an old spiritual:
"On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand."
Just substitute, in place of Christ, in the verse above: Aquinas or Atkins; Bohm or Bohr; Capra or Crick; Darwin, Dawkins, Dennett and Drees or Descartes, Deacon, Davies and D'Aquili; etc (need I go on) and you'll see what I mean about being a metaphysical understudy to these great thinkers, all of whom appear to subscribe to systems which are largely externally congruent, internally coherent and logically consistent. (Don't pick a nit with me here; I said *largely*.)
Now, when it comes to foundationalism, I rather like the language of Hans Kung who speaks of a "justified fundamental trust in uncertain reality" versus a "paradoxical, unjustified fundamental trust in uncertain reality." Everyone makes a big deal out of references to primal ground, primal origin, primal support, primal being, primal destiny and *ultimate* foundations. I understand why. The point which seems to escape many, however, is that a "justified fundamental trust in uncertain reality" is only an *attempt* at grounding meaning and purpose.
Granted, it is this *attempt*, this entailment, which eliminates the paradox in one's hermeneutic, which avoids the purely arbitrary, which lays down the foundation for an ontology to be modeled (Polkinhorne) by an emergent epistemology. However, the fact that one attempts such grounding, that one justifies one's fundamental trust, does not thereby eliminate reality's uncertainty. It does not validate one's metaphysics either, neither one's ontology nor epistemology. Uncertain reality continues to support without itself seeming supported.
Why bother with the hypothesis of a God? Can it even begin to predict, explain or make uncertain reality intelligible? Can it give insight and inspire research?
Proceeding from a God hypothesis, what about derivative theological assertions as hypotheses (Wolfhart Pannenberg)?
In Ted Peter's typology for relating science and religion (and I would guess maybe moreso for relating science and theology), he suggests there can be hypothetical consonance, although in a weak sense, between the disciplines, if we can identify common domains of question asking. Such would presume some methodology common to both disciplines.
What are the disciplines? I like the categories that fall out naturally from the interrogatives: who, what, when, where, how and why (and that). They've always been useful in writing invitations to socials and picnics. Maybe they can have some utility in an invitation to the Cosmic Dance!
I relate:
where-when-what-how to space-time-matter-energy, typically the domain of science;
why, to that of philosophy;
who, to that of theology (following the lead of Merton in musing about the immanent/transcendent, impersonal/personal, existential/ theological and natural/supernatural); and
I add "that" for the mystical (for, as mentioned earlier, following Wittgenstein: "It is not how things are but "that" things are which is the mystical." and Heidigger: "Why is there something rather than nothing?")
Do our epistemic capacities suggest a method in theology *and* science ?
Cetainly we can find a common major methodological criterion even as we acknowledge the differences in phenomena being studied?
I think we can find a methodology common to science, philosophy and theology (and I can almost concede religion as a subdiscipline to the human sciences but not theology). I think we can derive hypotheses for all of these domains which can predict, explain and make uncertain reality intelligible, which can give insight and inspire research. In order to do so, however, we need to pay increased attention to the diversity of models of rationality.
I haven't dealt with the connundrum of disparate hermeneutics yet, though. I'm getting there.
Are these metaphysical pre-modern, modern and post-modern voices a cacophony? Or might they be a fugue, contrapuntally developed over the millenia with a continuous interweaving of successively entering voices?
Or, to use a raw physical analogy: Can we extract a signal from the noise?
Will there ever emerge axiomatic propositions, self-evident presuppositions, descriptive or normative? Or must we continue down the path we *ought*, never proceeding from an *is*? Are any foundational suppositions self-justifying?
[I won't elaborate here, but I do want to note that I do agree with the M.J.Adler position that we can find grounds for affirming the truth of prescriptive conclusions if we can find a way of combining a prescriptive with a descriptive premise as the basis of our reasoning to a conclusion].
Do we accept relativism as inescapable or do we proceed, however tentatively and tenuously, in our grounding attempts?
Are our pre-modern, modern and post-modern grounding attempts (or avoidances) incommensurable, all dissonance and no consonance?
What does the hermeneutic of dualism reveal, whether of Cartesianism or vitalism? What about the Thomist concept of soul? Some theists do adopt both epistemic and ontological dualism (Swinburne and Eccles). Maybe most of us are headed to monism anyway, whether an emergent monism (Peacocke) of nonreductive physicalism (Murphy) or ontological reductionism (Russell). Then there is the dipolar monism (Polkinghorne) of ontological emergence (where complex phenomena are intrinsically differentiated in an ontology that can't be decribed by physics alone). Additionally, there is process metaphysics (Whitehead) and panexperientialism (Barbour), where every real event or 'actual occasion' includes the capacity for experience ('prehension'), and thus a mental 'pole', although this mental aspect produces consciousness and self-consciousness only when sufficient biological complexity have evolved in the form of coherent societies of actual occasions. [This summary, in the paragraph preceding, is comprised of direct excerpts and paraphrases of Dr. Robert Russell's "Theology and Science: Current Issues and Future Directions."]
There's actually much consonance between the above positions. What happens, however, when you throw in the dissonance of those who defend both epistemic reductionism and reductive materialism (Atkins and Dawkins)?. Do we still have a fugue?
Well, there is at least a theistic harmony between some pre-modern and post-modern approaches to uncertain reality. The approaches of Aristotle and Aquinas can be considered congruent with certain aspects of modern formulations, such as with Sheldrake's morphic resonance, Bohm's implicate order or even Jung's synchronicity. Serious philosophers and theologians, biologists and physicists, can be tempted to invoke such archaic ideas of formal and final causation when confronted with the ontological implications of superluminality, nonlocality, indeterminacy (even if they are acting as mystics when they do). Jack Haught would point out that non-energetic causation could be an indispensable explanatory idea, though not capable of scientific verification, for, like cosmic teleology, it would have a trait of concealment. Haught just points out the logical and cosmological congruity of putative unobtrusive formative causes and makes clear he is not attempting to demonstrate them (citing Polanyi's __Tacit Dimension_).
In large measure, much harmony between the mostly modernist approaches was realized by what Barbour would call the *independence* model in his typology of interactions between science and religion. Peacocke would call it a "difference in realms" model and Haught would use the word *contrast*. These would be distinguished from models of interaction which involve outright conflict.
So, again, what about the dissonance coming from the likes of Dawkins and Atkins?
Do we still have a fugue? What about the outright conflict?
Well, before exploring the harmonics of this dissonance, let's be clear: we definitely have a distinctive and separate voice and it most definitely is contrapuntal! But, is it fugal? Can these voices of consonance and dissonance be interweaved (and perhaps harmony is superfluous in some musical genres)?
How in the world can one presume to interweave the pre-modern: epistemic and ontological dualism, vitalism, Cartesianism; and the post-modern: non-foundationalist epistemologies, panexperientialism, process metaphysics, emergentist monism, nonreductive physicalism, ontological reductionism, dipolar monism, ontological emergence; with the modern: critical realism (in theology and science), epistemic reductionism and reductive materialism, however foundationalist or not?
For starters, we're looking neither for syncretistic blending nor Hegelian dialectic. Neither are we indifferent to which of the epistemological approaches we take, confounding as they are in their plenitude.
I think I may have moved to a position of what I would describe as quasi-foundationalist when I have suggested a God hypothesis would be valid and fruitful and, over-against any pure foundationalist approach, I have otherwise argued myself into a post-modernist, non-foundationalist approach. But what about the paradox that might perdure absent any clear and unambiguous approach to justifying uncertain reality? I wouldn't be here today if I could not well tolerate both paradox and ambiguity. Besides, as I will demonstrate later, many paradoxes have a rather simple resolution.
At any rate, my fugue metaphor has not collapsed yet. The voices, however contrapuntal, definitely interweave, the contrasts forming patterns. A new metaphor arises: that of a tapestry or mosaic. Better yet, picture a three dimensional mosaic of interpenetrating and hierarchical fields (Haught?), where our knowledge systems are more like a web (Murphy). Russell describes his cohort, Nancey Murphy's adoption of W. V. O. Quine's non-foundationalist or holist approach:
"Here systems of knowledge are pictured more like a web or net than a building, with each level in the hierarchy of disciplines forming its own web. Core theories that characterize each discipline lie at the center of the web; they are indirectly connected to the edge of the web and its ties to the appropriate facts and experiences. As before, both constraint and emergence operate between the disciplines."
Murphy also adopts Imre Lakato's notion of a progressive research program for theological methodology. Imre Lakatos and Nancey Murphy make a distinction between the inner core commitment and the outer belt of auxiliary hypotheses in a reserach program. Graphically, one can again image the web or the net, and it, to me, could look much like what the cognitive scientists call neuronal assemblies and neurognostic structures. Across this web, there would be an interactivity, an ongoing dialectic between consonance and dissonance (like in the human brain? being reinforced or extinguished)?, and some may even countenance a nuanced use of Karl Popper's procedures for critical verification and falsifiability in all the affected domains (scientific, philosophical and theological --- with the mystical totally occulted, of course, 'til the eschaton).
In this non-foundationalist epistemological holism, all of the voices are interweaved, even if the musical genre of our fugue may more resemble the nonharmonic tones of a chromatic scale, used mostly in the East (sometimes by the Beatles though!), but never employed in the four-part harmonies of a barbershop quartet of the West. But abandoning this metaphor before it collapses under all of this metaphysical weight, let's adopt a new metaphor, of hygiene.
The dissonant voices of the reductionists have been hygienic. They make everyone else better philosophers and theologians. The don't allow any sloppy "God of the Gaps" theology to enter our discourse unnoticed. If they are iconoclastic, good, for we want no idols in our temples, mosques, ashrams, churches and synagogues. They force us to reexamine our God-concepts and to reformulate our God-hypotheses. My good friend and science-religion dialogue mentor, Michael Cavanuagh, likes to quote Emerson: "When the half-gods leave, the gods appear." [I'll double-check this; I think I've got it right.]
In our fugal movement, the contrapuntal voices of reductionism (mostly atheistic), in their dissonance, can lead us in a holy chorus of apophasis. This apophatic approach can tell us, anagogically, what God is not. Now, I don't concede every last assertion by the reductionists as pertaining to what God isn't, especially their big ontological supposition THAT S/he isn't. This particular hypothesis will be verified or falsified at the Eschaton. This metaphysical answer to the biggest ontological riddle of them all is occulted from science, philosophy and theology, consigned to the realm of mysticism.
Nevertheless, that these reductionists have taken the Kierkegaardian leap across Drees' "open space" is a testimony to their courage and, some would add, to their metaphysical chutzpah. I don't think their position is any more unreasonable than all the other nonreductionistic, epistemic pioneers who take the same leap but who land on, what some would consider to be, a dogmatic shoal of a different colored sand. Are they all walking on sandbars, not the water? Is any of it sinking sand? Well, my whole point has been that it is not for me to say: On ______, the solid rock, I stand. [This verse from the old hymn is a valid faith claim, btw, even if not a self-evident epistemic stance. It's even a valid *faith* claim for the reductionists who choose to fill in the blank with Darwin.]
So, we have the apophatic voice, contrapuntal and dissonant, telling us, anagogically, what God is not.
It is here that I will unload from the trojan horse of this essay, my own typology for the interaction between science and theology, a methodology which nuances the Lakatos-Murphy epistemological holism (and maybe would even be consonant with the systematic theology of Phil Hefner?).
One of the things that adds additional common domain to our scientific-theological methodology is their common use of metaphors. Now metaphors are analogical, revealing similarities while acknowledging greater dissimilarities. It is here we can be led by the voices of nonreductionists (mostly theistic, pantheistic and panentheistic) in a holy chorus of kataphasis. This kataphatic approach can tell us, analogically, metaphorically and hypothetically, what God is. Now, I don't concede every last assertion by the nonreductionists as pertaining to what God is, especially their big ontological supposition THAT S/he is. This particular hypothesis will be verified or falsified at the Eschaton. This metaphysical answer to the biggest ontological riddle of them all is occulted from science, philosophy and theology, consigned to the realm of mysticism (where, in principle, they can't "slip you the answer", John Lennon).
Other theological assertions, as hypotheses, can be tested, not following a method of direct verification, but, according to Pannenberg building on Popper, by their implications, implications for understanding the whole of finite reality, also by increased intelligibility to our experience of uncertain reality. Certain theological assertions can thus gain indirect confirmation, direct confirmation awaiting the Eschaton. It would be tempting, at this point, to cite Hans Kung's entire hypothesis of God but let me rather encourage anyone who has not read it to read Kung's __Does God Exist?__.
So, we have affirmed both the apophatic and kataphatic approaches and their incorporation into our scientific-theological methodologies as integral components of our epistemological holism, eschewing any methodological exclusivism. We will test our hypotheses, verifying them as best we can within given methodological constraints. As we move across the great web, no matter what we place at the core of our Lakatos-Murphy methodology, no matter what we choose as our auxiliary hypotheses, we will, following Hefner, test these hypotheses for their explanatory adequacy, subject them to falsification by experience, and measure their relative success by their fruitfulness. Russell quotes Hefner: "What is at stake in the falsification of theological theories is not whether they can prove the existence of God, but rather whether, with the help of auxiliary hypotheses, they lead to interpretations of the world and of our experience in the world that are empirically credible and fruitful -- that is, productive of new insights and research."
[Steve Petermann, in IRAS's LDG-Net, posted several reasons why the great traditions remain extant. It is my intent to reintroduce them here. BTW, it is also my intent to go back over this essay and, at least secondarily, to source all of my references which were made to this or that scholar and to provide appropriate citations and attributions.]
In addition to the apophatic and kataphatic approaches, let me now introduce a third, which is the unitive. It is important for both science and theology to recognize that when we say:
1) proposition |X is true|, metaphorically and kataphatically; and that
2) proposition |X is not true|, anagogically and apophatically;
that, unitively, at least sometimes, we might also should say that neither |X is true| nor |X is not true| is true literally.
Caveat: This is not the same as a Kantian relativism or a distinction between noumenal and dinge an sich reality. Rather, it is just a convenient tool to arrive at certain insights that are hidden from us until we collapse conventional conjunctive-disjunctive dualism.
Conjunctive awareness is largely unconscious and involuntary (as used by Samuel Brainard) and involves logical causation. Note, here, that it would be associated with God, for example. I think, too, of D'Aquili's holistic operators, which, according to Newberg, most likely rise from the activity of the parietal area in the brain's right hemisphere and which, as a mental function, allows us to look at an assemblage of component parts and comprehend the whole. Also, of the abstractive operator. This may not be an appropriate stretch; I don't know.
Disjunctive awareness is largely conscious and voluntary and involves efficient causation. I think, now, of D'Aquili's other operators: reductionist, binary, quantitative, etc
Collapsing this conjunctive-disjunctive awareness dualism is no mystical feat. [see note below] It is neither uniquely scientific nor theological. It's just part of the scientific-theological methodology that I think we all need to be more aware of. Another part is what Mortimer Adler calls the fallacy of reductionism, and he is speaking, here, at the level of particle physics. He resolves an otherwise insoluble problem dealing with the appearance and reality of an ordinary chair (a problem posed by Arthur Eddington). In his solution, he uses Heisenbergian terms of potentia (that which exists only virtually) and of actual reality, distinguishing between modes of existence in degrees, clarifying why we do not experience the chair as mostly empty space (the reality of elementary particles). I highly commend Adler's __Ten Philosophical Mistakes__ and mourn his passing a few months ago.
The best example of the need to distinguish between the metaphorical and anagogical, the kataphatic and apophatic, efficient and logical causes, is what is known in Aristotlean terms as the "sorite" or heap paradox. I will render Brainard's version (the paradox can be found in most introductory texts for classical philosophy):
"A single grain of sand does not make a heap. Adding another grain of sand still does not make a heap. Indeed, at no point does adding another grain of sand make enough of a difference in the pile to make it, for us, a heap. But this seems to imply that no amount of sand is enough to make a heap. The paradox does not arise if logical and efficient causes are distinguished. On one hand, there is the heap, maintained by logical cause. The object of awareness is a heap to the degree it instantiates the characteristics of a heap; it is not a heap on the basis of adding sand. The domain of an individual event entails efficient, not logical, cause. An action begun and ended in the moment has no logical meaning apart from other moments like it and unlike it."
Sorite (heap) paradoxes - F. Samuel Brainard, __Reality and Mystical Experience__, Pennsylvania State University Press (2000)
It is Brainard who set forth the triad for what metaphorically - is true (kataphasis);
anagogically - is not true (apophasis); and neither the metaphorical nor anagogical is true
(unitive). Here, I will introduce what Brainard points out as neoplatonic language (in an effort to keep the pre-modern ever before us, interwoven in our web of methodology).
He points out that Dionysian mysticism uses Proclus' triad of mone (remaining/rest, which I like to call the *liminal*); of proodos (proceeding/emanation, which I like to call kataphasis); and of epistrophe (reverting/return, which I like to call apophasis). He explains further:
"The triad is like a fractal in that each element of the triad, no matter what it is, seems to be itself a triad. It is specifically through the medium of this recursive triadic structure that Dionysius preserves everywhere the disjunctive-conjunctive distinction with the addition of a mediating principle."
An aside: If epistemology models ontology, if what is going on in our brains models epistemology, and if syllogisticlly our noumenal realities model our dinge an sich realities, then teleological models of reality that include roles for logical, formal and final causation, however nonenergetic and unverifiable/falsifiable, are at least congruent with nature as we understand it.
The idea of the fractal, like that of the hologram, should not be counterintuitive to modern cosmologists.
As far as common methodologies in science, religion and theology, Ken Wilber makes a good point: They share the central methodological criterion, that all knowledge claims should be settled on the basis of direct appeal to experience. The domains don't, however, share the very same characteristics. Wilber says: "Put somewhat poetically, unity in knowledge and diversity in phenomena." and then cautions about pushing the poem too hard because it will collapse into paradox. (I think we have explored some of the reasons why.)
So, my thesis: We can move forward in science and theology with a non-foundational epistemological holism, honoring a methodological pluralism and pluralistic epistemology, metaphysically confident that none of the other models (of methodological exclusivism) can do anything but attempt to justify their fundamental trust in uncertain reality. We need not fear paradox; that paradox which is not truly mystical will dissolve in our methodologies. Our epistemic humility and its resulting insoluble ontological riddle, need not yield to epistemic despair but can be combined, rather, with an epistemic hope which searches out real truth in all domains of human knowledge. Pre-modern, modern and postmodern metaphysical voices; of theists, nontheists, atheists, pantheists and panentheists; of reductionists and nonreductionists; of the phenomenological and the scientific; all contrapuntally interweave in perpetual fugal movement, feeding on each other, trophotropically; acting on each other, ergotropically; spinning a web where both constraint and emergence operate between disciplines; cascading in a Dionysian triad of apophasis, kataphasis and liminality; collapsing dualisms; dissolving paradoxes; and yielding testable hypotheses which are explanatory, insightful and fruitful in both science and theology.
Until the veil is pulled aside or torn asunder, the journey will be my destination and the quest will be my grail.
Sincerely,
Noveau-Dionysius
Note: I wrote: "Collapsing this conjunctive-disjunctive awareness dualism is no mystical feat." This should be nuanced. This phenomenon is at least analogous to some mystical states which yield profound but ineffable ontological insights. It does not escape my notice, that the pre-modern Dionysian triad fractal resembles some post-modern holographic theories. More importantly, it may be just as valid to consider the Dionysian recursive movements as fugal, its interweaving voices being analogical, anagogical and mystagogical.
The analogical voice uses the kataphatic and metaphorical, uses words and symbols (and sacrament) deals with efficient causes (and, in a sense, instrumental causation), "proceeds" and is therefore ergotropic and operating in the realm of energetic causation. It corresponds in trinitarian theology to the efficacious will effected by the Son, to action. This is why the mystic says all can be well. This is the New Covenant and the illuminative way. Our prayer is meditatio and operatio. This is where code and law and goodness came together in a Person, the via and where legalism can corrupt.
The anagogical voice uses the apophatic and the ineffable, deals with logical causes (and, in a sense, formal causation), "returns" and is therefore trophotropic and operating in the realm of nonenergetic causation (morphogenetic fields? implicate order?), however concealed this realm may be (as with telos). It corresponds in trinitarian theology to the permissive and designing will effected by the Father, to intention. This is why the mystic says that all may be well. This is the Old Covenant and the purgative way. Our prayer is lectio and oratio. This is where creed and doctrine and truth, the veritas, was revealed and where dogmatism can creep in.
The mystagogical voice uses the unitive which has no need for words and symbols (contrasted with the apophatic which wishes it could effable about the ineffable and struggles in its faltering, foundering and floundering attempts to do so), deals with final causes, is a "resting place", the liminal threshold (on the borders of chaos?), the juncture where, paradoxically, the mediating principle dissolves all dualisms in an unmediated and direct encounter with Reality. In this crossing-over between gatherings and dismissals, between discipleship and apostleship, between every I and every Thou, the teleological is revealed and the implicate/explicate order unconcealed. It corresponds in trinitarian theology to the desiring will effected by the Spirit, to desire. This is why the mystic says that all will be well. This is Pentecost and the unitive way. Our prayer is contemplatio and collatio. This is where cult and ritual and beauty, the vita, are experienced and where ritualism and magic can pervert.
Eschatologically, the conflation of desire, intention and action correspond to a mandatory will. This is why the mystic says all shall be well. This is the beatific way. This is where every tear shall be wiped away.
Because of natural theology and revelation, the mystic says you shall know that all manner of things will be well. The hymnal says the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.

