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Just Call me Quasi-modal (what Radical Orthodoxy gets right)

JB on July 1, 2010 in Axiological, Cosmological, Methods & Approaches, Practices & Experiences, Provisional Closures & Systems, the descriptive - Science, the evaluative - Culture, the interpretive - Religion, the normative - Philosophy | No Comments »

If we, as created co-creators, indeed participate in and are indwelled by our Creator in a dynamic Creator-creature relationship, then all dualistic conceptions of this relationship must give way to nondual approaches.

There is a great deal of value that has been revealed by and that can be realized through our cosmology via its triadic constellation of descriptive science, evaluative culture and normative philosophy. Many, indeed most, report that there is even more value to be had if one allows this constellation to then spin around the interpretive axis of religion.

If there is one thing that the great traditions and even many indigenous religions seem to have in common, then it would seem to be the notion that this Creator-creature relationship involves a Lover, a beloved and the love dynamic, itself, most often called the Spirit. Whatever else may be going on with onto-theologies and theo-ontologies and such root metaphors as being, substance, process or experience, we must recognize our creaturely autonomy as quasi (not inconsistent with the formal modal distinction of Scotus). So, too, it must be with this dynamic love triangle, wherein we recognize our otherness as also quasi. If we are not wholly autonomous in the intraobjective dimension of our experience, wherein we interact in reality’s dynamic unfolding, however that activity might be conceived, neither are we wholly other in the intersubjective dimension of our experience, wherein we interact, hopefully, as lovers do.

That we are never wholly autonomous or wholly other in any dimension of our experience is precisely due to our constitutedness as spirit in a perduring intrinsic relationship to the Spirit, a relationship that, for better and worse, is vectoral (characterized by both magnitude and direction). This is all to recognize that, like all participatory dynamics, there’s an implied range of motion whereby one can participate or not and in varying degrees. The Spirit, we might suggest, is never timid (always present) but always coy (ever unobtrusive), a gentlemanly suitor, Who’d not force His way in, but a seductive siren, Who’ll not stop Her singing from around the bend.

As in any relationship, the Creator-creature dynamic is characterized by elements of vulnerability and risk, sacrifices, even, of that which is good for that which might be better. There’s a divine kenosis, in fact, in the act of creation, itself. This self-emptying or delimitation is like a fugue playing in every dimension of our co-creative reality as we shed monotony and appropriate novelty, augmenting value-realizations through all manner of risk-amplifications, running even a risk of disintegration in the pursuit of more truth, beauty, goodness and unity.

The quasi-autonomy of creation is a “managed” risk, reminiscent of my old banking trope that profits do not come from risk-taking but from superior skills at managing risks. However one might conceive of such boundaries and limits, or laws and axioms, in a divine kenotic act of self-delimitation, the Ens Necessarium “relaxed” its boundary and limit conditions in devising the initital conditions of creatures and, then, creation thus processed forth with regularities, habits, tendencies, capacities, or an agapic Spirit, if you will, coaxing us all along in a dance of discovery toward a divine romance.

The cosmos, for its part, gave itself over to emergence dynamics as it surrendered to a state far from equilibrium, where novelty could be teased forth from the bifurcations and permutations that were compounded in the formation of each dissipative structure, structures that, in running the risk of disintegration, experienced increases in fragility that were only to be exceeded by their increases in beauty.

Animals emerged whose behavior became increasingly plastic only because their brain processes became decreasingly algorithmic, which is to say more capable of error. But the animals exploited these errors, where different parts of otherwise discrete memories became dissociated from each other only to be recombined in novel (mistaken) ways. Their brains became open-ended rather than close-ended processors as mere icons and indexes gave way to symbols (mistakes) that presented models (more and less perfect) of reality that could compete with reality, itself, for the animals’ attention and responses. This is to say that predicates could now be stripped from their subjects, properties from their objects, accidents from their essences, and combined in novel ways (even bigger mistakes) to tell stories and make myths, some which, lo and behold, evoked novel but appropriate (adaptive) responses to reality. Mistakes were being exploited by creatures as their algorithmic, rule-governed behavior became progressively de-limited, more open-ended, an imago Dei dynamic, to be sure.

Homo sapiens thus emerged as the symbolic species, modeling reality through story-telling and myth-making. This modeling abilty was very rudimentary and was, ironically, a tad too rule-governed and dualistic in its conceptions. This is to recognize that humankind’s epistemology was not modeling reality’s ontology very well.

For a participatory reality which was governed much more so by probability and much less so by necessity, which had initial, boundary and limit conditions that were much more relaxed and much less fixed, which was profoundly relational, triadic and semiotic and much less empirical, logical and dualistic — well, when it came to

1) logic, there was way too much emphasis on the deductive and inductive and not enough attention given to abduction;

2) reason, there was way too much emphasis on conceptual map-making and not nearly enough on participatory imagination;

3) aesthetics, there was way to much emphasis on art as imitation & mimesis, as essentialism and formalism, and not enough on art as expressivism and instrumentalism;

4) ethics, there was way too much emphasis on the deontological and contractarian and not enough on the teleological (consequentialistic) and aretaic (virtue);

5) paradox, there was way too much emphasis on its resolution through dialectic, dissolution through paradigm shifts and not nearly enough on the exploitation of its creative tensions and its evasion through pragmatics;

6) first principles, there was way too much emphasis on the excluded middle and noncontradiction of actualities & necessities (radical empiricism, logical positivism, naive realism) and the suspension of noncontradiction in possibilities (metaphysics run amok) and way too little emphasis on the suspension of either-or thinking (excluded middle) in probabilities;

7) causations, there was way too much emphasis on efficient causation, while material causation was taken for granted, and not nearly enough attention paid to the emergent realities of formal and final causation (essential to the study of semiotics);

and so on and so forth.

The practical take-away is that a participatory ontology can gift us with an enhanced modeling power for reality. And this does not really challenge the notion that methods precede systems because a participatory ontology is not really a system but is a practice, which is to say, a method, an approach to reality, an interpretive axis, a confessional theological stance that is moreso practical and not so much speculative. It inspires a turn to community because it invites one to love and be-loved via the Spirit. It allows us to leverage up our cosmological approaches of descriptive science, evaluative culture and normative philosophy through the orthodoxic, orthopathic and orthopraxic risk amplifications known as faith, hope and love, which augment our value-realizations of truth, beauty and goodness. Think Eucharist. Do Eucharist.

Next time you encounter a mistake, an imperfection, a blemish, an uncomfortable arousal from a serene equilibrium — welcome that Cross with open arms. It’s the paschal mystery come to call and great things are about to happen — if you hold on loosely but don’t let go. That’s the divine fugue and your co-creative calling to bring an even greater harmony into a love relationship.

What does this mean in terms of esse? or the immanent trinity? Heaven if I know. And it’s increasingly hard to care less these days.

Tags: act of creation, created co-creator, Creator-creature dynamic, descriptive science, dissipative structure, divine kenosis, efficient causation, Ens Necessarium, evaluative culture, final causation, formal modal distinction, imago Dei, interpretive axis of religion, John Duns Scotus, logical positivism, naive realism, normative philosophy, onto-theology, paradox, participatory ontology, paschal mystery, radical empiricism, the Spirit, The Symbolic Species, theo-ontology, turn to community

Emergence – neither implies nor ambitions explanatory adequacy

JB on June 21, 2010 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Science, especially semiotic science (dealing w/signs), has grappled with hierarchical complexities that present dynamics like downward causation (w/o any violation of physical causal closure), what has sometimes been described in terms of a minimalist telos or minimalist transcendence.

Emergence, as a concept, was then applied – not because a new level of explanatory adequacy was achieved, but – precisely because certain realities were remaining both epistemologically and ontologically open vis a vis their unpredictability & novelty. The take-away from this is that the concept emergence is a heuristic device, a conceptual placeholder, that neither implies nor ambitions explanatory adequacy. Instead, it helps us to keep our bearings. It helps us avoid category errors & any rush to closure. It helps us to get the questions right while we wait patiently for answers.

In science, emergence has thus served both heuristically and hygienically, on one hand, freeing some from a sterile reductionism, otoh, reigning in others from their flights of fanciful metaphysical reification. To use Philip Clayton’s phrase, it helped many to “see paradigms in which we’re imprisoned” (although neither the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse nor their fundamentalistic counterparts).

In religion, emergence is no more and no less and perhaps, even, no different. It invites us to, in the words of 38 Special, “hold on loosely, but don’t let go.” And, in Philip’s words, again, can better “open us to new things God may be doing.”

If these dynamics are at work with semiotic realities, then, how much more they will assuredly apply to pneumatological realities, for, as Spencer Burke sagely observes: “we feel and see the effects of the Spirit but we are not in control…” For that matter, so many pneumatological realities are indeed semiotic, for the Spirit seems to like signs (and wonders) because they, as Good News, are not just informative but performative (says Walker Percy)!

