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.

pax tibi,
QuiEst, J.B.