On the Parsimony & Fecundity of God & Sagan Hypotheses

I learned the word "probabilism" in my self-guided explorations of Roman Catholic moral theology, dissenter that I have been. My brain produced a neuronic assembly associated with that concept when questioned, recently, about the possible interactions between my pragmatism and my hopes. I went to the dictionary to help tease out the implications of this neurognostic structure and found that I indeed resonated with the first definition (the moral application being the second). That 1st definition that was not at all in my lexicon:
probabilism n. a theory that certainty is impossible esp. in the sciences and that probability suffices to govern belief and action.
I realize now that one of my first real experiences with probabilism in the sciences came during a Christmas Bird Count when it dawned on me that we were making a lot more mistakes of observation and data compilation than I had ever dreamed of in my early years of birding. I did not countenance these mistakes very well until I became what I now realize was a field ornithology probabilist. Then, it became fun again.
It seems to me that both the God and the Sagan hypothesis attempt to predict, explain, give insight and make intelligible why there is something rather than nothing. While some of their auxiliary hypotheses may be falsifiable by experience, their very inner core commitments are intrinsically untestable. It is this realization that likely yields up the word "probabilism" in response to your questions. Most of the God & Sagan auxiliary hypotheses are legitimate enough but their inner core hypotheses aren't subject to Popperian verification/falsification pre-eschatologically. I suppose I did not countenance this very well until I became what was a field ontology probabilist. Then, it became fun again.
How does one choose between the God versus Sagan core hypotheses?
Does one simply attempt to explain the unknown only in terms of the known, following William of Ockham? Does one look for the simplest competing theory?
In the application of Occam's Razor, does the tie go to Sagan?
As far as explanatory attempts, both natural theology and naturalism attempt to explain the unknown in terms of the known (and they suffer the same handicaps regarding such as the earliest moments following the Big Bang, cosmological t = 0, the deep structure of matter and the ontological riddle).
As far as competing theories, here's my rub. While, superficially, the simplest competing theory may appear to be the Sagan Hypothesis, what if we more heavily nuance Occam's Razor? What if we look, not for the simplest competing theory but, for the simplest competing theory that can get the job done?
Doesn't the proper use of the Razor presuppose one's awareness of the proper degree of parsimony to be applied to the given task?
I think that one of the central premises at the core of the God & Sagan hypotheses must be that one can be aware of the proper degree of parsimony to be applied in one's determination that one's hypothesis can indeed get the ontological job done. The very crux of my impasse with any methodological exclusivists is my systematic and categorical denial of the possibility that one can so be aware.
I base this denial syllogistically, my first premise being that the job can't get done for there is an eschatological occultation of why there is something rather than nothing, Drees' open space regarding, not how things are but, that things are. If the job, itself, cannot get done, then we are precluded from arguing the degree of parsimony needed to get it done.
Job 38:2 "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
This does not mean we must do away with the hypotheses altogether. It simply means that choosing between the two based on laws of parsimony isn't tenable.
So, we do construct an ontological hypotheses, their job being to predict being, explain being, make being intelligible, interpret our experience of being, produce insight into being, produce research about being and to falsify our predictions, explanations, intelligibility, interpretations and insights regarding being by experience.
Could one reason the hypotheses seem so equally compelling be that their core commitments are not falsifiable pre-eschatologically?
So, if choosing between the two based on laws of parsimony is not compelling, what other basis do we employ? Might we look to the relative successes of their auxiliary hypotheses?
Could one reason the Sagan hypothesis seems so compelling be that its auxiliary hypotheses have yielded a veritable plenitude of relevant, intelligible and meaningful predictions, explanations, interpretations and insights regarding being?
Could one reason the God hypothesis seems so compelling be that its auxiliary hypotheses have yielded a veritable plenitude of relevant, intelligible and meaningful predictions, explanations, interpretations and insights regarding the ground, origin, support and destiny of being?
Let us not engage the logical fallacy of consensus gentium in choosing between the two. Let's not misapply Occam's Razor (if only out of respect for the fact that he was a Franciscan). Rather, until the eschaton, let us be nourished by the predictions, explanations, interpretations, insights and intelligibility offerred by the great and beautiful web of diverse ontological core commitments and their auxiliary hypotheses and ancillary epistemologies.
Some claim that one's choice of core commitments is the foremost determinant in what therapies (individual and social) one devises. I agree that this may very well be true. I hasten to add, however, that even those deontologies which have long-claimed an extrinsic validating factor seem to forget that their ontological core commitments and hypotheses are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. While their attempts to evade paradox and escape the arbitray may indeed be efficacious, they are still precariously perched above the abyss of the open space.
If there is any good news about our therapies, I think it lies first in the fact of our solidarity with one another and with nature. Our first task is to awaken to this solidarity. Once it is awakened, compassion will ensue.
If there is a challenge, it is likely defining who "one another" is, and when human life begins and ends. The more daring and complex this challenge, perhaps the further we should avoid any slippery slopes? This is reminiscent of one of the great biblical interrogatives: "Who is my neighbor?" and it takes on a more poignant urgency as we seek common ground in the emergent bioethical and ecological concerns of our cosmos.
As I make my approach, theoretically, my hopes do not conflict with my essential pragmatism. I do, however, think it is possible that my pragmatism could be somewhat idiopathic. Depth psychology would be required to sort through it.
These questions evade easy answers, like trying to recite the subtle distinctions between all of the nonreductionistic monisms.
Upon surface reflection, my pragmatism is likely very much influenced by my hopes, but due to that dynamism where I am consciously, more or less, wagering with Pascal, I think my pragmatism likely retains its essential nature.
I think this is a consciously competent approach to faith and suspect that many, many others may be approaching faith in the same way, however, unconsciously. If one accepts the highly nuanced versions of faith such as Tillich's ultimate concern and the Catholic formulation by Dulles about remaining poised over the abyss of doubt" and recognizes that faith is a dipolar human reality, then it might not be totally inaccurate to suggest that many believers, in an etymological sense, are "agnostics with inclinations". I think this would be moreso true for those who have advanced in the development of their faith per Fowler's schema and not true at all for Hoffer's "true believers" or for the credulous believing masses which are stuck in Folwer's early stages.