Tags: downward causation, minimalist telos, minimalist transcendence, performative, Philip Clayton, physical causal closure, pneumatological, semiotic science, Walker Percy

What Is God?

JB on June 13, 2010 in Axiological, Cosmological, Uncategorized, the interpretive - Religion, the normative - Philosophy | No Comments »

What Is God?

Below is my tongue (only partly) in cheek response to an experiment Kevin Beck is doing at Transmillenial:

There are some concepts that we employ that may or may not successfully refer to realities we cannot otherwise successfully describe. One such concept, God, then, is the conceptual placeholder that many of the English speaking world employ when hoping and acting as if, or while either believing or denying that, it successfully refers to One Whom no one can otherwise
describe even though often supplicated, thanked, blessed, praised and cursed by many for manifold and multiform realities that are generally attributable to no other.

Once we’ve exhausted, for all practical purposes, the truth, beauty, goodness and unity that we can reasonably expect to realize in abundance through our descriptive sciences, normative philosophies and evaluative cultures and interrogate reality wondering if there might be more, a superabundance even, appreciating that reality’s response to that query is incredibly ambiguous for us and terribly ambivalent toward us, this despite our most diligent evidential & empirical investigations, our most dutiful rational arguments and logical formulations, our most clever presuppositional analyses and most sincere existential surrenders and we find ourselves, nevertheless and pretty much in spite of ourselves, very much transcending ourselves, sometimes most ephemerally, at other times surprisingly habitually, inhabiting, or at least trying desperately to inhabit, an interpretive stance toward reality that just so happens to heighten our sense of value-realization, intensifying our experiences of truth, beauty, goodness and unity, we then recognize a dimension of our experience that graciously opens up to us, beyond any thinking and proposing and conceptual map-making, though certainly not without them, engaging more so our imagination and inviting very much more our participation, as we humbly respond to manifold and multiform cues that are robustly performative even if only very weakly informative, cues that have us feeling like Pip in Great Expectations, a beneficiary in search of a Benefactor, have us feeling like characters in search of our Author, whereupon, because of such cues, like Pip, then, suspecting we are in relationship with a putative Benefactor, Whom we’re at a total loss to successfully describe, but Whom we otherwise aspire with all due humility to successfully supplicate when we are hoping against all hope and despite all appearances to the contrary that all may be well, can be well and will be well, knowing with a confident assurance in things hoped for and a conviction of things unseen that all manner of things shall be well, if and only if, when speaking of Whom, we have made a successful reference, we set out on a journey, an adventure, a quest for One Whose conceptual placeholder goes by the word you asked us to define.

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I haven’t been blogging much lately, but this is a good place to preserve some chalk-talk, some passing thoughts awaiting future development (or not).

One cannot fully escape explanatory appeals that turn metaphysical, especially when we are pushing the limits of understanding. Because our models are metaphors and all metaphors eventually collapse, the goal is to employ one that works the longest. For what the average Joe is trying to explain, all sorts of metaphors will do just fine.

When I throw out the concepts intersubjective intimacy and intraobjective identity, I’m employing supercategories to vaguely refer to, respectively, our distinct personhoods/agencies, which are realizing the values of interpersonal relationship, and to the matrix of divine activity, an ad extra cosmological procession of habits, tendencies, probabilities, near-necessities, invitations, coaxings and other realities which we can reasonably discern & metaphorically model, and with which we can willingly cooperate (ignore or even resist) on a journey to Whomever it is ad intra. Now, this super-schema is silent and does not get more epistemically determinate or ontologically specific with its metaphorical modeling such as one might do with substance, process, fields or experience approaches but it does imply a panentheism which models a creature-Creator interactivity and intersubjectivity. The Holy Spirit of course is person. And we are saying that the Spirit’s activity or workings is often through reality’s tendencies (think Tao, for example). What we have not imposed, necessarily, are any natural-supernatural categories, even as we draw a Creator-creature distinction. So, grass-growing and sunshining may all be super/natural activity, intraobjectively inter-related, somehow, to the divine matrix and available to reality’s subjects and Subjects and co-creativity.

While we do maintain, in principle, an in-principle ontological occulting where the reality of God is concerned, where created reality is concerned, we can not know a priori whether our explanatory attempts are being thwarted due to methodological constraints, which may one day be overcome, or whether certain aspects of reality will remain inaccessible in-principle, occulted ontologically, because of some radical discontinuity with our known primitives, forces and axioms. Some aspects of reality may be related enough to exert effects but may otherwise possess dissimilarities that so far otherwise outweigh the similarities to known reality that we would need to invoke an hierarchical ontological distinction, such as we do between Homo sapiens and other creatures, who lack our symbolic consciousness. Perhaps that would correspond to what one might refer as supernatural? There is no a priori reason to rule such out and no a posteriori evidence to conclusively rule such in. I think we need to remain open to these concepts because we live in a very richly textured reality.

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Robert Cummings Neville has 3 distinctions in play. There IS an ontological cause, whereby the contextual field or ground or act of creation takes place, where an ad intra God is indeterminate as the transcendent creator of all determinations of being. Then there’s the cosmological order w/its temporal relations of determinate causes and effects across space and time, which we can account for (I say perhaps) apart from God. Thirdly, Neville accounts for the creaturely freedom of our subjective experience as self-constituting agents.

I guess it depends on what one means by the natural-supernatural distinction. We can affirm that there is all the difference in the cosmos between agents that are, perhaps, omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenvolent or quasi- or something like that and those that are not as they inter-relate intersubjectively. But we have to be careful about suggesting that there is all the difference in the world intraobjectively vis a vis the divine matrix of activity because we would be denying the very possibility of a causal connection that would be necessary to produce any effects on the world’s STUFF. So, what does supernatural imply? Two different types of persons or agents, one transcending the other? God certainly transcends us! Two different kinds of stuff/activity making up our cosmological realm of causes and effects?

But where is their nexus, their mechanical interface? So, we recognize a MAJOR mystery re: an indeterminate God ad intra. And we refrain from any onto-theology of a God ad extra whose determinate reality we know only via creation in general revelation and whose moral and relational nature God mediates via special revelation in the incarnation, pentecost, scripture, sacraments, charismology, etc

Natural theology only frames the questions. When we launch into a theology of nature we are already in a confessional and not an apologetic stance and using iconography and not doing metaphysics. So, we are left only with vague references that suggest THAT we are in relationship with God and THAT we can co-create and interact in a divine matrix, but cannot presume to describe HOW. In other words, it cannot all be mere analogy and the weakest form at that, metaphor. There must be some actual, literal causal nexus, whereby we are only QUASI-autonomous.

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Recall that the hesychasts were talking about manifestations and drawing a theological distinction between those and God’s essential nature ad intra which was occulted, of course. But they maintained that these visible manifestations were God’s uncreated energy ad extra. Of course, the palamist would consider any ecstatic phenomena and such as secondary to love, as would the sanjuanist or teresian.

But take such notions of uncreated energies and divine matrices and the spirit as mediated K – They don’t map perfectly because different paradigms are being employed w/different axioms. But they lend themselves to a re-axiomatizing.

In the panentheism of Neville and Bracken, there is an ontological distinction preserved for the Creator and they even advocate a creatio ex nihilo. But this is not the supernaturalism they and process folks like Griffin are working around. What they seem to be saying is that the created order is “making use” of divine activity, that we as created co-creators as quasi-autonomous agents (free) are actively participating with and harnessing and even constituted by a dynamic God-energy. On the intersubjective level, we have our personhoods and agency, as does the Spirit, but on the intraobjective level we are all inextricably and intrinsically related in this energy-matrix with God, that the whole so-called natural order is supernatural.

What the theologians are doing is trying to overcome the problem of the One and the many to some extent. They are not denying an ontological dualism of Creator-created so to speak. They are implying a cosmological monism though, such that ontology then becomes a rather moot point within creation. With the materialists they are affirming monism. Over against the materialists they refute naturalism and are affirming a supernatural monism.

It gets kinda involved but, yes, we might wonder how we might thus contextualize the Baptism in the Spirit, for example. Even the notion of an infused this or that takes on “new light.” Divine intitiative and prerogative and sovereign activity is preserved. But the Spirit, Creator, as agent is using the same “stuff” as we do as agents, co-creators, in the ongoing transformation of the cosmos into an harmonic Kingdom. We can cooperate with or ignore or even refuse to get with the program, of course.

Interestingly, our semiotic science has reintroduced such as formal and final causations although it is a minmalist telos in that it exhibits downward causation w/o the violation of physical causal closure. Think of Jack Haught’s hierarchical levels. By analogy, we can easily imagine a downward causation that might affect us “ontologically” but that we could not access epistemically. I think one way to frame up this cosmological monism is to say that what has traditionally been invoked as a supernatural-natural distinction within the created realm is epistemic and not ontological in nature. Again, there is a valid natural-supernatural distinction of course between Creator and creatures but beyond the act of creation it has no cosmological significance that manifests, for example, in any distinction between material and immaterial.

