Christian Nonduality

In the East, a distinction is drawn between the “way of the baby monkey” and the “way of the kitten,” the first way describing that of the ascetics in pursuit of Enlightenment, Knowledge and Wisdom, the second that of Devotion. The metaphorical implications are that there is more effort on the part of the baby monkey, which must actively cling tightly to its parent in getting transported around, while, as we are all aware, the kitten is passively transported by the nape of its neck in its mother’s teeth. I offer another distinction, which is the “way of the baby goose,” implying an imprinted following of the parent or an imitation of Action. Finally, we might consider the “way of the baby martin,” which is familiar to any who’ve observed the parents knocking a fledgling off of the Purple Martin House that it might thereby learn to fly, the implication here describing the Way of the Cross via formative, reformative and transformative suffering. If these are different path-ways, perhaps roughly corresponding to creed, cult, code and community in our great traditions, where do they ultimately lead? I will discuss, herein, how they are all ordered toward a unitive Life in the Spirit and are animated via Lonergan’s conversions (intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious) by the very same Spirit.

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BEFORE YOU READ FURTHER and bother to browse this website:

The main thrust of this website is to subvert from within an approach to reality that is too rationalistic, which is to say that we are using philosophy and metaphysics to undermine an approach that has way overemphasized philosophy and metaphysics. In simpler terms, if you get what Richard Rohr means when he says that our problem-solving, dualistic mind is a good thing but that we need more than that to build a relationship with God, then, don't bother with this website; instead, go ahead and return to your prayer and say one for me, too!

In short, God is not a syllogism; love is not an argument.

For the long version of this discussion, keep reading and browsing. After all, those of us of wonkish temperament do this for kicks!

Philosophers, continue reading below.

Scientists, you may wish to start here.

True, God should not be placed in gaps, but neither should Nietzsche be guarding the perimeter of reality's limits.

 http://twitter.com/johnssylvest

Epistemology studies how we name, claim and aim our various epistemic leaps. There is a lot of agreement between different perspectives regarding the number, size and nature of these leaps. There are important disagreements, too. Which leaps are necessary and how many are sufficient in order to enjoy many of life's lesser goods? or in order to better realize life's greater goods, such values as truth, beauty, goodness and unity?

I will say this much. A credible epistemology will recognize the reality of these leaps and will not downplay the significance of these leaps (both cognitive and existential).

The Implications of a Semiotic Theological Anthropology for the Interaction Between Science and Religion

Some Traditional Distinctions

The human mind has been described in many different ways over the years by psychologists, philosophers, theologians and others. In psychology, it has been described in both structural and functional terms, both by its parts and by their activities. Psychology coursework typically combines sensation with perception, emotion with motivation, learning with memory, personality with development. There are Jungian terms like sensing, intuiting, thinking, feeling, perceiving and judging and Freudian terms like ego, id and superego. Philosophers have drawn a distinction between the brain and the mind. Most recognize distinctions like conscious, subconscious and unconscious. Neuroscientists describe a neuronal network that is distributed throughout the body. Theologians speak of memory, understanding and will. A host of other terms come to mind, like cognitive, affective, instinctual, inferential, noninferential, empirical, logical, practical and relational. One might also find the categories normative, descriptive, interpretive and evaluative helpful.

In philosophy, there is a branch of study called epistemology, which is concerned with how it is that we know what we know and just what it is that we might know, when we say we know something. In theology, belief has been justified as evidential, when based on evidence, rational, when based on reason, presuppositional, when based on inescapable suppositions, and existential, when based on ultimate concerns. In psychology, different developmental theorists have studied human growth. The best known are probably Piaget (cognitive), Erikson (personality), Kohlberg (moral) and Fowler (faith). Lonergan, as a systematic theologian, described growth in terms of intellectual, moral and religious conversions to which Gelpi has added affective and social conversions. Normatively, Lonergan gave us the famous transcendental imperatives: Be attentive! Be intelligent! Be reasonable! Be responsible! Be in love!