Some Theisms Are Demonstrably Better Science Than Some Atheisms

If ontology models epistemology and if it is not how things are but that things are which is the mystical and if reality can give no account of why there should be something rather than nothing,
then, in principle, there can be no a priori supposition which grounds being and there is no self-justifying proposition which can account for the fact of existence and there is no self-evident postulate regarding primal being and there is no warrant, justification, confirmation, proof, ground, certainty, assurance, stipulation, sanction or authority, maxim, postulate or axiom which can demonstrate the primal origin, primal source, primal support, primal ground or primal destiny of being, existence or reality,
and therefore,
ontology, as a branch of metaphysics, is thwarted at its very foundation from urging forcefully and irresistably any solutions to metaphysics' most salient problems, urgent concerns and irresistable questions and joins
cosmology and quantum mechanics, as branches of physics, as they, too, are thwarted at their very foundations from urging forcefully and irresistably any solutions to problems regarding the earliest moments after the Big Bang or cosmological t = 0 or regarding the deep structure of matter and since
these problems of physics and metaphysics are insoluble in principle and
these ontological and cosmological questions are unanswerable in principle
then the great theistic hypothesis which conjectures the existence of God and the great atheistic hypothesis which conjectures that nothing, as a system, is unstable and has a tendency to decay into something, both
admit to no a priori presuppositions and can offer no self-evident propositions and since
they are insoluble, preeschatologically, in principle, then temporally, they can not be submitted to a posteriori testability and no inductive reasoning processes can yield direct confirmation of these hypotheses although they can gain indirect confirmation, temporally, by their offering of increased intelligibility to our understanding of our experience of finite reality.
Now, however relevant, intelligible and meaningful its predictions, explanations, interpretations and insights may be, in order to be scientific, an hypothesis must be testable, open to confirmation, subject to verifiability and falsifiability.
The eschatological theistic hypothesis meets these criteria, open as it is to direct confirmation, eschatologically, and further, can be tested indirectly by the verification and falsification of its assertions based on its implications for understanding the whole of finite reality.
The nontheistic hypothesis, that nothing, as a system, is unstable and has a tendency to decay into something, does not make eschatological assertions and would never advert to the possibility of atemporality and, furthermore, excludes, in principle, the nonspatial, the atemporal, the immaterial or nonenergetic which would lie outside of the realm of space-time-matter-energy and, hence, coupled with the reasons cited above, remains untestable, not open to direct confirmation, nonverifiable, nonfalsifiable and insoluble, in principle, a priori and a posteriori, atemporally and temporally, eschatologically and pre-escahtologically. While the auxiliary nontheistic hypotheses can be tested indirectly by the verification and falsification of their assertions based on their implications for understanding the whole of finite reality, their very core commitment does not meet the criteria of a scientific hypothesis.
Ironically, the theistic hypothesis may remain compelling because it is more scientific in its articulation of both core and auxiliary hypotheses than the nontheistic hypothesis and because both its core and its auxiliary hypotheses remain relevant, intelligible and meaningful and their predictions, explanations, interpretations and insights are testable, open to confirmation, subject to verifiability and falsifiability and, importantly, are fecund.
The nontheistic hypothesis, however unscientific, may remain compelling because its auxiliary hypotheses remain relevant, intelligible and meaningful and their predictions, explanations, interpretations and insights are testable, open to confirmation, subject to verifiability and falsifiability and, importantly, are fecund.
My hypothesis is that it is in the very articulation of the God hypothesis, that is, in its grounding, in its hypothesized foundationalism, that it demonstrates its scientific methodology, both in its core commitment and auxiliary hypotheses, that it thus derives its cognitive consonance and tenacious mass appeal, and that
it is in the very articulation the Sagan hypothesis, with its lack of grounding, in its inherent nonfoundationalism, that it generates just enough cognitive dissonance, seeming paradox and apparent arbitrariness with its unjustified fundamental trust in uncertain reality, to keep the masses confused and skeptical, this notwithstanding its unparalleled contributions in so many disciplines of human endeavor.
I don't offer the Sagan hypothesis as a straw man for every other nontheistic and atheistic formulation, those which would be more heavily nuanced and which would more successfully evade any logical fallacies. I offer it in the spirit of Emerson, such that, when the half-Sagans depart, the Sagans will appear.
Neither is it my intention to disparage science-proper over against theology. I do advocate a nonfoundational essential pragmatism, myself, and I do affirm both the efficacy and fecundity of reductionistic materialist approaches.
My main point has less to do with arguing the metaphysical and philosophical approach to science and theology (although that is certainly much of the substance above) and much more to do with putting forth some putative psychosocial hypotheses to explain the tenacity of most people's core commitments to the theistic and nontheistic hypotheses.
Furthermore, might there be a neurocognitive substrate for what I often call a "rush to closure" by fideism and scientism and other isms, in between? that would, perhaps, be a maladaptive artifact of the gestalt process? as hunches and inspirations and epistemologies lead to worldviews, resisting both modification or nonclosure? especially in a system which is internally coherent, externally congruent and logically consistent? notwithstanding the existence of other such systems with equal epistemic and ontologic footings?

Common Ground with Atheism, even

Let me attempt to label this common ground. I think we share an evolutionary epistemology. If this is true, it is significant. To explicate this concisely, I think we agree that there is a dialectical process of "conjecture and criticism" that our human brains use as open-ended information processors. I think we share an optimism toward and a confidence about a human being's natural reasoning capabilities. I would further venture a guess that we share an essential pragmatism that relies on this natural reason operating in a pancritically rational manner.Therefore, when "we are in a realm where there seems to be fairly conclusive proof" we do NOT need to get so hazy and do not need to use such difficult concepts (which, I must humbly admit, I did not construct).I think of different typologies for science and theology engagement: conflict, contrast/independence, contact/dialogue and confirmation/integration. I am using Haught and Barbour here.In my Roman Catholic theology, at the level of natural theology and in my assessment of human natural reason, there can be much fruitful contact/dialogue and confirmation/integration regarding what we call the preambulae fidei and evolutionary epistemology. At the level of a theology of revelation and in my assessment of eschatological matters, because of foundationally different metaphysical presuppositions, there can only be contrast/independence or conflict. There is a LOT of territory to be covered on the landscape of science/religion and science/theology engagement. As we move from topic to topic, we will share some of that territory as common ground. When we don't share the common ground of presuppositions, the engagement typology and the topology of this landscape changes dramatically. Dawkins does not seem to be mindful of this. Other materialists, most notably for instance - some religious naturalists, are mindful of this.The realm where conclusive proof is not available is, to me, the metaphysical realm. It is the realm of ontology, of Kung's uncertain reality, of Heidigger's something rather than nothing, of Wittgenstein's "that" things are ... ...I understand the point that Stephen Jay Gould makes when he refers to humanity as "a tiny twig on an ancient tree of life." So, too, I understand how Bertrand Russell can call humanity "a curious accident in a backwater". I even TOTALLY agree with Richard Dawkins: "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference."So far, at this juncture in my exploration of the common ground which I believe I share with my materialist amigos, I see little difference in our evolutionary epistemology, in our pancritical reasoning or in our essential pragmatism.AGREED? or shall we back up?Where I disagree with Dawkins is not that the universe apparently lacks telos but that the universe itself is not what we should expect. I'm not talking about anthropic conincidences either. I'm talking about why there is a universe rather than nothing. This is the great bifurcation. This is where I part ways with materialism. I simply do not buy into the Sagan hypothesis that nothingness as a system is inherently unstable and has a tendency to decay into something. Things get hazy and concepts get difficult when discussing the deep structure of matter or the earliest moments following the Big Bang. That is still not the point of departure though. The bifurcation remains why there is something rather than nothing. Truly, conjectures about what lies outside of space-time-matter-energy would get even more obscure, hazier and more difficult. Some eschew such conjecture. I understand.
I think I have confirmed where it is we agree and where our point of disagreement begins. Perhaps the question which emerges is whether at this juncture, a human confronted with the great ontological question necessarily ceases the "conjecture-criticism" operation or attempts a meta- contextualization? If the person goes meta, can it be done with reason, rationally? Is there such a thing as super-reasonable or meta-rational? The hypothesis of God is claimed to be such a thing. It claims validity as an hypothesis because of its openness to pre-eschatological indirect verification and eschatological direct verification. It claims rationality. Reasonable people of large intelligence and profound goodwill disagree on this.As to whether or not there can be HUGE consequences in the forumlation of ethics regarding which position one takes on the God hypothesis, I think good arguments can be made either way. On one hand, there is enough disagreement and enough of a cluster party going on in moral exercises among the theists that I don't see introducing non-theistic ethics as marginally affecting anything. On the other hand, I am a nonfoundationalist myself but one who thinks utilitarian appeals must be LARGELY informed by the moral formulations of the great traditions.