The minimalist telos takes advantage of a tacit dimensionality that allows morphodynamic structures to effect teleodynamic outcomes, like a riverbed that redirects the flow of water, for example. The dimension is tacit insofar as it is at a zero-distance from equilibrium with respect to the rest of the environment. The riddle that presents for me is this: How would we distinguish between this tacit dimension within our heiarchical level, with its zero-distance from equilibrium, and a putative so-called nonenergetic or even a-energetic causation from a higher level dimension. I am not thinking of anything that is ontologically distinct, only epistemically problematical, like what Jim would call “deep and dynamic formal fields” or an implicate order. This does not involve massive tinkering with reality’s primitives, forces and axioms but does imagine any unified field or strings to be intricate, indeed. (Brings to mind causally efficacious platonic forms.)

Beyond the act of creation, where we initially invoke an ontological creature-Creator distinction for these agents or persons, ontology may be a moot point. “Before” or atemporally, and at the act of creation, ontology is a heuristic placeholder, a useful concept, but not a science. There is no reason, in principle, a priori, that there are not hierarchical levels which will transcend ours, ontologically, even in the cosmological created realm, but science hasn’t discerned any indirect effects from such putative realms that would be of any practical significance to us. There could be poltergeists, for example, but I’m not investing in equipment or TV programs in a search for them.

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Properly approached, onto-theology or philosophical theology or natural theology only frames up questions, disambiguates concepts, formulates arguments but doesn’t pretend to syllogistically proceed through argumentation to rational demonstrations or logically co-ercive proofs w/any naive realism. It has limited apologetic value although, I would say, indispensable work to do as preambulae fidei.

But what Jack Haught, Joe Bracken, Neville and others are doing (and probably you, too) is more properly theo-ontology, which is iconographic, poetic, pslam-like and begins within the faith as a confessional stance and, as an interpretive stance, is not really an apologetic or systematic argument.

The supernaturalism being questioned is in the cosmological created realm where a dualism is being applied to the creaturely realm. For example, concepts like immortal souls, mind-body dualism, contra-causal free will, poltergeists, supernatural consciousness. Instead, for some, consciousness is considered emergent, the soul is conceived in physicalist conceptions, the will is not free in any absolute sense but free-enough.

What I am saying is that, cosmologically, we do not have to resolve these questions of the nature of the soul or philosophy of mind, because an essential Christianity is not theologically intertwined with one metaphysical stance or the next. But I also admit that, while metaphysically agnostic, I lean toward an emergent conception of mind and a physicalist account of the soul and so on.

Intraobjective just means we’re fooling with the same types of STUFF. Intersubjective means that distinctly different persons or agents are fooling with that stuff, from different levels of transcendence even. By same type of stuff one is asserting monism for what God created and not monism for God, which would be pantheism. One might call this stuff creativity, or dynamic playdough, or ad extra God-manifestation stuff, or even a box of God-crayolas. The question that arises is whether or not transcendence involves our subjective agency, only, or whether or not, cosmologically, there is also a plurality of objective stuff.

For example, if one is naturalist re: consciousness, one might recognize that Homo sapiens enjoys a certain transcendence, hierarchically, enjoying a distinct subjective experience of reality that the animals cannot access but nevertheless made out of the same material. Now, God not only transcends us subjectively but objectively He is constituted out of self-subsisting stuff, essentially.

But this divine matrix wherein we subsist, a priori it needn’t be monistic, dualistic or pluralistic. (And however it thus presents, the relationship between nature and grace could still be intrinsic over against any extrinsicism.) The prevailing theories are monism and dualism. Again, I’m agnostic but lean toward monism. The folk piety says dualism. But dualism seems problematical in that two wholly different types of stuff would not interact and if they did then they wouldn’t be wholly different. Dualistic categories leave more questions-begging. Backing way up, from the cosmological realm or matrix to the divine act of creation — that procession or manifestation or creativity or divine activity, itself, would have to be the STUFF with which creatures are co-creating. There is a creative tension between us being OTHER and us being UNRELATED, substantially. So, we resolve it panentheistically by asserting a subjective dualism but an objective monism, but a monism re: God’s ad extra manifestation as creative activity, the only determinate nature we know, God’s ad intra reality being indeterminate and inviting apophatic silence. So, questions beg all the way around but we’re trying to change which questions beg and what type beg because some seem more philosophically palatable I guess. Also, even though Ptolemy & Copernicus could both predict planetary orbits, well … you know.

Tags: Divine Matrix, Natural Theology, onto-theology, philosophical theology, preambulae fidei, theo-ontology, Theology of Nature

Contemplative Phenomenology – implications

JB on June 10, 2010 in Axiological, Cosmological, Methods & Approaches, Uncategorized, the descriptive - Science, the evaluative - Culture, the interpretive - Religion, the normative - Philosophy | No Comments »

By the way, I forgot to mention –

I have not investigated this in depth but have had some sneaking suspicions re: Maritain’s integral approach and how he overcame the extrinsicism. Both Charles Sanders Peirce and Jacques Maritain were heavily influenced by John of St. Thomas. I haven’t done a thorough compare and contrast on how they appropriated his semiotic. Hartshorne (who heavily informs Jack Haught’s work), in turn, was immersed in Peirce (in many ways). His own panentheism and notion of nonstrict identity appeal to me. Polkinghorne gets a tad too specific for my tastes but his general idea that God is interacting with nature at its boundaries resonates with my intuition that creation’s initial, boundary and limit conditions leave all of the ontological space necessary for divine energies and pneumatological in-form-ation to accomplish in all temporal frames (past, present, future) whatsoever the Spirit so desires (Bracken, Neville). The Radical Orthodoxy folks are correct, I believe, in their neoplatonic intuitions, even if they are somewhat wrong in their account of epistemological methods; yes, the world is enchanted through and through. Radical Orthodoxy has no business blaming modernism on Scotus, though.

The transcendental thomists were not the only ones to reject the neo-scholastic extrinsicism. Maritain, through his existential thomism and integral humanism also said that grace works within nature. And Maritain did not fall into the kantian trap of the transcendentalists but employed a critical realist epistemology. Thomism had its problems.See http://www.innerexplorations.com/philtext/john.htm
and the over against a sterile hierarchicalism http://www.innerexplorations.com/philtext/ph7.htm

re: if one can explain something without invoking divine agency, then it’s of the natural or creaturely realm?

This systematic theology doesn’t employ such distinctions as are found in supernaturalism. In a theology of symbols, the distinction between natural endowments and supernatural gifts doesn’t arise and there is no dualism between material and nonmaterial realms. Divine presence and activity are at all levels and in all realms of life.

Indeed, as you point out regarding our various faculties and values, our cosmology (Everybody’s Story) can account for all of these scientific (descriptive), philosophic (normative) and cultural (evaluative) causes and effects apart from God (theologically) and without any reference to a soul (metaphysically). I would say, then, that our cosmology accounts for our normal experience of truth, beauty, goodness and unity.

Our interpretive axis, we believe – after leaping, relates us to a religious dimension of experience in which we enjoy a heightened sense of truth, beauty, goodness and unity, which we attribute to the divine presence and activity in the world. And we experience the divine presence and activity in the world in varying degrees. We may also experience, in varying degrees, the lack thereof.

This interpretive stance thus primarily entails an amplification of epistemic risk that is ordered toward an augmentation of human value-realizations (truth, beauty, goodness, unity). It is not primarily adopted as an explanatory strategy with an aim to close various gaps in our cosmological knowledge, as if what we can explain is physical and what we cannot must be metaphysical, as if what we can explain is natural and what we cannot must be supernatural, divine or otherwise. Any such categorical scheme based on explanatory adequacy or a lack thereof falls prey to the “god of the gaps” charge. The religious dimension of our experience, then, invites an interpretive stance that is primarily an axiological strategy and is not, for the most part, aimed at cosmological and ontological explanations. It is more theosis than theoria, more practical than speculative, though not without propositional aspects, to be sure.

Thus the invocation of divine agency, essentially, is an interpretive stance, primarily an axiological strategy; it’s neither a cosmological nor ontological explanation. However, you left a similar question begging. Why invoke the metaphysical concept of the soul, the faculties of which are otherwise explained scientifically?

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From the NPR Forum 13.7 on Cosmos & Culture

In the context of this thread and also “Nature, And Something Else Beside Nature,” it seems to me that values like truth, beauty, goodness & unity can be realized in abundance (and I’m not denying that one can also be frustrated to no end in their pursuit) and that what we know from Everybody’s Story (our shared cosmology) is necessary & sufficient for such value-realizations. As I conceive it, this cosmology integrally relates the otherwise autonomous methods of science, philosophy & culture, methods that are, respectively, descriptive, normative & evaluative. By abundance, I mean “good enough” & not anything in an absolute sense. By “everybody’s story,” I mean we shouldn’t imagine that we can go around willy nilly making all this stuff up.