For every distinction listed above, there are further distinctions. We need not treat all of these nuances; however, just for example, let’s further examine human inference. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism, described three types of inference, all which presuppose the others, from the strongest form to the weakest, as deductive, inductive and abductive inference. Generally speaking, one might think of deductive inference in association with formal logical argumentation. Inductive inference is most often associated with the scientific method. Abductive inference might best be thought of as hypothesizing. Abduction is, then, informal argumentation and its “methods” are quite often what might otherwise be known as logical fallacies in formal argumentation. This does not mean that it should be readily dismissed for this is how we do most of our critical thinking, which is to say, fallibilistically. For example, so often, with only very limited information, we necessarily find ourselves reasoning backwards (retro-ductively) from known predicates (or properties) of a reality to unknown subjects (of various classes, sets or subsets). We find ourselves venturing guesses as to what reality or type of reality we may have encountered and employing analogies in our references to and descriptions of such realities, when we otherwise cannot determine (epistemically) or specify (ontologically) this reality versus another. Sometimes, we wonder if this or that reality is novel, even? It is through such alternating conjecture and criticism, then, or what Popper called falsification, that much of human knowledge has advanced. This is not to say that knowledge has not also advanced, on occasion, through various leaps and bounds, or what Kuhn called paradigm shifts.

Another pivotal distinction is that between a theory of truth and a test of truth. For our purposes, a conventional understanding of truth will suffice in place of any otherwise elaborately nuanced theory. A test of truth is a process that helps us navigate toward the truth while not otherwise constituting the truth in and of itself. A truth-conducive process, like deductive inference and formal argumentation, navigates us more or less directly toward the truth. A truth-indicative process, like abductive inference, navigates us indirectly by, at least, raising the probability that we are approaching the truth. As the weakest form of inference, abduction needs to be bolstered by repeated testing, which is to say, inductively. Beyond these rather simple, straightforward rubrics for human knowledge-advances, there are long histories and many competing schools in philosophy and theology and their interactions have not always been dialogical and irenic. At the risk of oversimplifying all things epistemological, we suggest that much of the confusion has been rooted in dualistic thinking which has viewed reality rather facilely in either-or and all or nothing terms, too often viewing what are mere distinctions as full blown dichotomies, too often mistaking partial truths for the whole truth, and too often absolutizing perspectives that are indeed relative to one’s frame of reference. In theology, there is a word for such thinking, heresy. In philosophy, there is an adjectival suffix, -istic.

Some Additional Distinctions

Sociologically and linguistically, we would like to introduce some additional distinctions that are based on whether or not our concepts have been negotiated (accepted into general use, more or less) by the wider pluralistic community. Those that have been thus negotiated have theoretic status. Those still-in-negotiation are heuristic devices or conceptual placeholders. Dogmatic concepts are employed within communities of belief but have not been negotiated by the wider pluralistic community, more broadly conceived. Semiotic concepts are those presuppositional notions without which meaning and communication would not even be possible.

Toward a Philosophical Anthropology

Our purpose, thus far, has been to introduce enough categories and distinctions to provide each different member of what might be a rather diverse audience some handles with which to grasp our meaning and intent as it relates to our philosophical anthropology.

Foundational to any theological proposal, one must have a philosophical anthropology, a perspective on humankind’s psychological make-up that is grounded in good biological science and sound evolutionary epistemology. The history of philosophy has been characterized by one overemphasis after another, which is to say one –istic perspective after another, whether the empiricistic, rationalistic, positivistic, idealistic or pragmatistic. Its history might best be summed up as the struggle between the more static essentialistic and substantialistic approaches and the more dynamical nominalistic and process-like approaches, which are but the obverse sides of the same coin of an otherwise epistemically and ontologically bankrupt dualistic realm, which transacts in a philosophical currency that has no practical cash value for most of us who get along quite well with good old common sense. The history of theology, which takes philosophy as its handmaiden, necessarily fares no better as its approaches can alternately be similarly described as evidentialistic, rationalistic, fideistic and pietistic. One might justifiably wonder if, down through the centuries, an epistemic fetish is all one could be expected to come away with after a formal academic engagement of these disciplines. Perhaps that’s what those in the modern scientistic cabal must think? No doubt, that’s what the radically deconstructive postmodernists must imagine with their nihilistic bent? Do the arationally gnostic mysterians have the only mindset that can transcend these otherwise mutually unintelligible epistemic stances and totally incommensurable ontological approaches?

Because of their overly facile dyadic approaches, neither an essentialism nor a nominalism, neither a substance nor a process approach, can account for the novelty we encounter in reality. Our known categories of givens include the primitives (like space, time, mass & energy), forces (like electromagnetism, gravity, strong & weak nuclear) and axioms (like the laws of thermodynamics & quantum mechanics). While it may be too early on humankind’s journey for us to epistemically determine with any ontological precision the exact nature of such novelty in terms of our known theoretic givens, our inability to robustly describe this novelty does not mean that we can not otherwise successfully refer to it with good heuristic devices. To be clear, the novelties we are dealing with include those involved in the Big Bang and its earliest moments, the origin of life and the dawn of human consciousness.

