Science, Philosophy, Culture & Religion
JB on October 10, 2009 in Axiological, Cosmological, Methods & Approaches, Practices & Experiences, Provisional Closures & Systems, Uncategorized, the descriptive - Science, the evaluative - Culture, the interpretive - Religion, the normative - PhilosophyHumans do not need a god-concept to establish a cosmic origin, free will, human intelligence, reality’s intelligibility, morality or spirituality. And while it is quite natural for us to aspire to interpret reality through religious questioning, we don’t need definitive answers to such questions in order to consider life good, for the most part, notwithstanding that reality remains very much ambiguous for us and undeniably ambivalent toward us. A theodicy, as a cognitive proposition, results from category errors. As an evaluative posit, a theodicy strikes me as cruel. +++ No apocalypse. No hell either. At the most, it might be a necessary theological construct to convey the reality that God would not coerce a relationship on anyone. For all practical purposes, for various reasons, in my book, it’ll be empty. I’m open-minded re: immortal soul, but, push come to shove, what serves us as a soul, in my view, ain’t likely immortal. Good conversation. +++
Walker said: “I suppose my typical protagonist or hero or anti-hero is a fellow to whom a great deal has happened, who sees all the dark things that we are talking about, who’s more or less dislocated like a Sartrean or a Camus character, but who, nevertheless, despite everything, sees a certain hopefulness, but has a certain resilience and reserve, and a feeling that there is something around the bend, like Huckleberry Finn.”
Now, that Walker quote strikes me as a distinctly axiological take on reality. It interprets and evaluates reality and speaks to the forming of our desires and the nurturance of our hopes. It’s an interpretive-evaluative posit that has neither denied nor ignored the ambiguous and often brutal cosmological evidence. It’s a practical existential response that goes beyond but not without the evidential and rational perspectives. To some extent, until we move beyond the extrinsic reward and punishment paradigm — driven by the what’s in it for me approach of our early moral and affective development — in order to enjoy the intrinsic rewards of the pursuit of truth, beauty, goodness and unity for their own sakes, an approach associated with a more advanced affective and moral development, our religion has only socialized us and not really transformed us. Transformed folks have stared into the abyss, in one way or another, and not unflinchingly, and have nevertheless said: “Let’s see what’s around the bend!” and then go on loving, creating beauty and searching for truth. The journey becomes their destination. The quest becomes their grail. Our questions and concerns, hopes and desires, unite us more than any metaphysical propositions and theological answers ever will. +++
If a ball comes flying over our fence into our yard and breaks a sliding glass door, it is not unreasonable to inquire of its origins. While we may never be able to ascertain its unknown cause, we may, from the nature of its effects, determine whether or not they are consistent with any other known causes, like kids playing ball, like lawn mowers hurling trajectories, like pitching machines in batting cages, like homemade potato guns and so on. And we may reasonably rule out any of the above possibilities by inference based on such properties as the nature of the damage inflicted on the door, the condition of the ball, the ball’s putative trajectory & velocity & acceleration as well as its mass & material composition. All such inferences will actually increase our descriptive accuracy of the cause even if only through negation, apophatically ruling out all known probable causes by saying it couldn’t be this or that or anything like them, either. And we may increase our descriptive accuracy of the origin of the projectile through kataphatic affirmation by analogically describing what the cause must have been like, asserting far more dissimilarities than similarities.
This globe we live on is hurtling through a space-time, mass-energy plenum leaving us perplexed and often frightened out of our minds. Our inquiry into its origins leaves us speculating, not idly, regarding its putative cause. And it is the most natural thing in the world for humankind to inquire after same. And I think we at least want to get our questions right and to avoid category errors as we continue our quest. We would not be having this conversation if we did not presuppose that some approaches to the problem are better than others, some more helpful, others downright hurtful. Some approaches deserve to be placed in baby strollers without bonnets and brought to a nearby hilltop and let go in a Monty Python skit. Others have the makings of a fairly good grail quest.
Here’s the rub. How can one say that our approaches to this inscrutable reality leave the universe utterly unaffected? Such an assertion is, itself, a ghastly apparition playing out on a screen of fancy in a shadowy Cartesian theater where humans are alienated from reality, truly getting uppity and holding court on what is a priori knowable or unknowable, phenomenal or noumenal, real or fancied. If nothing else, we do manifestly change the universe, even if only locally, even if only in the manner we choose to relate to our planet and one another, determining whether or not we go out with an ecological whimper or a nuclear holocaust.