Ursula described friends who inhabit “something else” beside the cosmology that I described. In addition to our descriptive, normative & evaluative methods, what each inhabits is an interpretive stance. If w/Wm.James we describe this “move” as a vital, forced & live option, then it is only by going beyond but not without our cosmology that would make the option live. Interpretive stances are tautological & thus add no new information to our systems. Many report that their inhabitation of same relates them to a dimension of experience in which they somehow enjoy a heightened sense of value-realization (e.g. truth, beauty, goodness, unity) over & above any normal experience. An interpretive axis is primarily an axiological strategy and will more so engage our participatory imagination (hometown knowledge) than our propositional cognition (conceptual map-making). As tautologies, they do not provide ontological & cosmological explanations & are thus more practical than speculative. This practical significance might be aesthetic, affective or existential. Any reasoning from is to ought should take place in our cosmology b/c the propositional aspects of interpretive stances are too highly speculative to be given normative impetus.

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As one goes back and forth between substance vs process vs experience vs other approaches, all which systematically employ different root metaphors & axioms, one needs to be able to re-boot or re-axiomatize, prescinding to a meta-critical level, because certain terms and categories that work in one system are nonsensical in another (for example, natural & supernatural distinctions). At bottom, in my view, theologies of nature are confessional, literary works and not apologetic, philosophical arguments. They have more iconographic value, which stimulates our participatory imaginations in forming our desires for the Kingdom with performative impetus, than propositional value, which would aid our cosmology with informative significance.

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My chief critique of thomism, even with the extrinsicism corrected and the epistemology being a critical realism, would generally involve a protest of its essentialistic categories. And a buy-into a nominalistic process approach is no cure. But I am sure you recall Jim’s fascination with the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics, Jungian synchronicity, Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields and such? This was Jim’s attempt to infuse thomism’s formal causation with deeply dynamic characteristics. This strategy, in my view, made for a very coherent via media between essentialism and nominalism in metaphysics. Mind you, if someone put a gun to my head, I’d go with the Copenhagen interpretation and wouldn’t give Sheldrake’s work the time of day. But substantively (no pun intended), I could see what Jim was doing and it was not unlike Jack Haught’s discussion of mutually interpenetrating fields, for example. To be very clear, I applaud these metaphysical projects and recognize them as hypotheses. I just do not do metaphysics having been preoccupied as I have over the years with epistemology and, let’s say, meta-metaphysics. And to be even more clear, what Arraj did and his manner of appropriating Maritain’s existential thomism makes it laregly immune from the critiques of thomism that I launched in that article. In a phrase, it’s good stuff.

Now, Gelpi’s transmuted experience hypothesis also corrects the essentialism, the naive realism and the extrinsicism under consideration. Even then, his model remains encumbered by dualistic conceptions like natural and supernatural grace, created and uncreated grace, and addresses Christian conversion without giving much of an account of how the grace might work in other traditions. I offer no serious, much less fatal, critique of his project, other than to point out that, it too, is a fallible hypothesis, which he’d be the first to suggest. Further, I only want to point out that there is more space open for theological discussion than one might first imagine when considering Gelpi’s account. Specifically, we would all want to address religious conversion in nonChristian traditions. In that regard, what Gelpi sees going on in Christian conversion, I would say is also taking place in other traditions wherever people are opening themselves to spiritual transcendence, experiencing creation’s pneumatic features, engaging their pneumatological imagination, lovingly participating in co-creativity and articulating such experiences with some type of pneumatological theory, however inchoate, however symbolized, however celebrated and realized. None of this is to deny that a Christological account might/should have a universal normative impetus with profound practical implications, fostering a journey where one moves much more swiftly and with much less hindrance. It is to say that that shouldn’t be one’s starting point in interreligious dialogue and needn’t be one’s starting point in theological anthropology, even if one buys into the Fall and classical substitutionary atonement theory, which I do not.

As regards epistemology in general, nowadays, most folks are critical realists, whether foundational, nonfoundational or postfoundational. Most have responded to the postmodern critique. So, even the foundationalists acknowledge weakened foundations. The important thing is that one has moved from a naive to some form of critical realism. After that, one reaches the point of diminishing returns vis a vis epistemic virtue by picking a nit with one school or another. This is to say, if you like existential thomism and Maritain, especially as interpreted and expanded by our late pal, Jim, I think that will serve you very well, indeed. I know it is never far away from my epistemological machinations, whether as my system dujour or foil! That is not the type of approach that falls victim to my critique and is not what I had in mind, which was mostly the old extrinsicism, essentialism and a priorism. As for the dualisms, like natural and supernatural grace, created and uncreated grace, it is my intent to open up the theological space for such hypotheses to blossom and thrive, should they be consistent in fostering human conversions and authenticity a la Lonergan/Gelpi. Those dualisms may not articulate MY preferred account of grace but I do not mean to dismiss them, only to suggest that it mustn’t be thought that things are necessarily so vis a vis an essential Christianity, in particular, or pneumatology, in general. In fact, like metaphysics, I do not think I really have a theological position on grace, only a meta-theological stance that suggests we needn’t rush to closure and have no warrant to get too very dogmatic regarding one account versus another, as long as such an account meets other criteria of epistemic and theological virtue.

Finally, not all postmodern approaches are created equal. I am not advocating a radically deconstructive postmodernism or relativism, which is the prevailing caricature of the postmodern bogeyman. There are those who do, but they do so rhetorically and not systematically; nihilism doesn’t do systems. Not all pragmatism is created equal. Rorty’s vulgar pragmatism is not related to Peirce’s realism. Finally, even regarding Peirce, I only appropriate the rudiments of his approach and am not sure I’d buy into anyplace where he gets overly metaphysical, which doesn’t really interest me. In conclusion, while many have adopted a so-called critical realism, their rather dogmatic insistence on approaching reality one way over all others betrays a practical naive realism, which leads to fundamentalisms. That’s why I adopted the mantra that our deontologies should be considered as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. And until someone comes up with a metaphysic that reconciles gravity and quantum mechanics, in my view, they all remain highly speculative. My biggest appeals are for epistemic holism and humility.

_________________________________________________________

To explain the relationship between nature and grace, there is an open space theologically to consider alternatives other than

1) an extrinsicism, where the supernatural acts as a superstructure alongside or above human nature and with such distinctions as between an immanent and an economic trinity

2) thematic grace, where grace penetrates, perfects and transforms nature within human nature as discovered by a priori, rationalistic transcendental methods and interpreted using essentialistic categories

3) transmuted experience, where grace penetrates, perfects and transforms nature within human nature as discovered by consulting experience a posteriori and interpreted per the various dynamic structures of human development as they are transformed in a distinctly Christian conversion employing distinctions like created and uncreated grace, natural and supernatural grace.

The hypothesis being supported in our contemplative phenomenology employs the concept of grace as transmuted experience, where grace penetrates, perfects and transforms nature within human nature as discovered by consulting experience a posteriori and as interpreted per the various dynamic structures of human development as they experience creation’s basic and pneumatic features. Such experiences inform a pneumatological imagination out of which emerges a theology of Spirit (pneumatology), which in Eastern theology treats grace as the fruits of the Spirit without needing to develop such a concept as created grace.

In this anthropology, human nature is biosemiotically distinct as the symbolic species. In this theology, the creature-Creator distinction and deification are both affirmed as our union with God is via the uncreated divine energies, hence neither hypostatic nor substantial as in the Incarnation and Trinity, respectively. What the West refers to as supernatural is signified in the East by these energies. Creation’s primal ground, primal origin, primal cause, primal destiny, primal being, primal support, primal context or primal matrix would be the act of creation, apart from which God is otherwise indeterminate. This hypothesis thus implicitly employs a vague panentheism that aspires to a successful reference of the Creator, Whom we cannot hope to otherwise successfully describe, whether in terms of substance, process, experience or other ontologies.

The implicit theological anthropology of this hypothesis does recognize our participatory role in this dynamic creative process and the distinctly symbolic nature of our co-creative activity does lead us to further specify it as a pan-semio-entheism. The Spirit thereby acts in a manner that is ineluctably unobtrusive but utterly efficacious, not unlike other semiotic realities with their formal, final and quasi causations and rather tacit dimensions.

Relying on observations and experiences and describing them with vague categories that can be affirmed phenomenologically, this hypothesis does take into account different types of continuity and discontinuity but does not try to prove too much metaphysically. That is to say that it does not try to determine too much epistemically, to specify too much ontologically or aspire to say more than we can possibly know about the precise nature of various continuities and discontinuities.

This theology, we suggest, is informed by the best of Western philosophy, a pragmatic and semiotic realism, which well articulates the logical import of our categories, but also the best insights of our Eastern traditions, which well emphasize the aesthetical and practical, hence axiological, import of our pneumatological vision, which blurs any sharp distinctions between the exoteric-mythical and esoteric-mystical, between dogma and experience, between conceptual map-making and participatory imagining, between a philosophic parsing and a contemplative being-with (Indian anubhava).