The question that should be begging for our readers, now, is just what is the most successful way to refer to reality, phenomenologically, even if we cannot otherwise robustly describe it, metaphysically? What concepts and categories can we most profitably employ and what rubrics for relating them would be most fruitful in their application? What can we reasonably aspire to say about reality without saying more than we know about such realities as the origins of life or human consciousness or even the cosmos, itself?

It is beyond the scope of this consideration to set forth the details of our own philosophical journeys through these questions to our present provisional closures, but with a great deal of enthusiasm we can recommend the approach of the American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, as it has been employed and articulated by the biological anthropologist, Terrence Deacon, and the systematic theologian, Donald Gelpi, S.J.. While we will not unfold the arguments of these scholars in any detail, neither would we want our enthusiasm to be mistaken for an academic pretension to either a full understanding of their work or a comprehensive grasp of its implications.

Deacon, for his part, employs an emergentist heuristic, which has also been well articulated by, and on several occasions even co-authored with, Ursula Goodenough, a prominent cell biologist and popular author at the interface of science and religion. Deacon and Goodenough are very circumspect in not telling what are otherwise untellable tales, as they comprehensively refer to many different natural phenomena without exhaustively describing them. In their popular writings, they take one on a cosmic journey where properties, even reality’s laws, are seen to emerge, first thermodynamically, as mere shape interactions, then morphodynamically, as shape interactions playing out over time, and finally teleodynamically, as a consequence of shape, time and information. These orders of emergence refer to progressively higher orders of regularities, which are causal configurations. For all science can tell, teleodynamics, or 3^rd order emergence, as Deacon and Goodenough say, define the onset of telos on this planet and, for all we now know, the universe. They go on to develop a correspondence between the human virtues of compassion, fair-mindedness, care and reverence with the inherited pro-social capacities of empathy, strategic reciprocity, nurturance and hierarchy, suggesting various symbolic accessions and syntheses whereby our otherwise innate groundings are complexified and transfigured into uniquely human capacities. In our view, this is hypothetically consonant with Gelpi’s Peircean-nuanced definitions of selves as autonomous functioning tendencies (think higher order regularities and telos) and of human persons as selves capable of conversion (think of Gelpi’s Lonerganian account of conversion).

In any case, the human capacities for virtue can be realized both intuitively and imaginatively as well as rationally and inferentially. Because humans are finite and learn fallibilistically, each human value-realization attempt leads to an uncertain outcome, which is to recognize that it requires a wager or risk. As such, the augmentation of human value-realizations must be successfully managed through various risk amplification and risk attenuation strategies, which is to further recognize that we must be able to cash out the practical value of our concepts and risk amplification-attenuation strategies in what is our perennial pursuit of goodness, radically finite as we are. Thus it is that many fallacies of formal argumentation are employed in everyday common sense leading us fallibly but probabilistically toward value-realizations. For example, if it is true, we believe that it is also beautiful and useful, leading us to various attraction or avoidance strategies in our value-realization pursuits. While the converse, if it is beautiful or useful, then it is also true, is not necessarily true, still, we do raise the probability of something being true in our recognition that it is either beautiful or useful because if something is neither beautiful nor useful then the possibility of it being true is nil. Thus it is in science that we employ Occam’s Razor and other truth-indicative criteria like simplicity, elegance, parsimony and symmetry. Thus it is in theology that orthopraxis grounds orthodoxy. Our existential orientations toward truth, beauty and goodness, which are innately grounded in our inherited pro-social capacities, get transfigured into the theological imperatives of faith, hope and love as a human value-augmentation strategy requiring the amplification of the epistemic risks already entailed in the normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics. In our religious communities, truth is thus articulated in creed, beauty celebrated in cult or ritual, and goodness preserved in code. Such is the nature of the Kierkegaardian leap and of the Pascalian wager.

Questions That Beg – Toward a Theological Anthropology

Our emergentist account, appropriately modest in its description of thermodynamics, morphodynamics and teleodynamics, leaves profound existential questions begging, questions which leave all in wonder and awe, many in reverential silence, and many more musing imaginatively about what we would refer to as the proto-dynamics that gave rise to and the eschato-dynamics that might ensue from this emergent reality we have encountered. Some employ a root metaphor, like being or experience, to elaborate a speculative metaphysic. Others dwell in analogical imaginations, inchoately relating to ultimate reality through robust metaphors and sweeping metanarratives. While our own Peircean-informed sensibilities do not ambition a metaphysic (and we feel there is no attempt better than Gelpi’s own triadic construct of experience), they are suggestive of a pneumatologically-informed theology of nature, precisely derived from an analogy that one might draw between the Peircean telos, as minimalistically conceived in Deacon’s teleodynamics, and the work of the Spirit, as broadly conceived in all of humankind’s great traditions and most native religions, also.