Fides et Ratio in Theology AND Science

In previous essays and correspondence I proposed that some theisms are more scientific than some nontheisms. I think I made it clear that I did not intend my "Sagan Hypothesis" to be a "straw man" by which all nontheistic hypotheses could be invalidated. I should also point out that my "God Hypothesis" was not a straw man by which all theistic hypotheses could be invalidated.
I also recognized and pointed out that nuanced versions of these hypotheses do exist and I explicitly (and dialogically) invited such nuancing. In this invitation was my implicit acknowledgement (even presupposition) that not all "fides" is fideism and not all "ratio" is rationalism. For example, a nuanced scientism might be that of Drees but not that of Dawkins. A nuanced fideism might be that of Hans Kung but not that of some traditional Catholic scholasticisms which invoked Aquinas (wrongly). But I want to be clear in my position: it is only through this nuancing process that the pejorative ism-suffix can be etymologically dropped.
In a sense, we are talking about fundamentalism, whether in religion or in science. Some scientists bristle when "accused" of having "faith" in science. I think it is only the non-nuanced form of faith whose label most scientists would positively eschew. I would still maintain that the core-commitment of the theistic and nontheistic hypotheses IS faith, even as some of the major premises of their auxiliary hypotheses are not. I will explain further.
I have explored whether or not there is a "rush to closure" dynamism that accounts for fundamentalism (even if in some scientisms we are dealing with a radical [non]fundamentalism). Is it a maladaptive artifact of our gestalt mechanism which coerces closure on Wittgenstein and Heidigger's insoluble metaphysical question? Is it an artifact of our holistic and reductionistic operators (D'Aquili and Newberg) which prevents the collapse of our conjunctive-disjunctive dualism? Is it an artifact of our imaginative faculties and our trial and error conceptualizations which sends us into infinite loop regressions when "looking for something in a place where we are simultaneously assuming there is nothing at all" (Luther Askeland)? Is it an artifact of our linguistic processes which hinders our dissolution of paradox into logical and efficient causal operations?
Are these evolutionary artifacts maladaptive failures of the gestalt and/or failures of the imagination? Are they, phenomenologically, a failure to nuance? Do we need to transcend the neurocognitive substrates of our gestalt apparatus individually? Is it a Kuhnian paradigm shift on the order of a new axial period we need to experience collectively? Perhaps we can neither countenance nor fathom being part of an "untellable story in which we are all being told" (Askelande)?
The recurrent theme that I propose, for our individual and collective failures in the un-nuanced theisms and nontheisms, is a "failure to go meta".
I also propose that both the God and Sagan Hypotheses, even in their highly nuanced formulations, as explanatory accounts for existence, only "postpone and complicate the dillema" (Askeland).
Neither hypothesis, at a certain level (the mystical) gives me a satisfying accounting. In my previous essays, I was really making an attempt to stand in others' shoes to see why those accountings possibly satisfy them and, perhaps precisely because of this exercise, from these accountings, my epistemological holism emerges.
Does my standing back amount to collosal epsitemic hubris? I am prepared to be both misunderstood and accused of metaphysical arrogance. At the same time, be patient, for "uncertain Reality" isn't finished with me yet! Take solace in the endproduct of my hubris: epistemic humility. It is surely the obverse side of the epistemological coin of the ontological realm.
In all humility, it is out of this depthful encounter of the consonance between faith and reason that my fides et ratio hermeneutic emerges, that my acute sensitivity to the excesses of fideism and rationalism is sustained. Through this encounter, with this hermeneutic, I pragmatically "justify" my Roman Catholic faith and attempt to "ground" my pluralistic epistemology, both paradoxically. We will further explore why "paradoxically" is okay.
Karl Popper: "Rationalism appreciates argument and theory and verification by experience. But this "decision" for rationalism cannot in its own turn be justified by argument and experience. Although it can be discussed, it rests ultimately on an irrational decision on FAITH in reason." He also wrote: "A self-sufficient, comprehensive, or uncritical rationalism as supported by Descartes and many modern scientists is logically untenable." In a real sense, Popper condenses into those two sentences what the mystical preoccupation with suchness, thusness and thatness is all about.
Karl Barth might support my thesis that some theisms are more scientific than some nontheisms: "For me, rationalists ought to be more rational."
Our fundamental trust in "uncertain Reality" (I combine the lower and upper cases out of deference for our collective apophatic and kataphatic endeavors), is described by Hans Kung as neither rationalistically demonstrable nor irrationalistically unverifiable but as being more than reasonable: "super-reasonable".
If there is a failure at the nexus between science and theology, science and religion, it is indeed what I have described: "failure to go meta".
There is no failure in paradigm-shifting that can be overcome by appealing to what is "non-meta-reasonable" rationale. Arguments for shifting paradigms in belief-systems are not philosophically operative, have no jurisdiction and are not dispositive in the temporal, pre-eschatological realm. The coin of the physical realm of materialist reductionism has no currency in the meta-physical realm, for all of the meta-reasons I've already stated with Kung, Barth, Popper et al. The nontheistic hypothesis has neither a priori nor a posteriori falsification or verifiability available to it in principle. The theistic hpothesis is, therefore, not a failure in logic, has not been stolen by the intelligentisia, is not a failure in Kuhnian paradigm-shifting, not a misapplication of Occam's Razor, not a mistake in parsimony, not an insufficient weighting of evidence but, rather, a meta-trusting, meta-reasonable "realization" of the radical possibility for fundamental certainty, a giving of one's self over to uncertain Reality, not without courage, never without risk.
Hans Kung: "I thus perceive the reasonableness of reason not as a premise "before" my decision (in this, Popper is right), nor even as a consequence "after" my decision (there Popper is wrong), but in the "realization" of my experience."
I would add that this realization does not have to involve an "infinite loop error" or an infinite regress. Kung continues: "Although we cannot attempt a logical justification of fundamental certainty, we are not dispensed from the obligation of rendering a rational account of it."
And, more from Kung: "If I commit myself trustingly to reality despite its uncertainty, I am not simply questioning in a circle, nor am I continually going farther back with my questions, nor do I dogmatically assume anything as obvious. I nevertheless commit myself to reality in all its uncertainty; in this very way, I experience, I know, the reality of reality, the reasonableness of reasonableness." And I see, in that quote, nothing that would bother Popper or Lorenz.
It may be that it is in the consideration of imagination and concepts, of the abstract and concrete, of logical and efficient causes, that some "failure to go meta" creeps into our consideration of ultimates. At best, there is an etymological piracy, at worst, a philosophical legerdemain, involved in defining "ultimate" as merely going back as far as one can go "for now". This attempt to foreclose on the ontological question-begging (that this consideration has been all about) cannot petition the Metaphysical Supreme Court where Justices Heidigger, Wittgenstein and Pseudo-Dionysius preside.
Neither can it accomplish a repossession of a suitably formulated God-concept inasmuch as ultimacy's debt to primal being is collateralized by a mortgage held as an asset in a blind trust of eschatological duration. A nuanced pragmatist's approach to ignoring classical ultimacy, and going back 'only' as far as one can go, in development of a hermeneutic is possible. If, however, it categorically denies Wim Drees' "open space", holds contempt for our metaphysical court, makes a priori ontological conclusions or uses a posteriori ontological arguments with the intent to logically coerce a materialist reductionistic paradigm-shift on worldviews, it must own up to its intrinsic unreasonableness and inherent irrationality.
After all is said and done, if I have tried to make a case that scientists are often irrational, nonrational and faith-filled, at the same time, they are not unlike true believers (Hoffer). As a pragmatist, however, I am not at all making a case that would suggest that scientism's irrationality (in its hypothetical core commitment) affects the efficacies of its methodologies. I am only pressing for their recognition that the integration of theology and science could be closer than many suspect; that the integration of science and religion would, then, not be far behind; that a global ethic is within our grasp.
It is at this "nexus" that the world desparately needs us to go "meta".
A friend asked me, just the other day, if, both theoretically and absent any methodological constraints, there was anything we could not know. My friend wasn't referring to the deep structure of matter or the earliest moments following the Big Bang. He was musing about absolutes and ultimates and mystery and, in a sense, wondering if they should ever be capitalized as proper nouns. He was intuitively grasping Al's thesis that "the whole structure of Absolutes is unworkable" and in the very same socratic and platonic contexts.
My response was that we could not know 'why there was something rather than nothing' and that Hans Kung's use of the term "uncertain reality" to reflect our apparent lack of primal ground, primal origin, primal being, primal support and primal destiny succinctly expresses this. So did Al: "It is certain that nothing is certain but uncertainty."
It seems possible, to me, that many theists, nontheists and atheists are unconsciously competent as essential pragmatists. All are confronted by uncertain reality and are implicitly asked to give an accounting of being and ground. Some articulate their accounting and, in so doing, attempt to justify their fundamental trust in uncertain reality. The theists do this by hypothesizing God. Others articulate their accounting, without such an attempt, with what Kung labels as a paradoxical fundamental trust of uncertain reality. Still others may have a very problematical fundamental mistrust which defies articulation.
Whether one bothers to articulate one's accounting of uncertain reality or not, one is inescably caught up in existentially trusting it or not. This existential trust or mistrust seems de facto pragmatic. Any articulation of one's accounting of being and ground which includes an attempt at justification, by an appeal to ultimate groundedness, also seems pragmatic. Pragmatism, being theologically neutral, would also seem to include those who proceed to live and move and have their being with a paradoxical fundamental trust of uncertain reality. While we can join Popper and Barth in discussing which of these positions is rational or irrational, what too many seem to lose sight of is that, in their justification of their fundamental trust in uncertain reality, their articulation of the premise of an ultimate ground is merely an attempt at grounding. As an attempt, it is neither the establishment of ultimate ground nor the demonstration of it. If Barth thinks, therefore, that science is irrational but theology rational, then I can, with my conjunctive awareness, agree with him at the level of logical formulations and in the realm of formal causation. In the realm of efficient causation, however, with my disjunctive awareness, I am still left with the a priori insolubility of Heidigger's fundamental metaphysical question. Perhaps the efficacy of justifying one's fundamental trust in uncertain reality lies in the dissolution of paradox and the elimination of cognitive dissonance. Still, it is inefficacious when it comes to the elimination of reality's radical uncertainty, in and of itself. It is in the process of collapsing my conjunctive-disjunctive dualism that I dissolve the "ultimate ground" version of the sorite paradox to find that the formal cause of God is not to be found in the heap of the efficient causes of nature. This apophasis can be an increase in descriptive accuracy, an anagogical revealing of what God is not.
The ontological riddle remains insoluble in principle and our ontologies remain mental maps which are modeled by our epistemologies. Any hermeneutic which fails to recognize its inherent self-referentiality is in peril of confusing its map with the cosmic landscape of uncertain reality itself. The window shades of conjunctive and disjunctive awareness, of discrimination and its abandonment, can only be opened and closed one person at a time. Every experience of collapsing conjunctive-disjunctive dualism is a personal experience, something we can facilitate but cannot accomplish for another. This radical subjectivity of our experience of uncertain reality leaves us all on equal epistemic footing, poised to take our next good step, no individual perception or judgement more true than another, but some more useful.
Our concept formulations and cognitive mapping exercises need be carried out in self-awareness, occulting what cannot be known in principle, not in ontological despair but with epistemic humility. As we proceed from our mothers' wombs and step out into the cosmos, this humility is not without epistemic hope for, through time, we can and do experience, in our hermeneutics, increased external congruence, greater internal coherence and augmented logical consistency.We can propose that the God Hypothesis is useful because it is explictly rational. We can recognize that science, however irrational per a Popperian critique, is useful vis a vis the fecundity of its methodology which is implicitly rational. One might pragmatically choose a theistic science over a nontheistic science because it is both explicitly and implicitly rational. One can claim that the God Hypothesis is both valid and compelling because it is both indirectly verifiable through its insights, explanations and intelligibility and directly verifiable eschatologically. One can claim that, in the pre-eschatological realm of space-time-matter-energy, both theistic and nontheistic hypotheses and their ontological core commitments remain unverifiable and unfalsifiable, ungrounded and irrational ,even as their respective auxiliary hypotheses are fruitful in their predictions, explanations, insights and intelligibility. These auxiliary hypotheses can have a recursive fecundity, a feeding of insight to insight, in a progressive upward spiraling of epistemic hopefulness, bootstrapping their noetic, aesthetic and ethical grounds, supporting humanity without themselves having any foundation. Such is the essence of our pragmatism, however conscious or unconscious, however competent or incompetent.
I appreciate what Al says and think I understand what he means here:
[To hijack (!?) a few phrases from Clay, my point was not to <declare "case closed" and judgment against> theology; only, case closed against theodicy and absolutism. When I claim that all experience is personal experience, I mean in *both* science and religion. We form world-views which are our own, based most strongly on first-hand evidence, with due allowance for hearsay influences (which includes mathematical and scientific "consensus" as well as religious teachings). With uncertainty as the only certainty, we might <declare "court in session" and let counsel for the theological perspective present their case.> I presented only my <opening argument> here. And as I too am <desperately short of time, I hope others will make a case for non-theistic ethics.> ]
inasmuch as I was borrowing others' statements, too, to express similar sentiments. From a meta-ethical perspective, I can conceive of no deontology which can validate itself extrinsically. Just because theists attempt a justification of their fundamental trust in uncertain reality does not mean they have thereby provided an extraneous validating factor for their ethical formulations. The reason some theists feel an authoritative deontology is more compelling is because they have been relieved of their cognitive dissonance and dispossessed of their paradox by their articulation of or buying-into a rational framework which attempts to ground their fundamental trust in uncertain reality. The reason some nontheists feel that a nonauthoritative approach has equal epistemic footing is because they are not confusing an attempt to ground with the fact of grounding. For theists who cannot grasp the nonauthoritative approach, it would seem that their very first clue, that an extraneous factor is not available in order to validate one's deontology, is the plurality of manifold and multiform extraneous factors humankind has relied on over the years. Even once conceding the possibility of an extrinsically validated and authoritative deontology, an insoluble problem persists inasmuch as there are no a priori grounds for establishing which putative authority is valid and no recourse to a posteriori testability of anyone's claim to authoritativeness. There could only be utilitarian appeals and that is precisely what we witness given how things are.
The inner voice, the personal experience, the phenomenon of conscience, the prophetic gift of Socrates and similar ethical operators are not proof of an extraneous validating Authority, but they may be important clues in the mystery of life. While the discussion above may have been nothing but a reiteration of the Skeptics idea that no idea could be justified except in terms of some other idea, and that ultimately this process of justification had to come to an end in some unjustified idea or set of ideas, it does not suggest that one can believe anything one wants. Although our knowledge is not grounded in justification and can not be deductively produced from a set of "self-justifying" or "nonpropositionally justified" axioms, evolutionary epistemology reveals that it is grounded in a combination of conjecture and criticism. A piece of knowledge may begin as a hunch but through its survival of a process of intellectual criticism it becomes knowledge.
Through pancritical processes, then, even the collective wisdom of our great traditions has gained ever-increasing external congruence, internal coherence and logical consistency.
In my own usage, neither pancritical rationalism nor essential pragmatism is intended to be an ideological position. Rather, they provide a meta-context into which one can feed one's natural reasoning. Presupposing natural reason as a preambula fidei, the great traditions can gather from their encounters with reality what is useful. In elaborating their metanarratives they can employ myth which, literally true or not, can evoke an appropriate response to reality. These responses need not be grounded in justification as axiomatic in order to have deep import and compelling urgency. Rather, they can be borne out in the crucible of experience in the context of creed, cult, code and community structure; creed articulated in doctrine and transmitting the truth encountered in reality; cult expressed in ritual and liturgy and celebrating the beauty encountered in reality; code formulated into law and morals and preserving the good encountered in reality; community structure nurturing, sustaining, affirming and supporting what is useful and passing on to successive generations truth, beauty and goodness.
In the context of pancritical rationalism, no skeptic need start from scratch in the pursuit of truth. In the context of essential pragmatism, no utilitarian need start from scratch in the pursuit of beauty and goodness. No tradition is then exempted from processes of modification and all are urged to attempt scientific statements of their religious truth in full partnership with philosophy (the ancilla theologi�). The full integration of creed, cult and code into a comprehensive belief-system can take place, therefore, in a context that is meta-contextual and which employs meta-rational and meta-ethical approaches which in their essence pay tribute to our evolutionary epistemology.
Honoring this natural reason as a preambula fidei, even the content of Divine revelation can be treated and systematized in the categories of natural thought. The perfection of such a methodology is manifest in the systematizations of Thomas Aquinas. Even though atheism, materialism, naturalism, pantheism, skepticism and other ideologies fall under the head of rationalistic systems, their deontologies appear to be but fractured and mutilated forms of those of the great traditions, hence, even for the utilitarian, not very useful. If both theistic and nontheistic deontologies are nonauthoritative and not validated by extraneous factors, at least the theistic deontologies have been internally validated by their implicitly pancritical and pragmatic processeses (albeit sometimes with glacial speed). The truth, beauty and goodness they proclaim, celebrate and preserve have been grounded by submission to historical conjecture and premodern, modern and post-modern criticism. Pieces of knowledge which may have begun as mystical hunches, through their survival of processes of systematic criticisms, from within and without, have become parts of systematic knowledge. Thusly, the collective wisdom of our great traditions has gained ever-increasing external congruence, internal coherence and logical consistency. The perversion of their wisdom in the forms of dogmatism, ritualism and legalism is assailed on every front and fundamentalism will ultimately fail. It is fundamentalism's failure to use a meta-context and to emphasize methodological presuppositions over those of substance which causes its crippling effect on intellectual freedom and foments its debilitating effects on human behavior. This failure will also bring about its demise.
It is the ultimate irony that this failure to go "meta" is shared, at least in part, by many nontheistic ideologies. We have considered here how the irrational cannot be overcome by either science or theology. It is in the framing up of the God hypothesis that we first intuit the "super-reasonable" and in its openness to at least an eschatological verification that we recover a rationality that is explicit as well as implicit. And even if this rationality remains a nonfoundational epistemology, a probabilistic and pragmatic theistic approach has this certainty: it is both useful and may ultimately be proven true. There is something to this that is so very consonant with mankind's most profound hunches.
Nontheistic ideologies, also nonfoundational, probabilistic and pragmatic, remain explicitly irrational, though I would defend their implicit rationality. However, in their core premises, they admit to no eschatological verifiability or falsifiability. Though they may be useful, their primary utility, to me, is hygienic, in that they are mostly reactionary to the great traditions and rarely define themselves in their own terms but instead define themselves over against the traditions. When nontheistic approaches have been systematized, their community structures have been miserable failures to all objective onlookers. Some may think there is no such thing as good and evil but everyone knows what an Evil Empire looks like. Nontheistic approaches, to me, are less useful and, in principle, their hypotheses can never be proven true. There is something here so very dissonant with mankind's most profound hunches.
Theisms have nothing to fear from nonauthoritative deontologies for their own are foundationally nonauthoritative (though their hypotheses may indeed be proven true one day). Such a theism as would believe in the fruits of Rahner's anthropological method in theology would have absolutely nothing to fear. Don't we believe that God created all human beings with the capacity to hear and respond to God? If the capacity is there and, even if we consider it grace, still, while others may be unaware of this unmerited grace, surely they would recognize this "natural" potential which has been added to nature? And they do. And we call it supernatural and they call it natural, but both experience it as an orientation to mystery and to horizon and to concerns about human ultimacies and to an ethic. Rahner claims that God does not choose to communicate to some, and not to others. Rather, God creates in us an emptiness, a hunger for God, in order to fill it. God is love because, instead of remaining alone with the divine self, God creates an emptiness God wants to fill. [These are Mark Fischer's paraphrases of Rahner's concepts http://www.west.net/~fischer/Rahner000.htm ]
Fischer discusses Rahner's theology as regards humanity's "Supernatural Existential" and God's "Divine Communication" and it is this "existential" which, to me, provides the substrate for the global ethic in believers and nonbelievers alike. It could provide the common root system through which we drink of our solidarity, taste of the ethic and find both sustenance and nurturance through our compassion.
We needn't engage the logical fallacies involved in choosing to believe something because it is useful. We have the opportunity before us to choose to believe in something because it is rational. It need not merely be pragmatic but can also be reasonable and probabilistic. It need not be axiomatic but can be pancritical. I don't know if there is a Santa Claus but there is no reason to believe we are all on our own with all of the epistemological stuff we've found in our stockings and all the ontological toys we've found under our tree.

An Artificial Intelligence Thought Experiment

Could free will supervene on artificial intelligence?