Our consideration is not just systematic but historical. We want to exploit the creative tension between aggiornamento and ressourcement, bringing our theology up to date by returning to our sources. The dualistic accretions of a neoscholastic extrinsicism take many forms, most of them insidious. Outside the faith, with their explicit sacred-secular divide, they fostered modernist excesses, naturalism and atheism. Within the faith, they fed an hierarchicalism that infantilized the laity.

See http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=3069

Also, see http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/833545gelpi.html

It is this extrinsicism that the transcendental thomists tried to overcome. Our critique of Rahner, Lonergan and deLubac is thus sympathetic. That grace perfects nature and gratuitously so, we can all agree. How this happens and what methods we employ in the discovery and defense of our accounts of how this happens has a great practical significance for our anthropology, formative spirituality, soteriology, ecclesiology and practical life of faith.

Archiving some random thoughts here for future reference -

Cyber-passersby, make what you will of them

Some clarifying thoughts regarding grace

The formulations as popularly understood might be characterized as Catholic, Reformed and Orthodox, respectively, those of scholasticism, extrinsicism & palamism.

Palamism is asking the question of how it is that God gives himself. It thus introduces the distinction of divine energies, which is theological. This has to do with transforming union or deification as distinguished from the hypostatic union (Incarnation) and substantial union (Trinity). It is concerned theologically with the cause of grace and also ad intra and ad extra distinctions of the immanent and economic trinity. One practical upshot of this question and answer for us is that it would thus bolster our contention that deification is humanization and would further address our interest in hesychastic prayer experiences.

Scholasticism was asking the question of how it is that man receives God. It thus introduces the distinction of created grace, which is metaphysical. It is concerned metaphysically with the created effects of the uncreated cause. One practical upshot of this question and answer for us is that we should be able to consult our experience to find evidence of Lonerganian conversions.

Extrinsicism was asking questions about the nature of God’s gift of self. It thus introduces the distinction between justification, which is freely given, hence extrinsic, and sanctification, which requires self-denial and trust in God, hence intrinsic. One practical upshot of this question and answer for us is that our contemplation of this gift will lead us into a grateful response of co-creative participation and cooperation.

I bring this up not just to reconcile these formulations but to point out that the palamism is a better fit for my particular project because I am trying to frame up an essential pneumatology using only vaguely phenomenological categories and not robustly metaphysical terms. This Eastern approach is not philosophical. It articulates essential elements of Christianity and leaves the philosophical space open for various metaphysical formulations, just like my pan-semio-entheism articulates my essential theological vision with some vague phenomenological categories (both theologically and anthropologically) that still leave much philosophical space open for various metaphysical formulations, for example, including different philosophies of mind and different root metaphors for ontologies (substance, process, experience, etc).

So, again, while I do not have need of such distinctions as natural and supernatural grace, created and uncreated grace, that is because I am not asking those particular questions and have no need in my particular project, then, for those metaphysical formulations. Further, I am suggesting that when metaphysical questions do arise, there are many different ways to approach them that would still be compatible with my essential pneumatology. Where the causes of our humanization-deification are concerned, I am comfortable saying they’re entirely supernatural. Quite often, not always, scholasticism was providing distinctions without a difference. Other of its distinctions had little practical import for the life of faith, providing answers to questions few others were asking.

I remain committed to a wider ecumenical synthesis – nothing facile, not syncretistic. Some differences are real enough and difficult. But others are due to our pluralistic approaches which differ in emphasis and in the nature of the questions being asked. And some that we imagine are propositional are nonpropositional. Sometimes people are describing phenomenal experiences and we misinterpret those as ontological conclusions or theological positions. This is the type of stuff I wish to clear away.

We know we are not separated from God but we do not know exactly how that works. We know we are distinct from God and we do not know exactly how that works. We even know that we are connected to other humans without knowing exactly how that works; for example, philosophy of mind questions remain open. But we know we are distinct from other humans, too. We have a self. The divine is coming at us with grace but we do not know exactly how that works. We are free, for example, to cooperate with grace. We often fail to thus cooperate because we are finite and make mistakes. Sometimes our failure results from a refusal, which is sin.

As to how all of this stuff works metaphysically? I am saying that there are many hypotheses, some better than others. Even after we’ve decided on which might be the best ones, employing as much epistemic virtue as we can muster, it seems way too early on humankind’s journey to dogmatically insist on one vs another. The same is true for the theological hypotheses. There are different accounts, some clearly better than others. But even once we’ve decided on the best accounts around, it is still too early for us to dogmatically insist on one vs the other. We can attempt to demonstrate the practical import of holding to one account or the other, as Gelpi does in putting forth his account vs Rahner’s.

I do think that by bringing the East and West together we will get closer to articulating even better accounts. Sometimes this is done poorly and that has profound practical significance! And when it is done well, that can be a very good thing, indeed!

I have paid some attention to the Asian Bishops Conference over the years and find their work very stimulating.

Check out: http://www.ucanews.com/html/fabc-papers/fabc-96.htm where they write, for example:

2.1.2.3 Trinitarian and Spirit-Centered

The whole framework of Eastern Theology is Trinitarian. This is very much reflected in the liturgy, as well as in the theology centered on the economy of salvation. At the same time, due importance is given to the theology of co-penetration/mutual indwelling (perichoresis). In expounding the doctrine of the Trinity the Eastern Church Fathers took the three persons as the starting point, and thence passed to the one nature; while the Western thought most frequently followed the opposite coursefrom the one nature to the three persons. The Eastern way, in conformity to the Holy Scripture and to the baptismal formula that names the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, starts from the concrete. For the Eastern Church, if one speaks of God, it is always in the concrete: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob; the God of Jesus Christ; it is always the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Eastern Theology gives special importance to the Holy Spirit. In the Eastern theological understanding, much emphasis is given to the sending of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost) as the fruit of the Christ event. Christ returns to the Father so that the Spirit may be sent. According to St. Basil there is no gift conferred on the creature in which the Holy Spirit is not present. Whereas the work of Christ is seen as concerning human nature which he recapitulates in his hypostasis, the work of the Holy Spirit concerns persons, being applied to each one singly. The Holy Spirit is acclaimed as the source of sanctification. According to Eastern thinking Christ is the sole image appropriate to the common nature of humanity, and the Holy Spirit grants to each person the possibility of fulfilling the likeness in the common nature.

In the Eastern tradition grace is treated in the theology of the Spirit (Pneumatology), as the fruits of the Holy Spirit. The theology of grace is the same as a developed treatise within the theology of the Spirit. Consequently, Easterners have not developed the concept of created grace, a term that appeared in the Western theological tradition.

Pan-semio-entheism is new to you? I’m glad because that is my neologism for my approach and I’m hoping it makes its way into the theological literature via my collaboration with Amos Yong. Here’s what is going on with it.

You are familiar, of course, with panentheism. And it has both orthodox and heterodox parsings. I stick with the orthodox pan-entheism, whereby God indwells in all things, not the panen-theism, whereby all things are within/part of God but God is more than the sum of all things. Often, panentheism is described in metaphysical terms using substance or process approaches. What I am doing is saying that I am agnostic to which metaphysic might best articulate what is really going on but that we can back away from any robustly metaphysical approach to a more vague phenomenological perspective and say that, for example, however one might conceive the soul, whether as some Cartesian ghost in a machine, via some aristotelian hylomorphism, some whiteheadian conception or even in a physicalist sense, we do know, phenomenologically, that there is something semiotic going on — as we are immersed in a social milieu of icons, indexes, symbols and radical relationality. I suppose that my pan-semio-entheism is a phenomenological lead in to a theological extension that much of our relationship to God is going to be sacramental and that signs and symbols are utterly efficacious in effecting the realities they bring to mind. This would clash with any anthropology that overemphasizes our dialectical imagination or that gets radically apophatic and wouldn’t resonate with approaches that are not incarnational or that see us as totally depraved and alienated from God.

Biosemiotically distinct means that, even though much of creation is semiotic and, most simply put, employs signs, that Homo sapiens is unique in its employment of symbols. This is a very technical distinction but it figures largely in the work of Terry Deacon, a neuorscientist who wrote the book The Symbolic Species, and from a more popularized source, figures largely in the work of the late Walker Percy, the famous Catholic author from Louisiana. It is a scientific account of a certain type of radical discontinuity between us and our phylogenetic cousins. A thomistic analog might be “ontological density” ? Classically, I guess this would roughly map over the concept of soul. This extends into a theological notion, I would reckon, of us being outfitted as an imago Dei?