Our proposal is that what humankind relates to as an ineluctably unobtrusive but utterly efficacious tacit dimension comprised of a matrix of dynamical formal causal relations would, from an hierarchical perspective, correspond to a divine telic dimension, much like the interpenetrating causative fields of John Haught’s process approach and aesthetic teleology, much like Joseph Bracken’s Divine Matrix. We would point out that this conception is not an attempt to facilely blend otherwise incommensurate approaches, for example the Whiteheadian process versus Gelpi’s Peircean account, and we do recognize and endorse the efficacies of the triadic over the classically dyadic (even di-polar) accounts. Rather, from a phenomenological perspective, we are invoking vaguely referential analogs as heuristic devices or conceptual placeholders, recognizing that metaphors and analogies are not, in and of themselves, system-bound. In other words, our robustly pneumatological imaginations are relating our triadic and social human experiences of phenomenal reality, with all of its many different patterns and regularities, to what we consider putative divine supremacies. We are not otherwise attempting, in the least, to account for manifold and multiform continuities and discontinuities between different orders of reality. We do believe that any who ambition a metaphysic must both account for divine alterity as well as differentiate the moral status of the human from other selves and creatures. All of this is to suggest that, because of the pervasive ubiquity in the use of the concept of Spirit down through the ages and still across the face of the Earth, arguably it meets the criterion of enjoying theoretic status contrasted with the dogmatic status of so many other theological concepts. In this regard, we might affirm with Radical Orthodoxy that, over against any notion that there exists a secular society writ large, as abstracted and reified by a militant but not truly regnant nihilism, our planet is inhabited, rather, by a pneumatologically-informed but broadly pluralistic community. With the Reformed epistemologists, we might affirm that being-in-love in the Spirit is a necessary and sufficient epistemic risk amplification for any who’d aspire to most robustly (superabundantly) augment human value-realizations beyond those inherited as pro-social biases and transfigured (abundantly, to be sure) into our authentically human moral virtues.

A Theology of Nature - Pansemioentheism

To the extent that we recognize, with science, that telos, as far as we now know, first emerged at that juncture in cosmic evolution that Deacon has described as 3^rd order emergence or teleodynamics, and to the extent we next venture forth with Haught, theologically, guided by his aesthetic teleology, we are perhaps de facto suggesting that reality is pansemiotic. For those whose theological sensibilities do not resonate with any pantheist perspective, as ours do not, it would follow that our theological vision might otherwise be considered a pansemioentheism. To be clear, we offer this as a vague reference and not a robust description, which is to say that we are suggesting this as an analog that recognizes and affirms the Peircean categories phenomenologically without intending to imply any particular root metaphor, as would necessarily be required in the articulation of either a speculative metaphysic or a natural theology. This pansemioentheism is, instead, offered as a theology of nature, which originates not from natural philosophy but from our distinctly Christian perspective. While we affirm, in principle, the possibility of a speculative metaphysic, and we strongly encourage the search for the next most taut metaphysical tautology, which will employ the next most robust root metaphor for reality, we might, at the same time, recognize that humanity’s metaphysical quest remains somewhat quixotic. Should we not gauge the practical efficacies of any of our root metaphors by attempting to cash out their value in such an exercise as, just for example, reconciling and renormalizing gravity and quantum mechanics?

The Relations of Science and Religion

What are the implications of this theological anthropology for the interaction between science and religion, viewing reality pansemioentheistically, employing the epistemic categories of the normative, descriptive, interpretive and evaluative and characterizing our concepts as semiotic, theoretic, heuristic and dogmatic?

To the extent that we map science as a descriptive enterprise and religion as an interpretive enterprise and affirm them as autonomous methodologies but still integrally-related in every human value-realization, there can be no talk of conflict, as reigns in the scientism of the Enlightenment fundamentalists and the literalism of the various religious fundamentalists. Our axiological perspectivalism with its explicit integralism speaks of a model of interaction that coincides with Ian Barbour’s Integration, John Polkinghorne’s Assimilation, John Haught’s Confirmation and Ted Peter’s Hypothetical Consonance (and Ethical Overlap).