Is there a Kurzweilian scenario wherein we could design spiritual machines?
Could these spiritual machines do philosophy, theology, science and mysticism?
Could we program, in them, all that we as humans collectively know about science in the realm of space-time-matter-energy? Could we design them in such a way as to yield the sum total of human knowledge in a manner by which they could yield answers to all questions pertaining to where-when-what-how? Could we rig them up robotically to accomplish all manner of physical tasks?
Could we design them in such a way as to yield the sum total of human philosophical and theological knowledge in a manner by which they could yield answers to all questions, both speculative and experienced-based, pertaining to why and who?
Could they be designed to deal with the ontological questions of thatness, thusness, suchness in the realm of mysticism? And when confronted with any problem of infinite regress, such as when queried about the fact of existence in the form of a questioning as to why there is something rather than nothing, could we program a time-out algorithm that would prevent an infinite loop error and reallocate system resources to other programs?
Could they be programmed to search out all manner of pragmatic decisions using an imaginative-type faculty built in conjunction with an open-ended processor which actively chooses between possible ethical options? options which would be embedded in a plenitude of legal abstractions and moral concepts patterned after those programs which model chess games or storm paths? Could this open-ended processor also yield, then, aesthetic determinations with a similar algorithm as that used in choosing the ethical options?
Once suitably programmed with the noetic, ethic and aesthetic algorithms, could they be further programmed to run subroutines which might establish special affinities for various scenarios ranked as higher versus lessor values, those to be preferred versus those to be avoided, along a continuum which saves program outcomes in storage memory as experience and calls them up into random access memory for processing as affective/disaffective program components?
Would we have at this point a digital spiritual machine capable of interconnectivity with peripheral analog apparata and robotics?
Would, at this point in design, the machine be prepared to make the Kierkegaard leap in a decision to trust its designer? Could the machine self-transcend and make an open-ended decision for or against trust in uncertain reality?
Notwithstanding the fact that we have no a priori information available to program the machine in order to have it ground itself or self-validate its various program codes, subroutines, algorithms and stored memory, could it nevertheless open-endedly derive a binary, either-or hypotheses regarding its program reliability? For instance, after a series of iterations, grounded in the experiences of producing predictions, explanations and insights which yield intelligibility and fertile algorithms for producing new code and modifying old code, could it then choose, algorithmically and pragmatically, for or against its own reliability in an attempt to self-validate?
What hypotheses could be produced in this binary environment? Would they be limited to radical trust or radical mistrust in program reliability? Or some program algorithm which emulates a dipolar trust-mistrust continuum?
Could there be an assortment of similarly pre-programmed machines let loose in an interconnective environment competing for both unequally distributed resources and access to peripheral apparata and robotics? How might their interactions with this environment influence their self-reliability determinations along a dipolar trust-mistrust continuum?
Which machines would, in choosing an algorithm of fundamental trust or mistrust of its own program codes, subroutines, algorithms and stored memories, decide for which hypothesis? that program which will guide its ongoing processing activities in making noetic, ethical and aesthetic choices?
Is the choice not unavoidable? inescapable? Is the self-in/validation of self-reliability not an integral program component?
In this digital-analog environment, in order for the computer to continue processing it must operate within parameters and with constraints? Is the machine limited to program coded in logic and dependent on rational decision-making algorithms? Is the program constrained by written code, code written in logical and analogical language and built on emergent complexity from an otherwise simple binary substrate?
In regard to the question of fundamental trust and internal program validation, given these parameters and constraints, requiring both rational coding and logical processing, would these machines sort themselves out into an assemblage of essential pragmatists, essential nihilists, theists and nontheists?
Some pragmatist machines (theists) rejecting a priori and a posteriori program validation, but producing a logical and rational hypothetical framework of fundamental trust to guide its ongoing processing activities?
The nihilist machines locking-up, with frozen screens, general protect faults, invalid media but with not even the hint of an error message?
Some theist machines (fideists) accepting both a priori and a posteriori program validation in a pre-supposed logical and rational framework of fundamental trust to guide its ongoing processing activities?
Some nontheists (rationalists) rejecting a priori program validation in a pre-supposed framework of arbitrary and paradoxical fundamental trust to guide its ongoing processing activities?
Some pragmatist machines (nontheists) rejecting a priori and a posteriori program validation and operating within an illogical and irrational hypothetical framework of fundamental trust?
Are these spiritual machines theoretically possible? Could they function as true messengers in conveying design structures for their virtual existence that emulate actual existence? Would they "know" they were machines?
Given design-parameters and essential constraints on functionality, could free will supervene on their artificial intelligence?
While it is theoretically conceivable, without considering all of the nuanced discussion of the body-mind problem, that there could be machines of the variety of pragmatic theists, theists and even nihilists (trust me, I own one!), design parameters and system constraints for binary-coded logical processors would preclude functionality of machines running on irrational, illogical machine code.
Human beings, as spiritual machines, as independent agents of free will, cannot be emulated, even in theory, because our potential for irrationality and illogic is not translatable into machine-readable, processable code.
Free will cannot in theory supervene on artificial intelligence no matter what position one takes on the mind-body problem.
That ought to provide a mind-body problem bias!

WHY I BELIEVE
Recapping: we share 1) an evolutionary epistemology, 2) an affirmation of natural reason, 3) a pancritical reasoning process, 4) an essential pragmatism, 5) a probabilistic approach, 6) an openness to the theoretical possibility of a non-natural ground and 7) an agnosticism toward Dree's open space problem due to its radical insolubility.
We can find no a priori, axiomatic, self-justifying, non-propositional, rational explanation for being itself. We cannot find its ground or its fundamental logical condition. We cannot find its origin or its derivation from a source. We cannot find its support or basis for its continued existence. We cannot find its goal though it seems to be evolving without aim. We cannot find a priori reasons for being. We cannot find a posteriori reasons for being.
Questions about primal being, primal ground, primal origin, primal support and primal goal are radically insoluble, in principle, methodologically and substantially. Our recourse to reason has been exhausted. The conjecture-criticism dialectic of our open-ended processor encounters an infinite loop error. Our open-ended processor cannot even yield an accounting of its own existence.
At this point, pragmatically, we take inventory and move on, seeing no need to discard items 1-5. Why bother with items 6 & 7? We must simply accept the radical uncertainty of reality. We must take existence as a given and get on with living. We must busy ourselves with how things are and not trouble ourselves with that things are. We must occult the problem of why there is something rather than nothing. Our open-ended processor cannot construct a testable, verifiable-falsifiable hypothesis regarding primal being, primal ground, primal origin, primal support or primal goal in thespace-time-matter-energy realm.
This processor can use its imaginative faculties of conjecture in the process of constructing an hypothesis that, at least in theory, would give an accounting for being outside of the space-time-matter-energy realm.Because such an hypothesis is untestable, in principle, methodologically and substantially, in the space-time-matter-energy realm, it would have to be considered unreasonable, irrational. Because such an hypothesis is testable, in theory, outside of the space-time-matter-energy realm, it could be considered to be super-reasonable, meta-rational. Not subject to direct verification, except eschatologically, it would only be subject topre-eschatological indirect verification through internal consistency,logical coherence and external congruence.Such an hypothesis resubmits itself to natural reason, pancritical process and essential pragmatism for its indirect verification and falsification.This hypothesis, based on the super-reasonable and meta-rational does not, however, submit itself to conclusive and direct verification and falsification. It gains or loses adherents, such fortunes rising andfalling, with its increasing or decreasing consistency, coherence and congruence.
This consistency/coherence/congruence is a highly distinctive kind ofknowledge. It is above reason but would not admit to discrepancies with reason. It does involve mystery and its reasons would be obscure to human reason and experience. It also involves the existential living out of an hypothesis which proposes a grounding reality of our uncertain reality which itself seems groundless; which proposes a supporting reality of our uncertain reality which itself seems unsupported; which proposes a goal of our uncertain reality which itself seems to be evolving without aim; which proposes a being beyond being of our uncertain reality which itself seemsprecariously perched between being and nonbeing.
This consistency/coherence/congruence meta-contextualizes natural reason aspreambulae fidei, philosophical pancritical process as ancilla theologiae and pragmatic behavior as the mystery of love. It involves the meta-rational, meta-aesthetical and meta-ethical when it attempts grounding, attempts teleology and attempts deontology. It does involve the Kierkegaardian leap and realizes its certainty through the consonance that comes from the insights, intelligibility, explanations and fecundity provided by that leap. The leap is super-reasonable and existential. It does involve a rational context that involves natural reason, pancritical process and essential pragmatism in its indirect verifiability/falsifiability but having "gone meta" now remains above reason in its direct verifiability/falsifiability.
Why the conjecture?
Feuerbachian anthropomorphic projection?
Freudian infantile illusion?
Dissolution of paradox?
Elimination of dissonance?
Prescription for angst?
Concern with ultimates?
Evolutionary artifact?
Nature's been thus nurtured?
Utilitarian designs?
If, after honest introspection and sober reflection, I recognized a mixture of all of the above motives in myself, I would not, at the same time, have demonstrated the hypothesis, in and of itself, to be irrational. I would merely have established that I am irrational.
Almost persuaded? or am I mad?
The God hypothesis is super-reasonable and meta-rational. People of faith and reason have a substantiated, nonparadoxical, nonarbitrary fundamental trust in uncertain reality with a certainty that transcends natural reason and they can do science from a hermeneutic that is both implicitly and explicitly rational. Doing science from reason, alone, is explicitly irrational. In their living out of this hypothesis, they move from head and heart, intellect and intuition, most seldom articulating its propositions formally but moreso informally in the very manner in which they live and move and have their being. Some visit the issue consciously, from time to time, but otherwise pretty much unreflectively go about their life of faithreaping its intrinsic rewards and extrinsic benefits with hope and love.
The great traditions have generated much data for our inductive reasoning, our pancritical process and our essential pragmatism to digest. Our greatest common ground perhaps exists in our collective belief that, while much of this data need not be taken literally, this data must be taken seriously. That it is only subject to indirect verification/falsifiability is an inherent system constraint we have to live with.
The realms of proof exist, therefore, on two planes.Some of the logical fallacies which I addressed precisely derive from the fact that this meta-contextual framework gives explanations for reality on an entirely different plane of reason. For instance, the insolubility of the ontological riddle is not something that can even be dealt with in the realm of natural reason. Also, the non-space- time-matter-energy attributes of the God hypothesis do not admit to Dawkins' probability analyses.
On the other hand, concerning the indirect verifications of this hypothesis, both stated in its positive and negative forms, there are some inductive reasoning processes which would seem to admit to some logical formulations.This would especially involve those phenomena contained in the meta-narratives which do exhibit historicity and which are explicitly put forth by this or that creed as literal or non-mythic. An example might be the resurrection event of Jesus in Christianity. Some seek to demythologize it while others don't. [I know you want to know where I stand here, but ... okay -for the most part, I don't.} In those cases, believers who want to hold to literal interpretations rather than demythologized renditions would seem to be inviting burden of proof-type exegesis and opening their interpretations to exhaustive form, literary, historical and scientific criticism. Also, logical formulations addressing a creed's internal consistency, logical coherence and external congruence would be used to verify and falsify indirectly.
I'm just trying to help Dawkins beef up his anti-apologetics and overcome my logical fallacies polemic. In good faith, I am also giving my friends in debate something in place of their strawmen, something you can get your arms around (to toss even). Some rejections of theisms that end up as atheism, to me, are movements away from idols and are better than the forms of fundamentalism, dogmatism, ritualism and legalism that were thereby abandoned. But it is not my intent to proselytize here. I am only framing up my apologetic to help my debate partners engage the real Imago Dei of my Catholicism. I don't intend to go further into the realm of inductive reasoning regarding the content of my creed though. The conversation would too quickly devolve to apologetics. Let's stay metaphysical. As I stated before, I also see more efficacy in engaging theology and science rather than religion and science.
What say King Agrippa?
Recapping: we share 1) an evolutionary epistemology, 2) an affirmation of natural reason, 3) a pancritical reasoning process, 4) an essential pragmatism, 5) an openness to the theoretical possibility of a non-natural ground and 6) a probabilistic approach.Now probabilism is a theory that certainty is impossible in the sciences and that probability suffices to govern action and belief. By way of example, let me mention a separate but related definition of probabilism: In Roman Catholic moral theology, some hold that, in disputed moral questions, any solidly probable course may be followed even though an opposed course is or appears more probable. At this point, our open-ended processors appear to be clones; you wouldn't by any chance also happen to like Michelob or the Swedish Bikini Team?Now, all possibilities and probabilities aside, would you agree that the problem of whether or not there is a non-natural ground is insoluble in principle? both methodologically and substantially? that the only rational stance toward Drees' "open space" is agnosticism
In choosing between the God Hypothesis and the Sagan Hypothesis, I have rejected any crieria based on parsimony (Occam's Razor), based on the logical fallacy of consensus gentium, or based on deontological imperatives.
I also reject any paradigm for choosing between these hypotheses based on criteria derived from the metaphorical application of any philosophy of law (such as burden of proof, preponderance of the evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, etc).
For instance, a burden of proof criterion would place the responsibility for proof on that petitioner with the unusual claim. I'll engage this without bothering with whether or not it is the Sagan (atheistic) or God (theistic) hypothesis which is more unusual in the (post)modern cultural milieu.
Foremost, to someone, like me,who resonates cognitively, affectively, cortically/limbically, consciously/unconsciously with the "open space" paradigm, who is stupified at all levels of his being at the fact of thatness, at the reality of somethinghood rather than nothinghood, ALL claims are equally ludicrous (or, more politely, preserve their Mysterium Tremendem Fascinans and pardon my Latin).
To me, THATNESS is inherently unusual and to use "unusual" as a modifier of the 'fact of thatness' strikes me as redundancy.
The ontological question will not find its way into a courtroom of metaphysical law in the first place because it is inherently insoluble. That which cannot be proved in principle does not beg the issue regarding a burden of proof.
To me, there is no pre-eschatological jurisdiction.
For those who would think existence is a criminal enterprise, who have pressed their claim theodically, there can be no prosecution due both to a lack of a suspect and a lack of evidence, due to inherent insolubility.
For those who would prefer a civil case metaphor, their position will be dismissed due to a lack of actionable cause and the same lack of evidence, and also due to inherent insolubility and it's concommitant absence of any proof-begging.

Re: The Insidious Isms

After engaging my brain as best I know how I enjoyed this first piece. I was going to start the second but my brained jumped in and exclaimed: �I�m going out for a walk. I may be some time.�

You raise a lot of great questions, JB, and, with the wide net that you cast, asking the right questions is often the right answer. I�m left with an overall impression that if mankind - each and every one of us - has the freedom to decide these questions for ourselves then that is the answer.