Tags: act of creation, ad extra, ad intra, aggiornamento, anthropology, anubhava, apophatic, aristotelian hylomorphism, Biosemiotic, Bohm interpretation, Cartesian ghost-in-a-machine, Charles Hartshorne, Charles Sanders Peirce, Christian conversion, contemplation, Copenhagen interpretation, cosmology, created grace, deification, deLubac, dialectical imagination, divine agency, Divine Matrix, Donald Gelpi, ecclesiology, economic trinity, esoteric-mystical, essentialism, Everybody's Story, existential thomism, exoteric-mythical, explanatory adequacy, extrinsicism, formative spirituality, foundational epistemology, god-of-the-gaps, grace, grace as transmuted experience, hesychastic prayer, hierarchicalism, hypostatic union, immanent trinity, incarnation, interpretive axis, interpretive stance, interreligious dialogue, is to ought, Jacques Maritain, John Duns Scotus, John Haught, John of St. Thomas, John Polkinghorne, Joseph Bracken, Jungian synchronicity, justification, Karl Rahner, Lonergan, Lonerganian conversions, metaphysical, neoplatonic, nominalism, nonfoundational epistemology, palamism, panentheism, panSEMIOentheism, participatory imagination, pneumatological imagination, postfoundational epistemology, Postmodern Critique, primal being, primal cause, primal context, primal destiny, primal ground, primal matrix, primal origin, primal support, radical orthodoxy, radically deconstructive postmodernism, Rahner, relativism, religious dimension of experience, ressourcement, Robert Cummings Neville, root metaphor, Rorty's vulgar pragmatism, sacramental, sanctification, scholasticism, Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, soteriology, soul, supernatural grace, supernaturalism, tacit dimension, Terry Deacon, The Symbolic Species, thematic grace, Theological Anthropology, theoria, theosis, transcendental thomism, transforming union, Trinity, uncreated grace, Ursula Goodenough, Walker Percy, whiteheadian, William James

Dear Wormwood, Tell Screwtape he’s totally screwed!

JB on May 25, 2010 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Dear Wormwood,

When are you going to surrender? Did Screwtape not teach you that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it?

On Christmas Eve 1814, the United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent. This put to rest any British aspirations to seize New Orleans and the great Louisiana Purchase territory. The war was over but the Battle of New Orleans raged on because news of the peace did not reach the combatants until February 1815.

For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, in every Great Tradition and every indigenous religion, a signal has emerged from the noise. Truth, beauty, goodness and unity have been realized in abundance. And they have but one Source.

The war is over. A victory has been sealed. A great peace has been secured. Yet your battles rage on? Seems like someone else missed a Christmas Eve message?

At any rate, you and Screwtape have thus been reduced to naught but noisy gongs and clanging cymbals!

Not one pelican will be forgotten by my Father though they perish now in a sheen of oil. What should they fear, then, those whom we have called our own in this world, whose very hairs on their heads are numbered?

I promise you that every trace of human goodness, even every beginning of a smile, shall be eternalized!

Like stars in the great firmament, our people shall fill the sky, each on fire with the love they have propagated as co-creative participants on their journey to eternal glory. Our Father would not be one to coerce even a single soul into relationship and so would not begrudge those who’d rather vanish, instead, into some blackholish vortex, where every sin has gone, never again to be seen or even remembered.

What is at stake in our various responses has much less to do with any eternal vanquishment and much more to do with whether or not one will shine forth as a blazing helios with all the brilliance of the sun or as a tiny votive candle in a dark corner of the basement of the abbey cathedral for, as Daniel prophesied and our brother, John, sang: we will all shine on like the moon and the stars and the sun.

What is at stake, then, in avoiding any so-called false irenicism, insidious indifferentism or facile syncretism between traditions is not really an issue regarding any absolute salvific efficacy, as if a people is saved now or here but not then or there. Rather, we have an interest per the motto of the Company of Jesus, which is ad majorem Dei gloriam. In our desire to give God the greatest possible glory, we will thus seek out that voice or that vision with the most favorable signal to noise ratio and cannot deny that it has been, more versus less favorable, sometimes now and here, at other times then and there. That is why we are not indifferent to which voice or vision we follow. That is why we do not pretend that diverse voices and visions can easily be blended.

What is at stake in amplifying that signal to noise ratio via solitude and silence is our ability to move more swiftly and with less hindrance along the journey. That is to say that, in this cosmic boot camp where we are learning how to love (Scott Peck’ metaphor), for one thing, all types of consolations are available to nurture and encourage us. Out of compassion, then, not only for ourselves but all others, we want to get as much right as we possibly can (and I mean right more so performatively than informatively, though both have importance). This is also to recognize that, in such a participatory eschatology, we are constantly working out the nature of our destination in the firmament where we shall burn variously brightly or dimly in accord with how much of our life and time was donated creatively in an oblation of truth, beauty, goodness and unity and thus eternalized versus how much was, shall we say, otherwise squandered on egotistical aggrandizement and lonely self-indulgence, worthy only to be vacuumed into some cosmic dustbin.

And I offer this as consolation to all. I think of every parent who raised a beautiful child, wide-eyed with excitement, wild with imagination, beaming brightly with a loving smile and glowing warmly with the fire of love, only to see them disappear as a teen as their brain became the habitation of some chemical that then took over their body and drove their soul into corners so cold and dark that the child could no longer be found. That excitement, that imagination, that smile, that love, indeed, that child, has been eternalized, along with every beginning of a smile and every start of a gleam in an eye from which every tear has been wiped away.

So, Wormwood, tell Screwtape that, well, in a phrase, he’s totally screwed! Not one shall be lost.

Tags: apocatastasis, apokatastasis, eschatology, heaven, hell, religious pluralism, Screwtape, syncretism, Wormwood

Emergence – a signal emerging from the noise

JB on May 20, 2010 in Uncategorized, the descriptive - Science, the interpretive - Religion, the normative - Philosophy | No Comments »

This discussion begins with a simple consideration of emergence using it as a metaphor theologically. For the few who may have an interest, it gets progressively more technical, addressing emergence from a scientific and philosophical perspective. (The scientific and philosophical discussion is dense prose that I intend to translate into something more accessible in the future. It has implications for the science & religion interface.) In summary, while very helpful, it is only a heuristic device. Further, it doesn’t lend a great deal of support to such ideas as the anthropic principle or to classical notions like telos (final causation). Those do remain reasonable interpretive stances but they still very much require a good old-fashioned leap of faith and an active analogical imagination.

Emergence – a signal emerging from the noise
Various cohorts in our Christian tradition have articulated and practiced what we might call minority reports. And some such cohorts in different places and at different points in time, and in manifold and multiform ways, have served in the indispensable and vital role of a saving remnant, optimally preserving and propagating the Good News.

It may be that our fallible propagation is never without some distortion (is always variously suboptimal) but who could credibly deny that the signal to noise ratio of the essential Gospel message has been more versus less favorable when propagated by now this cohort or now that one? When I think of emergence, for me, that is precisely what it entails – a signal emerging from the noise.

Another Metaphor

We can drill down into the experiences of our faith journeys to discover the many layers of our religious heritage and we can survey our socio-cultural landscape to explore the many contours of our people’s responses to these riches. Our great traditions have distilled these riches that they might empower us in many different ways enabling us to travel for many different distances at many different speeds. Early on our journeys, we manage fairly well with the unprocessed crude but, soon enough, we discover that the demands of the journey require a bit more refinement. Notwithstanding all sorts of impurities, most will power along mostly satisfactorily until their lives of faith experience some form of cracking, which will make it, in a manner of speaking, lighter and more, shall we say, aromatic. Some folks actively seek out the more catalytic cracking of the deeply contemplative life (which is experienced via many different spiritualities & pieties). Most respond, instead, to a more involuntary thermal process as life’s crises apply the heat. It is difficult to watch folks spit and sputter along with lower octane fuels that are spoiled with contaminants. Still, ordinary living will eventually provide them further distillation has been my experience and without much intervention from us. Sometimes, though, a community’s distillate spirits and residuum may well be in increasing jeopardy of becoming much more heavy, much more crude, much more contaminated. At those times, the Spirit may indeed light a fire within us to be a voice of prophetic protest and hope. Yes, the Spirit may fire us up to intervene in a local refinement process to serve another person, or even a community, as a source of purifying heat.

Emergence – as ubiquitous
In the beginning was the Sign … and its propagation by the Great Traditions and every indigenous religion has proceeded with varying levels of success due to various types of noise and interference, characterize them as you will. My lifelong study has been to seek out the emergence of this signal from the noise and many, like Merton and Thoreau, have been my guides, and solitude and silence have been my amplifiers. My question to you is: “Do you hear what I hear?” For everywhere I go, like heaven’s hound or a siren’s sound, the signal thus emerges, sure, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, sometimes clearly, but, way too often, distorted.

What does emergence look like and how might one know it when one sees it? The answer, I truly believe, inevitably involves the full marriage, hence realization, of both the exoteric-mythical & esoteric-mystical. More simply, it involves radicalization or digging deep, because the signal is strongest at our traditions’ roots, not gauged by the biomass of their shoots, but otherwise well revealed in the sweetness of their fruits.

Emergence – implies naturalism?
We adopt a methodological naturalism. This is because we cannot know, a priori, when it is that our knowledge advance is being temporarily thwarted due to methodological constraints, epistemologically, and when it might be that we are otherwise confronted with an aspect of reality that will forever remain unknowable, in principle, ontologically, for whatever reason. For the same reason, however, we must summarily reject a philosophical naturalism. This is to say that we recognize that, if we have lost our keys in the park, we know that we do well to look for those lost keys underneath the lamp post, for there is little hope of finding them elsewhere in the dark. For most of us, that does not, at the same time, suggest that we have a priori decided where those keys may or may not be.