In some sense, the very basis of a semiotic approach is grounded in the need for informational interpretation, a need that derives from the radical finitude of creatures, a need that plays out in our fallibilistic methodologies and heavy reliance on the weaker forms of inference, both abduction and induction, such as in the back-door philosophy of Popperian falsification and the informal argumentation that predominates, even mostly comprises, our common sense. The implication is, then, that absent this finitude and given a virtual omniscience, descriptively, and omnipotence, evaluatively, the normative sciences would consist of only aesthetics and ethics, logic would be obviated and the descriptive and interpretive would be a distinction without a difference, which might describe, in fact, an idealized eschatological epistemology whereby humankind as a community of inquiry has attained to the truth. At any rate, to be sure, that is manifestly not the case, presently.

One practical upshot of this situation is that there need be no Two-Language Theory as discussed by Peters or Two-Language System as described by Peacocke, at least from our idealized theoretical perspective; however, from a practical perspective, science and religion will seemingly traffic in two languages because, if for no other reason, the latter is dominated by dogmatic and heuristic conceptions, the former by semiotic and theoretic conceptions. These need not be conceived as two languages, from a strictly linguistic perspective, but might better be conceived as two vocabularies that are slowly merging. There is another reason for religion’s expanded vocabulary, though, but that derives from the fact that it has additional concerns (e.g. interpersonal) that are of no special interest to a purely scientific quest or merely descriptive enterprise. It is in that vein that one might invoke what Barbour and Polkinghorne have called Independence and Haught has described as Contrast. Willem Drees has developed a schema that more explicitly recognizes that religion has additional elements than the merely cognitive-propositional as much of religion’s content rests on both religious experience and tradition.

At this point, one might recognize that the various categories that have been employed for the interaction between science and religion are not all mutually exclusive. The categories we employ in our axiological perspectivalism are methodologically- autonomous but epistemically-related and this noetic reality is affirmed whenever a scientist normatively invokes Occam’s Razor, parsimony, symmetry, elegance or other aesthetic criteria to adjudicate between competing hypotheses. Thus it is that, whenever any methodologically autonomous realms do not fully overlap, but only partially overlap, and are placed in what Haught calls Contact, we would urge what Barbour and Polkinghorne suggest as Dialogue.

Anticipations

From the standpoint of interreligious dialogue, this hermeneutical circle of the normative, descriptive, interpretive and evaluative might be interpreted in terms of orthopathy, orthodoxy, orthopraxis, orthocommunio, each as an aspect of a religious interpretation which presupposes the other aspects.

From a practical perspective, these distinctions are critical because they imply, for example, that the orthopathic aspects of our spiritual “technologies” – by which we refer to the various spiritual disciplines, practices, asceticisms and devotions, for example – are not (necessarily) inextricably bound to any given doctrinal insights. Thus we would expect continued fruitful interreligious engagements such as have already been realized between Christianity and Zen, for example, and would encourage further orthopathic dialogue and exchange. Most theologians already recognize this dynamic, prudentially speaking, in their willingness to abstract orthopraxes – or moral and practical aspects – out of their doctrinal contexts in other traditions. Also, metaphorical and analogical language (ananoetic knowledge)　is not system-bound, so our depth encounters of reality can be enriched by our interreligious ananoetic interchanges, which can provide common ground to explore together our theologies of nature, especially from a pneumatological perspective. We believe this approach can help prepare an ever more fertile ground for interreligious dialogue as our orthopathic, orthopraxic and ananoetic exchanges prepare the way to a much sought after unity even as we continue our search to discursively identify the commonalities in our otherwise diverse and pluralistic belief systems.

Suggested Reading

Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972)　

Deacon, Terrence, ‘Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub’ in The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion by Philip Clayton (Editor), Paul Davies (Editor) (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Deacon, T. & Goodenough, U., ‘The Sacred Emergence of Nature’ in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford Handbooks in Religion and Theology) by Philip Clayton (Editor), Zachary Simpson (Editor) , (Oxford University Press, USA, 2006)

Gelpi, Donald L., Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (Collegeville, Minn.:Liturgical press/Michael Glazier, 2000)

Gelpi, Donald L. , The Gracing of Human Experience: Rethinking the Relationship between Nature and Grace (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press/Michael Glazier, 2001)

Haught, John, The Cosmic Adventure: Science, Religion and the Quest for Purpose (Paulist Press: 1984)

Bracken, Joseph, The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link between East and West (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995)

For comprehensive discussions and bibliographical materials pertaining to the relation between science and religion, visit http://www.counterbalance.net/

Barbour, I., When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (HarperOne, 2000) and Religion in an Age of Science: Gifford Lectures 1989-1991, Vol 1 (HarperOne, 1990)

Polkinghorne, J., Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (Yale University Press, 2007) and Science and Theology (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998)

Haught, J., Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (Paulist Press, 1995) and The Cosmic Adventure: Science, Religion and the Quest for Purpose (Paulist Press, 1984)