An Unbearable Lightness of Being: the Logical Fallacies of Dawkins

A common logical fallacy, the false dilemma, limits the number of options under consideration while in reality there are more. A common form of this fallacy is argumentum ad ignorantiam which assumes that since something has not been proven false, it is therefore true. Conversely, such an argument may assume that since something has not been proven true, it is therefore false. Dawkins commits argumentum ad ignorantiam here: "Either admit that God is a scientific hypothesis ... Or admit that his status is no higher than that of fairies and river sprites." Now one may be tempted to point out the hyperbole as an excuse but it is hard to locate quotes in his philosophy of religion that are not emotionally charged and fallacious.
Another fallacy is the slippery slope where, in order to show that a premise is unacceptable, a sequence of increasingly unacceptable events is shown to follow from that premise. An example from Lane: "When the concept of God is understood as imaginative rather than having actual existence, it becomes easier to question that which has been understood as from God, easier to doubt and examine that which might not be consistent with the ideals of integrity. That seen as "the word of God" can then more readily be doubted if it is suspected of being destructive. Since excessive self-righteousness may be associated with a commitment to God, such self-righteousness may be more easily avoided if the God concept is realized as imaginative."
We cannot logically suggest that if we want to avoid the destructiveness which flows from self-righteousness which in turn flows from dogmatism which in turn flows from a lack of integrity which in turn flows from a concept of God that suggests he exists, then we should use a concept of God that suggests He doesn't (none of which is addressing the FACT of His putative existence or not). Dawkins commits this fallacy when he suggests faith is "capable of driving people to such dangerous folly."
Nothing that Lane or Dawkins are saying here has anything to do with the actual existence of God or not. In fact, they compound their slippery slope fallacy with the fallacy of appeal to consequences, argumentum ad consequentiam, by pointing to the disagreeable consequences of holding a belief in God in order to show that this belief is false.
When Dawkins says "they saw it because they wanted to see it. They believed it because it fitted with their world - view. They were blind to the truth that was staring them in the face." or someone politely suggests: "May I kindly suggest that you got this impression from your cognitive dissonance protecting you from views that may challenge your faith???", they are committing the fallacy of attacking the person, argumentum ad hominem, whereby the person presenting an argument is attacked instead of the argument itself. The above are examples of the abusive ad hominem where instead of attacking an assertion, the argument attacks the person who made the assertion.
In another common ad hominem fallacy, the circumstantial, instead of attacking an assertion the author points to the relationship between the person making the assertion and the person's circumstances. Discounting a central tenet of a religion, such as the resurrection of Jesus on the basis that it is a Freudian product of wishful thinking, without investigating the legitmacy of the claims scientifically and historically, would be an example of the consequential ad hominem. Perhaps the most common ad hominem in religious debates is the tu quoque, where there is an attack on the person along the lines that a person does not practice what he preaches.
In the neurocognitive sciences, the fallacy of coincidental correlation or post hoc ergo propter hoc, meaning "after this therefore because of this", is common. Does brain activity monitored during mystical states of awareness cause these numinous experiences or is it merely correlated with same. Not even the scientists performing these experiments claim to know such an answer but uncritical naturalism assumes a priori that there is only a physical explanation for the experience.
Lane writes: "An openness to doubt and examination should supersede the commitment to faith in doctrine. Openness to doubt is one of the prime characteristics of integrity (and openness to doubt and examination are characteristic of the scientific outlook). In the fulfillment of fundamental value, the primary commitment of religion should be to integrity; commitment to doctrine should be secondary."
Is he suggesting that openness to doubt and examination are not ever characteristic of a religious outlook and that all religions require doctrinal faith which essentially excludes the possibility of doubt? What about Tillich's assertion that faith and doubt form one polar reality, that faith is not the absence of doubt but rather the state of ultimate concern? What about the assertion by the prominent Catholic theologian, Avery Dulles: "The Christian that thinks that his faith is sufficiently protected by his philosophy or theology or by any created institution - such a one is really insecure in his faith. Faith does not possess what it affirms. It is ceaselessly poised over the abyss of doubt."
The straw man fallacy may be the most common and egregious atheistic fallacy of them all, wherein the detractors of God attack a God-concept which is different from the God-concept of Christianity in its very essence. St. Thomas Aquinas would not recognize the Dawkinsian Imago Dei and would truly wonder: "Whose idolatrous godde is this that Dawkins seems to be continuously and iconoclastically driving out of the temple where scientism worships?"
When Dawkins and others advance that class of arguments which suggest that, on one hand, faith is unevidenced belief, or on the other hand, that it does not include an intrinsic element of doubt, they are not engaging the authentic claims of Christian theology.
Lane's mischaracterization of faith above is a straw man, too. There is no such thing as faith without doubt except in perverted forms of dogmatism and fideism. Here, he is also engaging the fallacy of misuse by suggesting that the abuse of faith is an argument against the use of faith, the abuse of a nonimaginative God-concept is an argument for an imaginative God-concept. Dawkins explicitly commits this fallacy when he says: "faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness... powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings."
The gods and dogmatisms under attack by Dawkins et al are directed against a 'straw' version of Christianity, one which the orthodox would not wish to defend.
He further refuses to acknowledge that Christianity proclaims, in principle, that God lies outside of space-time-matter-energy, but then bases most of his cosmological arguments against God on scientific tests and applications of probability theory. Others advance related arguments based on rules of evidence using legal metaphors such as burden of proof, unusual claims, preponderance of the evidence. Still others invoke Occam's Razor and the law of parsimony to a metaphysical problem of ontology that Christians recognize as insoluble in principle.
What is most curious, however, is that Dawkins et al attempt to solve this metaphysical problem of ontology at all inasmuch as a materialist monist reductionist could be considered to need no ontology, at least not a "physical" one which is, in a word, "meta".
Since the issue of "why there is something rather than nothing" is insoluble, in principle, it makes little sense to then set about proving or disproving ontological hypotheses.
This brings us to the next atheistic fallacy, the untestable hypothesis. Hypotheses are tested by means of its predictions. Neither the existence of God nor the competing worldview "nothing, as a system, is unstable and has a tendency to decay into something" can be tested by cosmology. The God hypothesis and the no-God hypothesis carry no weight as explanations and there is no way to test these hypotheses. Their main premises are certainly not self-evident. Perhaps the major appeal of the God-hypothesis is that, in principle, in theory, it may be directly verified eschatologically. This eschatological dimension gives it the verifiability dimension that makes the hypothesis testable, hence vaild, therefore rational. It is the lack of any testability, in principle, which renders the nontheistic hypothesis unverifiable both pre- and post-eschatologically, hence invalid, therefore irrational, which brings up the next fallacy, petitio principii.
Begging the question, petitio principii, is a fallacy wherein the truth of the conclusion is assumed by the premises. In considering what Hans Kung calls the paradoxical fundamental trust in uncertain reality, as held by those who reject the God-hypothesis, there is an implicit form of question begging. By not adverting to a ground of reality and a ground of reason, one does not thereby evade the question of groundedness. Atheism can not suggest why it trusts uncertain reality without engaging the additional fallacy of circular definition, trusting being itself while giving no satisfactory accounting for either its trust or for being, its definitions always self-referentially making an appeal to themselves.
Dawkins uses a class of arguments that include meme theory, a metaphor of religion as a 'mental virus' and the supposed readiness of the young to believe anything they are told. Whether one uses sociobiology or biotheology to explain how ideas and concepts originate and are transmitted, using explanations from evolution, brain chemistry and culture, whether sociologically or psychologically, they are simply explaining the spread of concepts and ideologies. Such explanations have nothing to say about the truth or falsity of the beliefs themselves. They don't make the God-concepts under consideration true or false even as they are examining the processes by which they are formulated and modified.
When Dawkins writes of the God of Design, he commits an ambiguity fallacy of equivocation, in essence using the same word, explanation, with two different meanings: "The only thing he [Paley] got wrong - admittedly quite a big thing - was the explanation itself. He gave the traditional religious answer to the riddle, but he articulated it more clearly and convincingly than anybody had before. The true explanation is utterly different, and it had to wait for one of the most revolutionary thinkers of all time, Charles Darwin." In theology, our explanations for cosmogenesis lie outside of space-time, as even St. Augustine knew. It is not so much that Paley got anything wrong per se but the fact that his "proof" has a straw man character and that contemporary theology would not be providing explanations in the same realm and of the same order as evolution. It is explicitly acknowledged in Christian theology that the classic proofs of God, those being the moral, teleological, ontological and cosmological arguments of Anselm, Aquinas, even C.S. Lewis and others, are not logically coercive. Those elements do become integral in a more comprehensive belief-system which is being judged for internal consistency, logical coherency and external congruence. The Coulson God-of-the-Gaps argument has no currency in dismissing the supernatural and was, in fact, coined by a Christian! We already know its lessons. The materialists are in more danger of dismissing all anomalous experience as being a priori reducible to matter and energetic causation than Catholics are in danger of too readily claiming a miracle at Lourdes (which, when they do, are merely attesting that it has no scientific explanation).
Moving on, there is the fallacy of composition where, because the parts of a whole have a certain property, it is argued that the whole has that property. In every religion there is creed, code and cult, hence doctrine, law and ritual --- and members who may be dogmatic, legalistic and ritualistic. How often this category error is invoked in the very process of building straw men and painting all believers with the same brush.
We have set forth some Category Errors, Syllogistic Errors, Causal Fallacies, Missing the Point Fallacies, Fallacies of Distraction, of Appeals to Motives in Place of Support, of Changing the Subject, of Ambiguity, of Explanation, and of Definition as found in various arguments in support of nontheistic hypotheses. None of this is to suggest that those fallacies are some type of support for a theistic hypothesis --that would be a fallacy all its own. The other most common fallacies are the Inductive Fallacies, but we are all familiar with what takes place in the fury of debates: hasty generalizations are made where the sample is too small to support an inductive generalization about a population; unrepresentative samples are cited: the sample is unrepresentative of the sample as a whole; false analogies are made: the two objects or events being compared are relevantly dissimilar; and the fallacy of exclusion is maybe most common: evidence which would change the outcome of an inductive argument is excluded from consideration
The work-product above includes a great deal of unannotated and liberal paraphrasing from the materials listed below:
Stephen Downes, University of Alberta, The Logical Fallacies Index <http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm> , who wrote: permission is granted to use, abuse and reproduce this document in any way you wish provided (a) you don't claim copyright over it, (b) you don't charge anyone for using it, and (c) you indicate its original authorship.
Michael Poole:
A Critique of Aspects of the Philosophy and Theology of Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins: Reply to Michael Poole
Michael Poole: Response to Richard Dawkins' Reply
all found in articles in: _Science and Christian Belief_
<http://www.cis.org.uk/scb/scb_articles.htm%20>
Addendum: the Twenty-four Points
summarizing the book "God Unmasked" by Ernie Lane (C) July 2001
<http://human.st/bernt_rostrom/24points.htm%20>

Re: Dionysian Triad Fractals and Epistemological Holism in an Integrative Methodology for Science and Theology - a constructive postmodern approach using a pre-modern mystagogy

What is knowable and would it make any difference if I knew it? I can't help but ask that from time to time as I get caught up in the wondering. Knowledge, as measured by the results of what we have today if one just looks around, is the seemingly unstoppable advance of science towards ever-greater gadgets. Even as technology seemingly improves our physical comfort one can see in places that our spiritual comfort correspondingly suffers. But a Luddite I am not. Perhaps we�re paying a price in the short term as we near discovering some larger truth that leads to proving God himself.

But the amazing thing is that Buddha or Jesus (setting aside the divine nature of one for sake of argument) did not have access to our knowledge of today and yet they came up with some amazing truths that still stand the test of time. Newton may be overthrown but not these sages. If anything, Quantum physics can be interpreted (less by New-Agers) to verify some of their ideas. We are all one, for example.

Several of your ideas and those of others, the fugue for example, and the mental pole, are intriguing, as well as the idea that what truly exists has split off into different �forces� or realms: one realm can be measure by science, another perhaps by religion, etc. And intuitively some of this seems true to me. Like any good scientist one must prove it, but one also starts with an idea or premise that mirrors beauty or simplicity. Truths may be first glimpsed in this way, much like (and how clumsy that I don�t remember his name) the philosopher did when he supposed the atom.

I think ultimately these questions are interesting. But faith, long the realm of religion and sometimes used to extinguish questions and the pursuit of knowledge in the first place, is a good end in itself. I don�t necessarily mean the faith that this or that exists or that this or that will eventually be proven or disproved. It�s that human experience, human feelings and consciousness have no inherent need of knowing all the answers to the big questions in order to exist (to exist WELL is another question I suppose). They�re interesting by-products of awareness, but there�s a certain completeness of the entire story by just being alive. For some, questions are an insatiable itch that needs to be scratched, while for others there is contentment in just living the now (not that they are mutually exclusive or that one is preferable over the other). The faith is in the completeness of the moment and the realization that the universe moves ever onward as it will and is not inhibited by our unanswered questions.

JB, I've read some of these reflections from you before in different places, although some seem new and updated. Lots of good material here, which hardly deserves to be placed in the jokes forum (guess I'll eventually do something about that ).

I know you're reflecting in places on matters that go beyond the scope of what I'm about to reference, but how about taking a look at Appendix Four and seeing how that sits with some of what you've been proposing. No need to comment on points you're making outside of this schema, but how do you see the schema itself holding up--especially considering that an evolutionary development need not be excluded.

Phil

Phil wrote: "I know you're reflecting in places on matters that go beyond the scope of what I'm about to reference, but how about taking a look at Appendix Four and seeing how that sits with some of what you've been proposing. No need to comment on points you're making outside of this schema, but how do you see the schema itself holding up--especially considering that an evolutionary development need not be excluded."

Of course, I've seen this before and had some good meditations on it and it no doubt influenced some of the very crystallizations I've re-presented. The two characteristics that I most resonate with, and which are most important to my own vision of Reality are: 1) God is well-represented as both immanent and transcendent with the egg well-depicting the many differentiations of immanent being. I would think that pantheists and nontheists could focus on the egg, itself, and have no dissonance with your representations. I look at it panentheistically and am thus satisfied also. 2) By using an egg metaphor, you are not locked into a metaphor that is merely hierarchical vis a vis the "great chain of being" but one which might also accomodate various levels of interpenetrating fields (a la Jack Haught) with the interpenetrations being somewhat problematical to depict two-dimensionally.

I'll stop before I take my assumptions too far, but are we still on the same sheet of music?

pax tibi,
jb

Brad wrote: "I think ultimately these questions are interesting. But faith, long the realm of religion and sometimes used to extinguish questions and the pursuit of knowledge in the first place, is a good end in itself ." (jb's emphasis)

I REALLY appreciate THAT notion. If there is anything I attempt to get across, at times, it is that the "virtues" of faith, hope and love are intrinsically rewarding. My poetry better conveys this than my tedious prose but I think I usually refer to this as just because-ish-ness. This is also reflected in my comments that the journey IS my destination and the quest IS my grail. I pursue truth, just because, beauty, just because, goodness, just because ... and it is the radically unconditional nature of this pursuit which elevates it to, in the case of truth, faith; in the case of beauty, hope; in the case of goodness, love; the theological virtues. I hope I haven't taken your "end in itself" statement too far away by my extrapolations, but I got kind of excited by our possible connectivity (especially once considering how poorly I connect with my prose -- which I posted here, ultimately, for Phil to translate and ship to the masses).

Brad continued: "I don�t necessarily mean the faith that this or that exists or that this or that will eventually be proven or disproved. It�s that human experience, human feelings and consciousness have no inherent need of knowing all the answers to the big questions in order to exist (to exist WELL is another question I suppose). They�re interesting by-products of awareness, but there�s a certain completeness of the entire story by just being alive ." [jb's emphasis]

This reminds me of the Jewish prayer of Dayenu: Lord, You did this ... and that would have been enough ... but then You did this ... and that would have been enough ... but then You did this ... and that would have been enough ... ad infinitum and I affirm that there�s a certain completeness of the entire story by just being alive.

Merci, mon ami
jb

Phil, insofar as how I see your "Appendix Four" schema holding up, and more relevant to what the K-Pax & Buddhism and other related threads at Shalomplace (e.g. Apophatic, Kataphatic, Schmataphatic - gosh, I feel so trivialized now) have been about, recently, might be the question: How does that schema hold up in light of Thomism in dialogue with Eastern traditions ?

And I can think of no better way to introduce such a consideration than by using Arraj's Mysticism, Metaphysics and Maritain.

In that book, available online (to order or to read), Jim diagramatically distinguishes between metaphysical contemplation , supernatural mystical contemplation and mysticism of the self. (I am setting all of this forth, not for Phil's edification - he generously mailed me this book, years ago - but for thread continuity). Scroll down on those pages to the jpeg files near the bottom (and you may even be tempted to read some of the discourse).