Emergence – as explanation
In the great chain of being there are levels stretching from the quantum to the sociological. There are levels of being within levels of being. There are theories that govern interactions within levels and sometimes between levels, sharing concepts. The concepts concern 1) parts and wholes; 2) properties and 3) natural laws.

There are three ways to look at the possible relationships between these levels. If a lower level completely explains a higher level, then we have reductionism and the strongest relation possible. When speaking in terms of parts & wholes, properties & laws, it is possible that reductionism will not explain a higher level, but we can still maintain supervenience, which is to say that any differences in parts, wholes, properties and laws at a higher level must have corresponding differences at the lower level (covariance without reduction). If a theory explaining higher level properties & laws is, in principle, unpredictable from a theory at a more fundamental level, then we have emergence.

Emergence does not ambition explanatory adequacy; it is only a heuristic device.

Emergence – as predictability

We employ abstractions when talking about systems and their features (parts, interactions, functions & environment). When we invoke different types of causation, they can be thought of in terms of these different system features: material, parts; efficient, interactions including semiotic; final, functions; formal, environment.

What we call information involves the coupling of two systems. Any actualization of information requires a third system, which interprets the causal coupling, which is to say that it exploits the coupling or uses it somehow. We tend to talk about (interpret or actualize) that feature of a system that allows us to most easily predict system behavior or to talk about that feature that most interests us. What we can predict also happens to most interest us.

What we call system levels or hierarchies have no ontological status (necessarily) but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically, situated where we happen to be within a network of systems.
That system feature which provides better predictability is the one we tend to call emergent. Ordinarily, this will be that autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature that tends to exhibit downward causation. (Self-organizing and self-constitution are two different things.)
These autopoietic features of a system will exhibit an entropy decrease. Entropy decreases interest us precisely because they have adaptive significance. They are significant because we can better exploit spatiotemporal order, or regularities, for vital resources.

Emergence – a free lunch?
The total system entropy will always increase but we tend to ignore those system features that serve as energy sinks. Because we ignore those features, from a folk psychology perspective, we tend to buy into the illusion that semiotic processes are a free lunch energetically, somehow transcending the space-time-energy plenum. Thus, for example, consciousness, while nonalgorithmic, is not contra-causal (at least, not necessarily). It just looks and feels that way.

Actualization of information requires a third system to interpret the causal coupling or exploit the coupling (use it somehow). System levels (hierarchies) have no ontological status (necessarily) but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically. An autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature exhibits downward causation & entropy decreases but the total system entropy increases. Physical information (like signs) have a non-zero value only in systems at nonequilibrium with their environment.

While prediction requires information in an effect to be computable from information in its cause, unpredictability (unspecifiability) is not the same as indeterminism. Peircean grammar rubrics apply to indeterminacy (re: possibility), which is epistemic in nature & results from methodological constraints, & to unspecifiability (re: probability), which is ontological, or modal, in nature and results from a putative in-principle ontological occulting. One way these would differ is that any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while any due to indeterminacy is potentially temporary & could be conquered with future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. abductions, paradigm shifts).

A noncausal reality would be an “apparent” transfer of identical information but this is improbable.

Emergence – a quantum perspective?
Symmetry requirements in quantum mechanics govern information generation. How might this tie into the rubrics and distinctions discussed above? “Physical” reality is probabilistic. The category of the Possible is an “objective” reality, perhaps physical but with a zero-value because it’s in a state at equilibrium with its neuronal net environment, hence the Possible comprises a rather tacit dimension that is nonetheless a robustly telic dimension, clearly causal but in the formal sense insofar as it comprises this structural neuronal environment.

Quantum Theory seems to recognize both epistemological & ontological limits. In Peirce’s recursive triad of abduction, induction & deduction, one type of abduction is retroduction, whereby we reason backward from known predicates to putative subjects. In our brains, we are able to strip properties from known realities & reassign them to unknown realities. When we reassign them to unknown causes of observed effects, this is an inference to the best explanation, sometimes predicting, for example, a new species or element on the periodic table. When we reassign them to mere abstractions, this is fantasy. Superpositioning and wave-function collapse thus involve only such possibilities as would successfully refer to realities that are physically instantiable, hence mediated by probability, which is why Schrödinger didn’t employ a Unicorn Experiment. Peirce’s grammar guides us re: the “logical” import of signs but we need an additional category to grapple with their “vital” import. When we add a 4th category called value-realization (a cashing-out of practical significance), the wave-function becomes a heuristic device not a physical reality (it ain’t real). Possibilities are (at least, most likely?), rather, formal causes, physical signs at rest (equilibrium).

Emergence – telos, a lost cause?
I’d like to offer a distinction between telos and TELOS, where the former entails a downward causation without violation of physical causal closure, while the latter is nonenergetic. Classical TELOS is a tautological metaphysical “concept” that adds no new info to one’s system & invites causal disjunction paradoxes. Biosemiotic telos has been a helpful theoretic heuristic (conceptual placeholder) that may fast become a rigorous scientific “term.” Conceptual confusion might arise between them because biosemiotic telos relies on but then transcends a formal causation contributed by a system’s environment.

This structural environment (formal cause) may be at rest or in equilibrium in relationship to the rest of the system (material & efficient causes). As a “tacit” dimension it might be assigned a zero value regarding its distance from equilibrium hence would mimic what would be a nonenergetic analogue in TELOS, but it’s in an integral relationship to a thermodynamic system, in other words, a system feature, and thus robustly efficacious, like a river’s bed & banks, like a waterfall’s cliff, like a mind’s neuronal network. Maybe telos is, in part, non-energetic, while TELOS is, more properly, a-energetic, a lost cause, indeed?

Emergence – chance or necessity?
Let’s now consider the dance between continuity & discontinuity, pattern & paradox, order & chaos, random & systematic, causal & noncausal, determinate & indeterminate, specifiable & unspecifiable, predictable & unpredictable, chance & necessity.

We must distinguish between chance & coincidence. Chance pertains to the future & the epistemically unavailable, while coincidence involves the present or past. Science, is probabilistic and deals with chance not coincidence. Any weak anthropic principle is trivial; a strong anthropic principle deals with coincidence. Only if we knew enough about the initial conditions of the cosmos could we do probabilistic thought experiments to test an anthropic principle. Fast forward to the origins of life and next to the emergence of consciousness where a “design inference” is often invoked; the inference may be logically valid but cannot be demonstrated as logically sound because it eludes probabilistic analysis & thus is not scientific. Reality is intentional, but only in the dictionary sense that it is firmly directional, at least insofar as it is probabilistic. To the extent a bounded probabilistic reality (let’s say human consciousness) presents along a continuum of degrees and exhibits an orderliness, or far from equilibrium decrease in entropy, it might be thought of as virtually free as its intentionality approaches the asymptotes of firm directionality.

INTENT (vs intent), on the other hand, like TELOS (vs telos), would be a metaphysical concept that imagines a platonic-like causation that is absolutely independent of our energetic milieu, confusing an asymptotically far from equilibrium state with a putatively a-energetic reality. This doesn’t demonstrate the anthropic; rather, it demonstrates the anthropocentric.

Tags: anthropic principle, causal & noncausal, chance & necessity, consciousness, continuity & discontinuity, determinate & indeterminate, downward causation, emergence, emerging church, esoteric-mystical, exoteric-mythical, great chain of being, methodological naturalism, minority reports, order & chaos, pattern & paradox, philosophical naturalism, predictable & unpredictable, Quantum Theory, random & systematic, reductionism, science and religion, specifiable & unspecifiable, Superpositioning, telos, wave-function collapse

Why the Oiled Bird Sings ♫♪♬

JB on May 12, 2010 in Uncategorized, the evaluative - Culture | No Comments »

Why the Oiled Bird Sings ♫♪♬

Because of oil slicks and fat levee breaches

We don’t know where your Mom n dem’s at

For our bayous and marshes and beaches

Remain threatened by this ‘n by that

Again, up to our neck in hot water

And the misery misfortune can bring

New Orleans is like the tea kettle

All we know how to do is to sing…

For the jazz here is good for our body

And the blues dey is good for our soul

Hey Tuway pakyway! God’ll hear us!

And prompt succor will surely unfold

Dey ain’t God’s, these forsaken disasters

They’re manmade; please don’t forget dat!