Peters, T., Bridging Science and Religion (Theology and the Sciences) by Ted Peters (Editor), Gaymon Bennett (Editor) (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2003) and Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence by Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett (Abingdon Press, 2003)

Peacocke, A., The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 1986) Paths from Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring (Oneworld Publications, 2001)

Drees, W., Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Religion and Science in Context: A Guide to the Debates (Routledge, coming in 2009)

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AFTERWORD

My affinity for Peirce comes from my appreciation of his pragmatic logic and theory of meaning and affirmation of metaphysics as a valid but fallible enterprise. Beyond that, I otherwise sympathize with the analytical approaches and the advocates of common sense and any other approaches that incorporate some type of fallibilism or critical realism. And beyond that, I really am not looking for additional epistemological or methodological rigor other than that practiced by conventional science and that enjoyed in colloquial usage (including the "leap" of faith) and subject to linguistic analysis.

Some of my critics are absolutely right in that I am an inveterate eclectic, methodologically, and also in that I will not get down to brass tacks, systematically, either, in order to make any metaphysical commitments. I do not receive such charges as an indictment but rather as an exoneration and proof that, philosophically, I am fetish free.

It is my simple thesis that most people are competent in their interactions with reality because we have evolved that way. That is a tautology, to be sure. But it is a taut one, empirically. Peirce is exactly right in his use of the analogy of a cable with many strands or filaments to explain human knowledge. The reason most people are competent is that they have enough strands. We are also fallible, because no one has them all.

Epistemology searches for an eschatological ideal that would account for every strand and epistemologists argue about the attributes of differently-stranded cables. Good for them. But these arguments, in my view, reach a point of diminishing returns where, for all practical purposes, the differences in their positions become so nuanced as not to be relevant to me vis a vis my value-realization pursuits.

Ontologists, for their part, argue about how high they have rope-climbed these cables and what vista they have taken in, cosmologically, or how low they have descended into the deepest structures of matter to discern reality's microstructures. Their arguments, too, reach a point of diminishing returns vis a vis my value-realizations.

Although there is no theoretical constraint on how high or low humankind can travel, hoisting itself on its epistemic cables, for all practical purposes, our radical finitude limits our horizons vis a vis humanity's ultimate concerns. And this, then, places me in deep sympathy with Wittgenstein, Pascal, James, Kierkegaard et al with my qualifying proviso being that faith takes us beyond but not without reason, which is to recognize that we do need different strands to construct our cables and that some cables are indeed better than others. Which strands are necessary and how many of them are sufficient is problematical. What would make for the ideal cable is highly problematical. I think it is fair, then, to talk in terms of adequacy, abundance and superabundance (or degrees of participation, if you will) when it comes to epistemic cables vis a vis value-realizations.  We might think, for example, of Lonergan's transcendental imperatives: Be attentive, empirically. Be intelligent, semantically, such as in our naming exercises, critically examining our referents, concepts and terms as they variously describe or refer to realities. Be reasonable, logically, whether in formal or informal argumentation, especially employing common sense. Be responsible, prudentially, in our practical and moral deliberations and judgments and in our analyses of actionable norms, guided by equiplausibility principles. Be in love, affectively, relationally interacting with reality guided, orthopathically, by authentic aesthetic sensibilities and a grammar of trust, proper assent, dutiful fidelity, a felt sense of solidarity expressed in compassion and by being-in-love (storge, philia, eros and agape).

Now, one of my central contentions is that a philosophical anthropology that does not recognize and affirm a human exceptionalism is not empirically demonstrable and therefore not philosophically defensible. I further contend that such a philosophical anthropology does not necessarily derive from a Peircean-informed perspective, neither from a religious nor a secular outlook. For example, I largely resonate with Ursula Goodenough and Terry Deacon, who have set forth what I interpret as a naturalistic account of human exceptionalism and I also direct you to http://christiannonduality.com/other_online_resources where you can follow the link to: Pansemioentheism: An Emergentist Account of the Biosemiotic Categories of Religion from a panentheistic perspective where I develop and defend this position myself.

However one defines the epistemic filaments that comprise the human cable of knowledge per the Peircean metaphor, epistemology is the study of which of the filaments are necessary and how many of them are sufficient. Beyond the necessary and sufficient, epistemologists also want to know what mix might be epistemically optimal. Presumably, because of our finitude, we are all operating suboptimally, some merely satisficing, minimalistically, others variously enjoying epistemic abundance and superabundance. 