I am precisely suggesting that philosophy rocks in just the manner in which you describe. But I dissent from any notion that it cannot hold court on what’s beyond. Some notions of what’s beyond are incongruent with science, inconsistent with logic, incoherent with our shared norms and unacceptable vis a vis the moral and practical courses of action they inspire, on which humans then embark. Good philosophy holds court on things beyond and, although it has not yet, at this point of humankind’s journey, rendered a proved verdict for any given worldview, it has competently and within its jurisdiction adjudicated both disproved and unproved (Scottish) verdicts. While there is no room for epistemic hubris, we need not surrender to an excessive epistemic humility or radical apophaticism.
I understand and appreciate, then, that a nuanced agnosticism, nontheism or even nonmilitant atheism might have the same epistemic status as my own nuanced theism. Good philosophy helps us adjudicate an unproved verdict, which is not unimportant over against competing worldviews, including fundamentalistic theisms, scientistic atheisms and unmitigated practical nihilisms, which can be disproved. These competing worldviews all exert an incredible amount of normative impetus affecting the moral and practical approaches of the people who hold them, suggesting descriptions of what might ail them and insidious prescriptions for what might cure those ails. I don’t just make coughing noises regarding their bullshit. I enter the courtroom and argue my case, suggesting interdiction of these very real dangers.
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RE: If you honestly think that philosophy can speak about the beyond, then you need to understand that you do not have the common ground with Ira (or myself) you suppose, because we are thoroughly Wittgensteinian, at least in that respect. +++
I affirm a fallibilist, metaphysical realism and a semiotic pragmatism. I’m with Wittgenstein’s student, Anscombe, when it comes to such arguments as have been advanced, for example, by CS Lewis, on occasion. But I do not buy into a Kierkegaardian fideism, which seems to me to be an over-correction to an Hegelian scientism. Neither do I buy into a Kantian transcendentalism, which should have confronted the Humean critique practically. I see much value in what Wm. James and and Pascal had to say, but correct them with Peirce.
RE: Epistemic hubris or no, I find it astounding that you’re still able to assert (even without display) that philosophy “holds court on things beyond,” and more astounding still that you seem to expect philosophy to have something definitive to say on the matter in the future. +++
I’m with GK Chesterton in that it is too early on humankind’s journey to say that reality is unknowable. Our knowledge advance is slow but inexorable. I made clear that nothing is being proved. My findings were epistemological critiques of scientism, fideism and nihilism, also essentialism and nominalism.
RE: You beat down a sad looking straw man when you come back against Ira’s statement that the universe goes on unaffected with a homily on global warming and nuclear holocaust. That is not what Ira meant, and I think you know that. Ira meant that whatever constitutes the universe, determines its laws (i.e., the fact that what we do with machinery can damage our world and potentially affect gravitational forces in our solar system) is unchanged by our conjectures as to ultimate causality or our speculations about the meaning of it all. +++
Thanks for the clarification. I guess I was working on the assumption that his rhetorical flourish was something other than a trivial grasp of the obvious. Our ongoing attempts to enhance our modeling power of reality do matter greatly. My point is that some models work better.
RE: I am also astounded that you continue to carry the Thomistic party line about the naturalness of causal questions with regard to the universe as a whole. Philosophy and science both converge here to tell us that the question of the origin of space and time is a confused question, precisely because we cannot know what “rules” govern “nothing.” +++
Wrong. I am not taking existence as a predicate of being, here. I do not even buy into an a priori assertion that the universe is eternal vs a product of creatio ex nihilo. Who knows? It was Wittgenstein who said that it is not HOW things are but THAT things are which is the mystical. That sounds a lot like Heidegger’s query: Why is there not rather nothing? Sounds to me like the Thomists, Wittgenstein, Heidegger et al might be reifying this conception called “nothing” and I have no a priori reason to know whether or not it successfully refers.
One might, instead, more profitably invoke Godel and our inability to prove a system’s axioms within the same formal system. Alas, that is not satisfying either because we humans do not advance our knowledge solely through formal symbol systems. Sometimes we can see the truth of our axioms even though we cannot prove them, which is to admit, for example, that one needn’t work halfway through the Principia with Whitehead and Russell in order to see the truth in the axioms used to prove 2 + 2 =4.
A better question might be: Why is there not rather something else? At any rate, I think someone else is confused if they equate quantum vacuum fluctuations with nothing.