For our nation can never repay us

Dropping coins in a French Quarter hat

Iko Iko ah-nay remains our chant

Joc-a-mo-fee-nah-nay our prayer

Joc-a-mo-fee-no-ah-nah-nay

We’re the city forgot by a care

So tell all the world dat you hear us

Our way of living’s again on the brink

And tell your Congress to help us

For our culture’s near goin’ extinct

jss 2010 ©

Tags: Big Easy, city that care forgot, French Quarter, Joc-a-mo-fee-nah-nay, Joc-a-mo-fee-no-ah-nah-nay, New Orleans, oil slick, prompt succor, rig explosion, Tuway pakyway, Why the Oiled Bird Sings

Catholics in the Emerging Church Conversation

JB on May 5, 2010 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Visit: CATHLIMERGENT on Facebook

Others in the Emerging Church Conversation:
Agmergent (Assemblies of God).

Anglimergent (Anglicans)

Anglicans Fresh Expressions (Anglicans & Methodists in UK)

Baptimergent (Baptist)

Convergent Friends (Quakers)

Emerging Church (Emerging Church Europe & UK)

EmergeUMC (Methodist)

Emerging Penetcostal

Emergent Village (ecumenical, USA)

Luthermergent (Lutheran)

Presbymergent (Presbyterian)

Resonate (Canada. ecumenical)

Queermergent (LGBTQ community of faith)

The Common Root (Mennonite)

Transform (A Missional Community Formation Network)

Ode to the Horizon Eleven

JB on May 1, 2010 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

death can bring a night of sorrow
disease the darkness of despair
earthquakes, storms and famine
can spread sorrow everywhere
addiction brings its own eclipse
codependency blocks the sun
this condition known as human
soon visits everyone

perhaps if i had never loved
i never would have lost
had kept my feelings to myself
wouldn’t have to count the cost
but i’d give my life this very day
to see your smile again
and i’d relive every bit of pain
to hear your laughter on the wind

for a single stroke of your flowing hair
one kiss on your forehead
i’d trade eternity for your life
and give it mine instead
when i begged our father for some sign
the spirit did its part
jesus reached into my soul
and wrote you on my heart

until we’re back together, love
and i hold you once again
this broken heart’s become my sign
it doesn’t need to mend
eternity doesn’t follow time
has nothing to do with time at all
love’s banner over us is now
enjoy the banquet hall

Tags: Deepwater Horizon, Louisiana oil spill, oil rig explosion in Gulf of Mexico

Are all religions merely different paths to the same wisdom?

JB on April 26, 2010 in Practices & Experiences, Uncategorized, the interpretive - Religion | 2 Comments »

Stephen Prothero in Separate truths writes:

It is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom

Prothero’s right in that it’s not as easy as many have suggested. But so much of what he talked about involved the more exoteric and mythical aspects of the traditions, including that aspect of religion that engages our conceptual map-making and dualistic, problem-solving mindset vis a vis empirical, logical, practical and moral approaches to reality. Religion is so much more when, as you know so well, it also involves the more esoteric and mystical aspects of the traditions, including that aspect of religion that engages our participatory imagination and nondual awareness vis a vis a more robustly relational approach to reality.

Religions are truth-laden – not in the manner in which they conceptually describe the ultimate, but – in the manner in which human value-realizations re: ultimacies get realized. Interreligious dialogue, then, is going to much less involve conceptual mapping and remapping exercises and much more involve the mutual engagement of our praxes, participatory imaginations & esoteric mystical experimentations. It will thus much more involve an axiological exploration of human value-realizations re: our ultimate concerns and much less will involve any analytic parsing of ideas. This is not to deny its important propositional and discursive elements only to remind ourselves that so much of religious experience is nonpropositional, nondiscursive and devotional, fostering intimacy (construed in some traditions as identity) with the Divine.

I think Lonergan’s categories of conversion (expanded by Don Gelpi) offer a helpful anthropological heuristic: intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious. We can ask how well any institutionalization of religion fosters these conversions and intimacy with the Divine. And our answers need not be either-or, yes or no, but can speak, instead, to degrees of realization of human values re: ultimate concerns.

Finally, I’d suggest that the most fruitful interreligious dialogue has come from exchanges between those who’ve gone deep into both the exoteric and esoteric aspects of their traditions. We might thus reaffirm a mystical core to organized religions and indigenous traditions along with a pneumatological inclusivity without, at the same time, suggesting that all traditions are equally efficacious in fostering human conversion and transformation and cooperation with the Spirit, Who coaxes and encourages us all along.

Please visit Carl McColman’s The Website of Unknowing for more discussion, where I added:

The nonduality I speak of is an epistemic stance, a contemplative approach, not an ontological position. But neither is it an ontology for many (perhaps most) in the East, who are not doing metaphysics in the classical western sense but are instead trying to lead one into an experience. This is a good example of what Prothero was talking about, imposing our own categories on other systems. So, no, my own position is not heterodox vis a vis Catholicism, where, by the way, one would do well do distinguish between its essential dogmas (creeds, sacraments, liturgical traditions, incarnational outlooks), moral doctrines (none are infallible) and church disciplines & polity (both are accidentals & in need of major reform). Affirming the Spirit’s activity in other religions is not syncretism.

Within each tradition, there always seem to be some who will treat essentials as if they were accidentals (the heterodox) and others who will treat accidentals as if they were essentials (ultra-traditionalists). And there will be settlers (w/a conservative charism) and pioneers (w/a progressive charism). Some will establish boundaries (kings & queens) while others maintain (warriors & maidens), negotiate (magicians & crones) or transcend them (lovers & mothers). Many of us experience all of these roles within ourselves through time in a developmental dynamism, so each role can be, as they say, developmentally-appropriate.

These roles and dynamisms play out in every tradition. What we cannot deny is that each of our great traditions has produced great saints. These saints will typically have delved very deeply within their own traditions, fully engaging both the exoteric-mythical & esoteric-mystical aspects of their traditions and sagely in touch with the developmental dynamisms and charismatic diversity (many gifts, same Spirit) of all traditions.

Chesterton famously suggested: Christianity has not been tried and found wanting but has not been tried at all! Similarly, other traditions may not have failed but may not have been fully engaged in this time or that, this place or that, by this people or that. There is a danger in suggesting that all of the great traditions are not wisdom paths: we might be engaging a facile caricature of those traditions and ignoring the developmental dynamisms that tend to take people through different stages of faith, most often over the course of a lifetime, sometimes through a rather spectacular metanoia.

Why do ALL of our great traditions have some truly radically fundamentalistic elements? That’s how I would reframe Prothero’s critique.

continued discussion:

Thomas & Cynthia Lynch published a book called The Word of the Light. In this book they juxtapose, topic by topic, 900 quotations from the scriptures of the world’s five largest religious traditions.

While the traditions do differ greatly in their exoteric and mythic expressions and the manner in which they foster human socialization for those early on the journey, for those who delve deeply into each tradition and also take seriously their esoteric and mystical dimensions, the traditions begin to converge in the manner in which they foster further human transformation. To the extent we are all invited to journey through stages of humanization, socialization and transformation, Merton notes that, even in our churches, many are not going beyond mere socialization, which very much involves, by the way, the construction of our persona or false self, which is necessary but not sufficient for true self realization.

To some extent, at various moments in life, most everyone inhabits a contemplative stance, enjoys a unitive experience, employs a suprarational approach. I think what happens is that, most often, they lack a fellow pilgrim to point out the significance of such moments that they may be more often recognized and then better cultivated.

As it says in the product description of Carl’s The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality: The mystic is not a special kind of person; every person is a special kind of mystic. ~ William McNamara. I really believe that this is, as they say, a BIG possibility for all and that’s why I am excited about the BIG book, which can introduce people to such fellow pilgrims, who will thus help them to recognize these contemplative moments and encourage them on this path.

If there is one thing about the witness of Thomas Merton’s life that stands out to me, it is the notion that many, many people are mystics via an ordinary or hidden mysticism that he called masked contemplation. There is, then, an extraordinary emphasis on the ordinary, in any authentic contemplation. Unitive experiences are most often realized in the mundane routines of each life, each day, and can be realized everywhere and in everyone. It is more so a matter of cultivating higher degrees of awareness and greater degrees of realization.

Tags: Carl McColman, contemplative, Don Gelpi, dualistic, esoteric and mystical religion, esoteric mystical experimentation, exoteric and mythical religion, human value-realization, interreligious dialogue, Lonergan’s categories of conversion, mystic, mystical core to organized religion, nondual awareness, participatory imagination, pneumatological inclusivity, problem-solving mindset, Stephen Prothero, The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality, The Word of the Light, Thomas & Cynthia Lynch, Thomas Merton, ultimate concern, unitive experience, William McNamara

christiannonduality.com Blog

beyond thinking & proposing to imagining & participating

Just Call me Quasi-modal (what Radical Orthodoxy gets right)

Emergence – neither implies nor ambitions explanatory adequacy

What Is God?

Contemplative Phenomenology – implications

Dear Wormwood, Tell Screwtape he’s totally screwed!

Emergence – a signal emerging from the noise

Why the Oiled Bird Sings ♫♪♬

Why the Oiled Bird Sings ♫♪♬

Catholics in the Emerging Church Conversation

Ode to the Horizon Eleven

Are all religions merely different paths to the same wisdom?

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