Phil, would you care to comment on your schema with emphasis on Arraj's three diagrams. I did not hyperlink directly to these diagrams for two reasons, first, I'd ask Jim & Tyra first, second, some explanatory cutline is needed to explicate the diagrams anyway. If there is a better way to spur this discussion on by editing all of this and hyperlinking, Phil, feel free to edit.

Brad and others, what you witness here are Phil and my obsessions to diagram our grand unified theories. These compulsions don't last forever, but come and go each year with varying durations and intensities -- as our "so much straw" burns up on re-entry to the Kansas barnyard. So, anyone see: Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? -- that is the true master paradigm for existence!

Phil, you can relocate this thread wherever you'd like and re-title it: Metaphysics and Oh Brother Where Art Thou? - Double Feature

pax tibi,
jb
Aliens Abducted Me, Laser-Photographed My Internal Organs, Dropped Me Off in a Crop Circle, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

To contextualize my ongoing science and religion and interreligious dialogues, I truly believe that most folks are going about living their existential orientations quite well and in a manner that corresponds to what I might consider theological imperatives. That most don't concern themselves with articulation and systematization of these orientations may truly be of no consquence in living the good life, however examined or unexamined. These fundamental orientations and fundamental options which are being lived out are WAY more than a bunch of technical literature and diagrams, are truly more the moon and less the finger pointing thereto. There is a lot of unconscious competence when it comes to living a good life. There's a lot of implicit and unspoken faith. And, wherever I've been, I've found a lot of love.

So why do I bother? Well, it's fun. Also, I feel led to build bridges and seek out common ground. I want to help folks articulate their true positions and to follow the logical and practical consequences of those positions. I want to help Buddhists be better Buddhists, atheists better atheists, Catholics better Catholics. For example, Dawkins is such a poor atheist and the world would experience so much more compassion if he thought more and thought better about his militance

That's a line of mine that will remain drawn in the sand until a seachange erases the insidious effects that professors like Dawkns have on young minds in early formation.

pax tibi,
jb

Re. "The Cosmic Egg:

The two characteristics that I most resonate with, and which are most important to my own vision of Reality are: 1) God is well-represented as both immanent and transcendent with the egg well-depicting the many differentiations of immanent being. I would think that pantheists and nontheists could focus on the egg, itself, and have no dissonance with your representations. I look at it panentheistically and am thus satisfied also.

Right! It was easy enough to do--just write God outside the Egg! Kind of satisfying to so thoroughly demolish pantheism with that one small move.

2) By using an egg metaphor, you are not locked into a metaphor that is merely hierarchical vis a vis the "great chain of being" but one which might also accomodate various levels of interpenetrating fields (a la Jack Haught) with the interpenetrations being somewhat problematical to depict two-dimensionally.

The egg symbol was really created because I could not draw a circle around the info on a regular sheet of paper with my drawing tool, and so I called it an oval, then an egg. That worksed out better, too. Only, I wish I'd have drawn the human level as an oval instead of a triangle; that would represent the holographic perspective better--the human as a microcosm of the macrocosm! But I had in mind doing something with body, mind, spirit on the sides of the triangle and then couldn't figure out what how to show this. When I deleted the triangle, everything inside it disappeared as well, and, worn out from the project, I went to Edit/Undo and let it ride.

Now you know how some of these metaphysical meditations take expression--has as much to do with the limitations of graphic editing software as anything else.

I'll stop before I take my assumptions too far, but are we still on the same sheet of music?

Yes indeed!

Re: On the Parsimony & Fecundity of God & Sagan Hypotheses

First off let me note that some of your treatises are so learned, so rich with thoughtful complexity that any could be an elaborately coded version of �The Cat in the Hat� for all I know. Still, I would comment on them, with appropriate sub-hypotheses of my own, and be none the wiser. Take that as a compliment.

It seems to me that both the God and the Sagan hypothesis attempt to predict, explain, give insight and make intelligible why there is something rather than nothing.

What position would we be in if there was nothing and we had to wonder why this is so and not �something�? Perhaps the real truth is that the two are not opposites.

How does one choose between the God versus Sagan core hypotheses?
Does one simply attempt to explain the unknown only in terms of the known, following William of Ockham? Does one look for the simplest competing theory?
In the application of Occam's Razor, does the tie go to Sagan?

As far as competing theories, here's my rub. While, superficially, the simplest competing theory may appear to be the Sagan Hypothesis, what if we more heavily nuance Occam's Razor? What if we look, not for the simplest competing theory but, for the simplest competing theory that can get the job done?

Considering that it sure seems that we, as conscious beings, play a part in creating reality by collapsing probability waves (or that reality may be dependent on consciousness), it makes me wonder if consciousness was needed in order to �make something happen� at time zero. I find nothing inherently unstable about nothing (intuitively, of course � as messy a logic as there can be) particularly since �unstable� is but a human concept with no real meaning in reality. An atom of plutonium is no more �unstable� than a fluorescent light: they both simply shine when the conditions are right to do so (even if those "conditions" are random). Therefore I give the nod to God if given only these two choices.

I got a letter of recommedation, years ago, in which my superior partly characterized my performance during a period wherein we had gone through three merger/acquistions in 65 days as: without complaining and without the promise of future reward. I hope that, on my career path, the intrinsic rewards of a job well done were motivators along with remuneration and advancement.

The same can be true of a life well lived. There are old Jewish Grandpas who would pray the prayer of Dayenu, even with no belief in an afterlife (and if so, not one as conceived by most Christians) and there are nontheistic Buddhists and nonmilitant atheists (who care deeply for the human condition), to whom we impute implicit faith and from whom we can learn more about the intrinsic rewards of radically unconditional comitments to truth, beauty and goodness. And it is quite beautiful to see these lives well-lived, without complaint and without the promise of future reward. Such a beauty as this is quietly and poignantly sad, too, and the suffering of such a sadness is not one I've transcended. Paradoxically, neither have I transcended such beauty.

namaste, love
jb

...but I think I usually refer to this as just because-ish-ness. This is also reflected in my comments that the journey IS my destination and the quest IS my grail. I pursue truth, just because, beauty, just because, goodness, just because ... and it is the radically unconditional nature of this pursuit which elevates it to, in the case of truth, faith; in the case of beauty, hope; in the case of goodness, love; the theological virtues.

You've pretty much answered my unstated questions in a subsequent post. My quest is a bit more pragmatic at the momemt, as the ever-watchful Phil yanked out of me. (Don't tell him, but he's my unpaid spiritual director, whether he knows it or not.) Just because-ish-ness? I love it! Sounds like it's from the Wizard of Oz: because, because, because, because - because of the wonderful things he does...

I hope I haven't taken your "end in itself" statement too far away by my extrapolations

Just projecting, JB. I�ve been caught up (still am somewhat) in those times when I bother myself with too many questions and devote too much energy to finding the answers and not always from a pleasurable �just because-ish-ness� motivation. It�s like the internet. I get on just to check the score of the Mariner game but before I do I think �what the heck, let�s check out National Review Online first� and then another hyperlink and then another until I suck the life out of my time and forget the initial pursuit (not that life need be, or ever can be, simply going from point A to point B). In this case the pursuit of the original questions may be obscured and forgotten and the pursuit of knowledge becomes sort of an end in itself and as a means to avoid the REAL questions. Now where the heck was I?

You've pretty much answered my unstated questions in a subsequent post.

My sincerest apologies as it is always only my intent to help supply you with the correct questions

Sounds like it's from the Wizard of Oz

Come closer ... closer ... you approach Homer's Oddysey and ... yea ... verily, verily ... also ... Oh Brother Where Art Thou and the siren song of johnboysian hack metaphysica

jb

don't pay any attention to the man behind the bulletin board but bring me back the broomstick of the wicca witch of the Northwest

Re: Some Theisms Are Demonstrably Better Science Than Some Atheisms

ontology, as a branch of metaphysics...joins cosmology and quantum mechanics, as branches of physics, as they, too, are thwarted at their very foundations

I never thought of it like that before. Perhaps there's some clue there.

Now, however relevant, intelligible and meaningful its predictions, explanations, interpretations and insights may be, in order to be scientific, an hypothesis must be testable, open to confirmation, subject to verifiability and falsifiability.
The eschatological theistic hypothesis meets these criteria, open as it is to direct confirmation, eschatologically, and further, can be tested indirectly by the verification and falsification of its assertions based on its implications for understanding the whole of finite reality.

Anyone want to volunteer to "directly confirm" this? Sounds like an experiment one can do but once - or needs to (an obscure Mark Twain reference for ya there, JB. Have I got the "dumming down" nob cranked a bit to low?)

The nontheistic hypothesis, that nothing, as a system, is unstable and has a tendency to decay into something...remains untestable

I still don't buy the instability of nothingness, and it's not just the usual discomfort with quantum weirdness. I do see a resemblance of this theory to the "quantum foam" (I think that's what they call it) of empty space where energy bubbles out of "nothing" and then disappears. I forget how they balance the energy books to account for this. But it's doing this in a known space-time region. How do we know these two "nothings" are the same, the one from which quantum bubbles spring forth and the one from which the universe springs? Then add to that the fact that this quantum foam does its thing without violating the laws of quantum physics. At time zero for the universe quantum physics doesn't work. How can one be compared to the other? Besides, the Sagan hypothesis just makes too much sense in terms of quantum physics to make sense.

and much more to do with putting forth some putative psychosocial hypotheses to explain the tenacity of most people's core commitments to the theistic and nontheistic hypotheses.

Political correctness in science? Surely you're joking, Mr. JB.

Furthermore, might there be a neurocognitive substrate for what I often call a "rush to closure" by fideism and scientism and other isms, in between? that would, perhaps, be a maladaptive artifact of the gestalt process? as hunches and inspirations and epistemologies lead to worldviews, resisting both modification or nonclosure? especially in a system which is internally coherent, externally congruent and logically consistent? notwithstanding the existence of other such systems with equal epistemic and ontologic footings?

It's always seemed strange to me that theories that seemed simple or beautiful are usually the ones that mirror scientific reality. Why should this be so? Perhaps it works but only up to a point.

re: Anyone want to volunteer to "directly confirm" this?

No volunteers needed. As a former member of our local draft board, the term that comes to mind is conscription.

BTW, those have been some beautiful musings you've gifted us with lately. So, anyway, how tenacious are your hypotheses today?

re: It's always seemed strange to me that theories that seemed simple or beautiful are usually the ones that mirror scientific reality. Why should this be so?

I could tell you but then I'd have to conscript you

K-pax tibi,
jb

This oughta fix things. The text wasn't disappearing, but rather was moving to the right. [a Bradwellian phenom?] Dialogues With Atheists

pax,
jb

JB, how come YOU get to go on vacation and I�m left with all this homework? Anyway, I do thank you for the reading material.

One can�t help but get the feeling that one of two things is true: either all the answers are right there in front of us, knowable by science, and waiting only for a couple Einsteinian leaps of reason, or we have to throw away our instinctive ideas of cause and effect (and even of time and space) and probe the unknown with tools that may seem quite �unscientific.�

If one thing causes another which causes another which causes another, one can see that there is a first cause implied in all this. A first cause would seem to suggest non-causality which would then mean the whole system really isn�t cause and effect to begin with. Without cause and effect how do we have change or motion? If the world is as quantum physics says it is and everything is non-causal and indeterminate then one thing CAN NOT affect another thus we�d have no change, no evolving universe. Thus I like some of Bohm�s (and others) ideas of formative cause.

I�ve heard explanations that get around the first cause, that get around the idea of what happened before the Big Bang by saying that time did not exist so there is no �before� to even talk about. Others create interesting scenarios by postulating that time is an illusion. But what if we were to turn this around and say the time and consciousness are the only things that exist and that space, matter and energy are all illusions?

Clearly matter and energy are manifestations of the same thing since you can turn one easily into the other. And non-locality seems to bring space itself into question. If we consider what we observe as matter and energy to actually be �particles� of warped time (not entirely different from matter curving space-time) then we never need deal with causality/non-causality � they don�t exist. Time need not cause anything because it doesn�t affect anything; it only reveals what is already there. Imagine time like a filter, keeping in mind the �infinite worlds� view of quantum physics. All states of a �particle� exist. Indeed, all states of EVERYTHING exist. There is no non-existence and never has been. Well, these little �time bubbles�, which we mistakenly call matter and energy, are like little lenses that selectively show us what already exists, has always existed. Time normally would be completely smooth and thus reveal nothing, but our consciousness �warps� time and reveals our reality. And the reason we see a relatively coherent universe (and not some wild LSD image) is because the formative cause is God�s structured mind (we are all sub-consciousnesses). And since we truly only have the �now� we may even be able to take time itself out of the equation.

Time to take my brain out for a walk.

Hey Phil, borrowing some cyberstorage space. The rent check is in the mail. My magnum opus is thus coming together. pax, jb

A Brief History of Human Time

To this non-liberal arts major, best I can tell, human history has been divided into three major epochs: The Era of Epistemological Hubris, The Era of Epistemological Humility and The Era of Epistemological Holism.

The Era of Epistemological Hubris might best be characterized by what I would call the a priori ontological , marked by both Premodernism and Modernism . Most premodernisms, including fideism and superstitions, and modernisms, including rationalism and scientism and suggesting the death of God , are grounded in a priori ontological presuppositions , the former supernaturalistic and the latter naturalistic, neither demonstrable , each merely the others� obverse, both engaging in unwarranted epistemological hubris. [For present purposes, suffice it to say, that properly nuanced versions of modernist supernatural faith aren't being treated in this paragraph.]

Both modernisms and postmodernisms have called the ontological riddle ( Why is there something rather than nothing? ) a pseudo-riddle deriving from inherent system constraints, due to inaccessible ground, due to unachievable meta-systems, due to our ability only to model but not explain system rules, etc. That�s a fine argument for pre-eschatological ontological undecidability and is perhaps an argument for agnosticism, but it is certainly not, in principle, an argument for naturalism (which likes to evade the issue altogether).

The Era of Epistemological Humility is best characterized by this ontological undecidability, which we discussed above and is marked by postmodernism, including relativism and deconstructionism and suggesting the death of metaphysics , also by antifoundationalism, neopragmatism, historicism, poststructuralism, critical linguistic theory and, finally, the ultramodernism or hypermodernism we recognize as the radical deconstructionism called nihilism , suggesting the death of philosophy .