One doesn't have to be a self-aware, consciously-competent epistemologist to realize human values because human common sense evolved as fast and frugal heuristics that probabilistically guide us toward knowledge, sometimes unawares. People with the requisite common sense are enjoying epistemic efficacies from these probabilistic heuristics. The normative and evaluative mediation of human knowledge-advances and value-realizations are grounded in these probabilistic heuristics and can be rendered, in fact, in terms of informal argumentation based on retroductive abductions that reason (backwards) from predicates to subjects, or, we might say, from various properties to various modal realities. (If it is elegant, it is true. If it is useful, it is true.) That is why Occam's Razor works, sometimes. That's how and why parsimony, symmetry, elegance, simplicity and utility work, sometimes. 

The epistemic efficacies, or gnosiological significance, of the logical and aesthetical and ethical sciences, or of truth and beauty and goodness, derive from the fast and frugal heuristics of an ecological rationality gifted by natural selection. When these heuristics are modeled like informal arguments, their fallibile and probabilistic nature is plain to see. Because we are fallible, our value-realizations involve risk-ventures. Risk ventures involve risk-management. The amplification of risks, within reasonable norms, augments human value-realizations. Like all other epistemic risk-taking, risk-amplification toward the end of value-augmentation is normed probabilistically and can be guided by equiplausibility (or even equiprobability) principles, which might suggest, for example, that one is acting within one's epistemic rights, only when one's risk-ventures are life-giving and relationship-enhancing.

The concepts and terms employed in our various belief systems can be categorized as semiotic (if nonnegotiable, cross-culturally), theoretic (if negotiated), heuristic (if still-in-negotiation) and dogmatic (if non-negotiated). One's belief system, even when articulated with dogmatic and heuristic concepts and terms (in addition to the requisite semiotic and theoretic ones), enjoys epistemic parity with competing perspectives as long as one is acting within one's epistemic rights as guided by the actionable norms derived from acceptable equiplausibility principles, which have been established in a, more or less, pluralistic community. One's beliefs enjoy epistemic warrant in a community of value-realizers when one establishes epistemic parity with competing systems, acts within one's epistemic rights and articulates those beliefs using only semiotic and theoretic concepts and terms. A community's acceptance of actionable norms and establishment of semiotic and theoretic terms and concepts is, itself, a truth-indicative, probabilitistic (hence, still fallible) guide to optimal value-realization.

The creeds, cults and codes of religious communities thus represent existential risk-ventures, Pascalian wagers and Kierkegaardian leaps, that go beyond (but certainly must not go without) the philosophic risk-taking of the normative sciences of the wider pluralistic community in a risk-amplification ordered toward optimal augmentation of human value-realizations of truth, beauty, goodness and unity. Which communities enjoy epistemic parity with competing interpretive systems and meet the criteria of acting within their epistemic rights? Which do not? Those are sociologic transactions, the currency of which is the pragmatic cashing out of values, not as a theory of truth (truth-conducively, as they say) per se but as a darned good test of truth (truth-indicatively).

recent (04/30/09) addendum:

I consider myself a minimalist realist, a fallibilist. I draw my inspiration from Peirce's pragmatism (or pragmaticism). Theologically, then, the only thing we need in our epistemic suite to do the God-encounter is our common sense and a receptive heart. The existentialists and reformed epistemologists think all we need is that receptive heart. The classical rationalists think all we need is deductive inference. The presuppositionalists think the God-idea is axiomatic, as indispensable as other unprovable notions like belief in other minds, first principles and the intelligibility of reality. The evidentialists think all we need is inductive inference. The cumulative case folks think all we need is abductive inference.

Peirce teaches us that inferential thought is irreducibly triadic and each inferential process presupposes the others and that, when our inferential processes end in a stalemate or Scottish verdict, we then necessarily fallback on our noninferential approaches to reality, like our receptive hearts, in order to adjudicate between competing actionable norms. So, as in theology, it is my view that in epistemology, heresy consists of our making a partial truth into an absolute. So, just like in theological apologetics, some folks adopt a perspectivalism that gives each of our epistemic witnesses to revelation a voice, my appropriation of the Peircean triadic logic is a nonfoundational perspectivalism that is holistic. Unlike those theological perspectivalists, however, who turn to Scripture as the normative perspective, I have somewhat of a positivist bent, which is to say that, for epistemology, broadly conceived,  I do not consciously get into fallback mode noninferentially until the stronger types of inference have failed me, which they necessarily will vis a vis our ultimate concerns. Even then, where the heart comes in -- whether via beauty or goodness, I interpret as a type of informal reasoning, a probabilistic, truth-indicative sign.

This is synthetic thinking, not systematic (which is for philosophers and theologians). This site sets forth an exploratory heuristic as a meta-critique of religious epistemologies and theologies of nature, hence, a nonfoundational perspectivalism normed by common sense and a receptive heart (inspired by Peirce's pragmatic logic) and a pneumatological theology of nature, a pansemioentheism, suggested by vague analogical references but not otherwise aspiring to robustly systematic descriptions.

PRECIS

In terms of Lonergan's imperatives, the descriptive is a focus of concern that requires the epistemic virtue of being attentive. The normative requires being reasonable and being responsible. The interpretive requires being intelligent in our naming exercises. The evaluative requires being-in-love, broadly conceived.

Peirce's pragmatic logic guides us in properly relating these epistemic foci and virtues such that our existential orientations correspond to transcendental imperatives. My distinctions between the dogmatic, heuristic, theoretic and semiotic draw inspiration from and are a concrete application of the pragmatic maxim coupled with Peirce's eschatological definition of truth and is also an affirmation of pneumatological realities that are at play in the sensus fidelium and consensus gentium.

My nonfoundational perspectivalism is very much like John Frame's perspectivalism (his religious epistemology) which integrally relates the evidential, rational, presuppositional and existential methods of apologetics, except for the fact that his normative perspective is Biblical, while mine is Peircean vis a vis the normative sciences. While I deeply sympathize with the existentialist, fideist, presuppositionalist and reformed epistemologies, it is my rather mundane contention that beauty and usefulness guide us to truth and goodness because they are retroductive abductions with probabilistic significance that gift us, truth-indicatively, with a higher probability of realizing the truth than other more arbitrary criteria based on chance, alone. The same is true for the truth-indicative criterion of community consensus. Beauty, pragmatic utility and community consensus are informal arguments but fallacies of formal logic; when intertwined together as individual filaments in our epistemic cables they gain epistemic strength, even if fallibilistically. I am not wholly disagreeing with other epistemologies in the belief THAT orthopathic and orthopraxic dynamisms are efficacious but offering my philosophic defense of HOW and WHY they work, as well as suggesting that while they may even enjoy a certain methodological primacy and even autonomy in matters of ultimate concern, this is true only after they have established epistemic parity with competing worldviews and only when operating within their epistemic rights vis a vis equiplausibility principles (life-giving and relationship-enhancing). They are not otherwise autonomous systematically vis a vis the other perspectives required for all human value-realizations.

Using a paradigm of risk-amplification/attentuation for value-augmentation, I appropriate Haught's aesthetic teleology, ontologically, and I relate the theological virtues to other epistemic virtues, epistemologically. Normatively, the implications are that, in our search for a root metaphor to articulate a speculative metaphysics, we must employ an emergentist heuristic in order to robustly account for the novelty that we will encounter in reality, a novelty that corresponds, hypothetically, to various degrees of participation in the divine matrix, ergo, also accounting for meaningful differences in the moral status of emergent modal realities, meta-ethically, and affirming a divine alterity, theologically.

Beyond these minimalist formulations of theological virtue ---

It may be that Spirit, broadly conceived, is a theoretic concept, cross-culturally? It may be that this is an empirically defensible sociologic datum? This would be consistent with the suggestion that the term secular society is a reification, that our world community is, rather, a pneumatologically-informed pluralistic community and overwhelmingly so, demographically. Radical Orthodoxy may thus have some valid points regarding same?

It may be, too, that, all things otherwise being equal theoretically and essentially vis a vis humanity's ultimate concerns, belief in Spirit is indeed epistemically warranted (beyond mere epistemic parity) practically and existentially, consistent with the Reformed perspective?

Even if the Spirit is not nonnegotiable for human values, broadly conceived, it might certainly approach nonnegotiability for any who'd choose the path of normative risk-amplification in pursuit of such value-augmentations as would be fueled by humanity's ultimate concerns? So,  to the extent that humanity's existential orientations to ultimate concerns are in play (and in whom are they not?) and to the extent that the Spirit would thereby be a semiotic concept, then this would be consistent with the presuppositionalist perspective?

These are stronger positions to defend philosophically than what I have argued within these pages, but it is my belief that my exploratory heuristic provides the categories and the empirical thrust by which these epistemic hypotheses can be evaluated as sociologic data. It may be that narrowly conceived dogmatic formulations of religion, as strawgods, are deservedly in retreat, but belief in Pneuma writ large remains compelling and vital in our new age and, arguably, as indispensable as ever to any truly robust augmentations of human value-realizations.

Let the half-gods depart that God may appear (borrowing phraseology from Emerson)!