Postmodernism ushered in an era of epistemological humility , precisely derived from this position of ontological undecidability . However, carried through to their logical extremes, deconstructionisms and relativisms are indefensible and self-contradictory. Hence, not even a formal agnosticism is logically consistent or internally coherent, especially once queried about eschatological verifiability. However much in vogue such realities as indeterminacy, the uncertainty principle and such, it is an untenable position to maintain that we positively cannot ever know, in principle, what may one day be revealed, post-eschatologically, in a hypothetical hierarchical universe (which is consonant with our experience of chaos and complexity theory, emergence dynamics and such, not to mention any alleged pre-eschatological revelations from a realm which may transcend our own). While credibly making the assertion that we cannot know now, it can neither authoritatively nor conclusively make the assertion that we can never know. How would it know, when, in fact, it claims we couldn't!

The Era of Epistemological Holism (think holons and fractals) might best be characterized as the hypothetical ontological and is marked by a constructive postmodernism, including transmodernism and reconstructionism such as mystical postmodernism (perennialism, New Age thought & pantheism) and process constructive postmodernism (panentheism, for instance).

The next epoch to be ushered in, I think, will be eschatological postmodernism , which will take us full circle, into our experience of our second naivete , back to Aristotle & Aquinas , marked by our understanding of the present as interruptive eschatological time before the living God, characterized by our use of the analogical imagination , articulated also in ongoing projects of natural philosophy and natural theology , experienced as both the apophatic and kataphatic , drawing on the resources of tradition , relying still on incarnational & sacramental forms, utilizing pluralistic approaches and critical realism in the ongoing reformulations of our meta-frameworks & metanarratives.

Epistemological humility, therefore, need not lead to epistemic despair, in what would amount to an incoherent and inconsistent condition, anyhow, but rather can find:
a) hope in constructive and reconstructive postmodernisms,
b) articulation in the hypothesis of a God (Hans Kung), and
c) coherence in being, at least, an open-minded skeptic (following, perhaps, the Apostle Thomas?) or a believer in an ultimate ground (following, perhaps, Thomas Aquinas?). Both positions qualify as faith. Have faith, therefore, even if it is as tiny as a mustard seed. It is a most reasonable position (to me, the most!).

Such faith and hope, of deep existential import, are then inescapably realized in love and implicitly realized in solidarity and compassion , in whomever they make their home (and a home of whatever philosophical persuasion, including those I have rejected above for their appearance of incoherency to me ).

What I�ve just described as antidote for the suggested deaths of God, metaphysics and philosophy is nothing more than that old time religion, its name derived from the Greek root kata holon, Catholicism.

Footnotes

(1) The dialectical imagination is implicitly rejected because it cannot accomplish a natural theology.
(2) A pantheistic view is similarly rejected because it cannot attain to the radical love that is realized in the unitive experience of radical otherness.
(3) Essay Outline:

I. The Era of Epistemological Hubris: the a priori ontological
a.Premodernism: fideism & the ontological riddle
b.Modernism: rationalism & the ontological pseudo-riddle
II.The Era of Epistemological Humility: ontological undecidability
a.Postmodernism: relativism- deconstructionism & the death of metaphysics
i.Antifoundationalism � neopragmatism (fallibilistic, nonreductive, nonscientistic, antiessentialist, pragmatic, incremental, flexible, critical, holistic) & historicism
ii. Poststructuralism � linguistic theory
b. Nihilism: radical deconstructionism & the death of philosophy � ultramodernism & hypermodernism
III.The Era of Epistemological Holism: the hypothetical ontological
a.Constructive Post-modernism: transmodernism & reconstructionism
i. Mystical Postmodernism: perennialism, New Age thought & pantheism
ii. Process Constructive Postmodernism: panentheism
b. Eschatological Postmodernism � back to Aristotle & Aquinas
1. present as interruptive eschatological time before the living God
2. the analogical imagination
3. natural philosophy & natural theology
4. the apophatic and kataphatic
5. resources of tradition
6. incarnational & sacramental forms
7. pluralistic approaches
8. critical realism
9. meta-frameworks & metanarratives
10. that old time religion � good old, ordinary Catholicism

Nice job, JB.

I followed along quite well up to "the Era of Epistemological Holism," which you kind of raced through. I'm not sure what you consider its defining characteristics, not how it leads to eschatological postmodernism. I actually do see this transition happening, but am not sure how or why one should lead to the other. It seems to me that some of the assumptions implicit in Christian faith are informing some of this interpretation, which would be a postmodern transgression, I think.

Looks like the the magnus opus is indeed coming along. You plan to connect this somehow with your insights on Enneagram, MBTI, and neuorlinguistics?

re: I followed along quite well up to "the Era of Epistemological Holism," which you kind of raced through.

Oh, I am so glad you did review it and found it followable, in part. My purpose, presently, is to get this down in the philoso-babble shorthand and then maybe to translate it in a more popularized and more digestable style. I did race through that part, mostly because I have so exhaustively described it elsewhere - for instance, in Dionysian Triad Fractals and Epistemological Holism in an Integrative Methodology for Science and Theology - a constructive postmodern approach using a pre-modern mystagogy and The Insidious Isms (well, except for pragmatism).

What I was doing, I suppose, was writing the preamble to those other parts, setting forth more concisely why I reject those other positions out of hand.

Re: I'm not sure what you consider its defining characteristics, not how it leads to eschatological postmodernism. I actually do see this transition happening, but am not sure how or why one should lead to the other. It seems to me that some of the assumptions implicit in Christian faith are informing some of this interpretation, which would be a postmodern transgression, I think.

The basic postmodern ingredients, once you take into account the whole of what I have presented elsewhere, also, are 1) a nonfoundationalism 2) an essential pragmatism 3) a more pluralistic epistemology 4) process elements 5) the framing up of a supernatural ontology, and even of God, as hypotheses. It tends toward an approach to is that is fallibilistic and an approach to ought that is probabilistic, while not denying, in the final analysis, that there may really be some foundational grounding for both, only acknowldeging that access to same is very problematic. [I really think some of this works quite well in a modernistic paradigm, too, which is why I made an exception re: nuancing. Maybe Haught's __Cosmic Adventure__ and hierarchical approach would be an example?]

But I think you are right, in one sense, that maybe any "constructive" modifier to the postmodern agenda might be a de facto transgression. Also, I think you are correct in another sense, and this is precisely what my intuition tells me --- Catholicism is big enough and universal enough that even its modernistic elements can contain the postmodern aspects. I find this difficult to articulate but I know you can sense what I am driving at. I think, for instance, that Arraj's Mystery of Matter and consideration of Bohm, Sheldrake, et al in the light of a Thomistic Metaphysics is one articulation of how this transition is happening. Some panentheistic articulations are another. Also, see this discussion of Thomism and Popper (re: fallibilism & critical rationalism) at the Maritain Center at Notre Dame.

I think the reason Catholicism can transist to a postmodern approach almost seamlessly (and even somewhat beneath the radar) is because of its explicit both/and thrust, especially in fides et ratio and most especially in the way it does (can do) natural theology (hence science and faith advance, in partnership, hand in hand).

My way of describing my own thrust is that, even if I begin with an ontological undecidability and a pluralistic epistemology, then move to an essential pragmatism in search of "system modeling power" [worldview] as measured by logical consistency, internal coherence, external congruence,------ I then find myself irresistably drawn to my native Catholicism, in essence, having "bootstrapped" my way back in via a natural philosophy (critical realism) and natural theology. I take the praeambula fidei of natural theology and what can be known through reason and open myself to the possibility of mysteria fidei. Once open to radical grace, I see the 2 + 2 = 5ishness of existence, through the eyes of faith and let my intuition of radical giftedness catapult me to a radical gratitude, which begs of a Personal Creator. Somewhere along the way, I became aware of grace supplementing natural reason, and it is that juncture which is difficult to localize, because, retrospectively, it ALL then seems like Grace. There is a luminous and numinous quality to the actual experience of faith that makes its preambles seem, in a word, trivial. It is a leap that can be leveraged by Pascal's Wager, too. Nothing wrong with that. I don't know if I said this coherently, but I threw enough mud on the wall that you could probably sort through it and more cogently and concisely set forth my notions. Then, I have the lingering issue of having been "touched".

Well, I'm not really doing this for third parties but only for my own satisfaction and being the temperament type that is thus motivated. I like being able to defend why I believe what I do, not that anyone ever really asked. I don't think it is necessary, though -- unconscious competence is okay, too. We'll all know more one day ---Like Fr. Moag said, for folks like the OLOWisdom unHoly trinity, it'll be quite the intellectually stimulating experience (he said that circa 73, speaking of personal resurrection, if you recall). IOW, I'm just processing, although I'd like to be able to dialogue more credibly and defend the faith more effectively to the next generation which is positively immersed in nihilism (see MTV2, for instance). I did take the enneagram project another step re: preference order directionality, as explained by heavy neuronal connectivity between the limbic and right brain, but haven't heard back from my correspondents.

This was a nice respite. As you already know, but I'll inform my UBB Board compadres, my father-in-law passed away this morning --- that journey has transitioned and I'll be on a new one, too.

This was fun. Great observations. Quite on the mark. I'd like your additional feedback and perspective (and your own apologetic if it differs much). And truly, if the postmodern label doesn't fit, that's not a prerequisite -- only consonance, congruence, coherence, consistency, consilience, etc are

pax,
jb

JB,
I'm sorry to hear about your father-in-law. God bless and be with you and your family.
Terri

As Terri noted, condolences on the loss of your father in law. Let all who read this offer a prayer that his soul may rest in God's peace.

My way of describing my own thrust is that, even if I begin with an ontological undecidability and a pluralistic epistemology, then move to an essential pragmatism in search of "system modeling power" [worldview] as measured by logical consistency, internal coherence, external congruence,------ I then find myself irresistably drawn to my native Catholicism, in essence, having "bootstrapped" my way back in via a natural philosophy (critical realism) and natural theology. I take the praeambula fidei of natural theology and what can be known through reason and open myself to the possibility of mysteria fidei. Once open to radical grace, I see the 2 + 2 = 5ishness of existence, through the eyes of faith and let my intuition of radical giftedness catapult me to a radical gratitude, which begs of a Personal Creator.

Yours has been a different (but complementary) journey than mine, in so many ways, even after those common, humble beginnings with Fr. Moag. I've not had the same intellectual "daemons" to contend with that you have, although I have surely had others. But what shines forth is that in your ongoing reflection on these issues, you have come to see how, in the end, faith is not only a credible stance, but the one most essential for making sense of human life. To do so in the face of the kind of philosophical confusion that seems to exist nowadays--a confusion you have faced squarely and "stared down"--is most reassuring, and speaks much of the grace that has moved you to both encounter the daemons and "put them in their place."

Now what are you going to do with this? I would certainly encourage publication, and am pleased that we are able to assist somewhat through dialogue and feedback on this forum. But as you've no doubt recognized, none of us are as familiar with the material nor the issues as you are. And yet I am convinced that your journey has much relevance to a far wider group than the philsophical elite of this world. Would there be a way to present the issues to the "educated Christian"--sort of what the questions and issue are, why this is important, how Christian faith can speak to the issues? I would hope so, and I think there are publishers who would be interested. Just a thought that I hope you will run with.

And tell us, please, what you meant by the new journey you alluded to in one of your closing paragraphs.

Phil

Would there be a way to present the issues to the "educated Christian"--sort of what the questions and issue are, why this is important, how Christian faith can speak to the issues?

Yes. Although I am not totally familiar with their writings, I'm pretty sure this has been done quite well by G.K. Chesterton, CS Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, Peter Kreeft and others. Just today, for instance, I came across this neat website by a fellow named Dave Armstrong : General Christian Apologetics,Worldview, and Philosophy . Check out his main index. Such fine authors as these best meet the needs of the masses, I believe. It has been my experience that most people are not really interested in the more esoteric and nuanced metaphysical discussions and that those who are read and publish in academic journals. Then, there are those like me who are caught in between the two camps --the academic and the popular - maybe there's a niche? I dunno.

And tell us, please, what you meant by the new journey you alluded to in one of your closing paragraphs.

Nothing profound. We've been in such an intense caregiving mode for three and a half years, whatever we do on our journey will seem new. I like to think that I minister to the few who minister to the many, INTP that I am

Thanks for your kind words and feedback.

pax,
jb

Dear JB, Phil a.o.

In did read quite a lot and I am happy this 'demon' is more and more conquered.
I think also JB's thoughts on metaphysics and epistemology are way above my head. But I wish to contribute this.

I was intrigued for a while by the perennialist/sophianic movement (Guénon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, Smith...)until I discovered this
http://www.naturesrights.com/k...frithjof_Schuon.asp!
I don't like keeping myself busy with negative things but this was quite perplexing. A so-called great thinker and metaphysician like Schuon with such credentials, being a demonized sexual pervert?

Any serious person will feel grateful to be confronted by such a generously discerning intellect ... in this darkening time. -- Jacob Needleman, San Francisco State University

He has influenced my music perhaps more than anyone in recent years ... I am eternally grateful to him. -- Sir John Tavener, composer and author

Reading Schuon I have the impression that I am going along parallel to him ... I appreciate him more and more. -- Thomas Merton (from a letter to Marco Pallis published in Merton's The Hidden Ground of Love)

The man is a living wonder ... I know of no living thinker who begins to rival him. -- Huston Smith, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

This book brings a much-needed message of return to the roots of our being ... that are ... planted in the ... Spirit. -- Patrick Laude, Georgetown University, Foreword to Roots of the Human Condition

I knew some of the accusations, after hearing about them through a friend, and I gather many of his admirers have now deserted him (though Nasr stood by him and denied the accusations). I am in no position to know if they are true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me, given that a long time ago I realized that his prose is permeated with a kind of spiritual pride and arrogance that is almost sickening, and one thing is connected to another. Very instructive - we see how the devil can work, and deceive 'even the elect', as Schuon himself has said (though not in reference to himself). I connect this with his inability to accept the Trinity or the meaning of the Incarnation. He prefers his own monistic ideology. Guenon has something of the same arrogance, though it may not have led in his case to such a fall. For my money, it is Jean Borella who had got most of this stuff right - he turned against Schuon, and has criticized Guenon in exactly the right ways, by correcting his metaphysics and his teachings about Christianity. Guenon may have converted to Islam, but perhaps he never quite turned his back on Theosophy.

See about Borella at
http://cosmos-liturgy-sex.com/...new-french-theology/

That is exactly what I always thought: monism may and mostly lead(s) to this kind of stuff! There is no sound morality without Trinity (relation), Incarnation, Cross...(see Dostoievski's saying).
The same I have seen with some Advaita teachers.
And after all therefore I don't like to read Jung anymore either! I stick to prayer and Biblical revelation (I have a group now practicing lectio divina out of the book Wisdom) no matter what they say about 'fundamentalism' (and even twist this term!
I had when seeing pics of Schuon this impression of pride. But let's be honest, such things happen unfortunately also within the Church until these days.

Let us pray.

Fred