RE: As for your penultimate comment, I find your protestations against alleged simplistic applications of “good” to God in the name of analogia entis quite unpersuasive. If God kills babies, that isn’t good to the nth degree. That defies any sense of good that anybody would ordinarily affirm. If the God of the Bible is good, then we have no way to know what “good” means, and it ceases to be a useful category for philosophical and ethical reflection. If, on the other hand, we do know what good means, then the actions of the biblical God do not transcend good; they contradict it. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of any putative almighty, beneficent creator of this particular world. +++
What’s with all of these Thomistic references? You seem to have me in a cage that I do not choose to inhabit. I do not even buy into the dualistic distinctions between essentialism and nominalism, substance and process approaches, the noumenal and phenomenal and such. I prescind to a more phenomenologial stance with a semiotic realism. Our conceptions have value insofar as we can cash same out pragmatically (as a test of truth, not a theory of truth). Whatever our conception of good is vis a vis the predicates and attributes we want to apply, that conception and those predicates don’t lose intelligibility just because they get employed in a metaphor. Perhaps we might concede that some metaphors invoke analogies that are so very weak as to provide us very little information about the concept we are trying to describe? That is certainly true. However, when we are talking about a reality as BIG as God, a little bit of info goes a long way.
RE: Mystifying otherwise plain terms through this principle of divine analogy is in my mind a process that conveniently benefits theism, and not a process that is rationally justifiable prior to or outside of those very definitions of the divine that require such mystification in order to be sustained. +++
Look, we know that, in our attempts to enhance our modeling power of reality, we will all inhabit somewhat elaborate tautologies. But just because a statement is tautological doesn’t mean it is not otherwise true. It only means that we have not added any new info to our systems. But some tautologies are more taut than others and some metaphors are more resilient than others, even if all eventually collapse due to circular references, causal disjunctions, question begging or infinite regressions.
RE: And nobody applied random to God. Random was applied to the world, and it is a critique of the claim that there is a moral order to this universe. Random is the description of the world given by the author of Ecclesiastes. It is not an attribute ascribed to God, but an attribute ascribed to the world that has implications for any putative god concept. +++
The problem perdures. No such implications can play themselves out because a more fundamental problem remains, which is that random does not successfully refer to the world.
RE: analogia
My invocation of analogy does not imply an analogy of being. I do not have a problem with same, however, as long as it is considered a fallible metaphysic.
I have a BIG problem when a highly speculative metaphysic is given an inordinate amount of normative impetus. Our de-ontologies should be considered as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. Put more simply, there are certain moral positions that end up being essentially religious because they have not been successfully translated in a way that would enable the diverse members of our pluralistic society to reason together.
I do not subscribe to any given metaphysic even as I affirm the enterprise as a viable but fallibilist venture. One doesn’t need a root metaphor or ontology to speak analogically and use metaphors. We can begin in media res with signs and symbols and concepts that have already been negotiated by a given community of inquiry and then have meaningful discussions about such matters, for example, as unknown causes and such effects as might be proper to them alone. We do this all the time in forensic criminal science and in highly speculative theoretical physics. Our analogies get progressively weaker as we begin to employ more and more concepts that have not been negotiated in this or that community, such as those that might still be in negotiation or even those that have not been negotiated at all.
Once we get past the Barthian hyperbole, even the analogia entis can get properly reappropriated:
Who’s Afraid of the Analogia Entis?
As Seinfeld once said: I’m not a Thomist – not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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RE: And our point is that one model’s “working better” than another doesn’t make it really real. Nobody here is claiming that all metaphysical claims are equally fantastic. Just that they’re all basically fantastic.
The pomo critique, properly considered per my view, did not dispossess us of our theory of truth, which remains a nuanced correspondence. It properly changed our theories of knowledge from a naive realism to different types of critical realism (some nonfoundational, others a weakened foundationalism).
There are a host of criteria we can apply to working hypotheses like external congruence, internal coherence, logical consistency, inferential fecundity, interdisciplinary consilience, hypothetical consonance, symmetry, parsimony, elegance, abductive facility, pragmatic utility and on and on. Each such criterion, applied alone, amounts to a formal fallacy like the one you implicitly charged me with re: what works.
But it would amount to a caricature of human knowledge to suggest that only the stronger forms of inference, like deduction and induction, lead us to what we call knowledge, as if we only advance same in formal, truth- conducive argumentation. Rather, reasoning our way retro-ductively back from such predicates as usefulness, elegance, parsimony and so on, most human knowledge advances fallibly as we reason our way informally, employing truth-indicative criteria. Not everything that is useful is true, indeed; that would be an insidious pragmatism. But we can say that what is useful, what works, has a higher probability of being true or real.
And thus theologians have coined the aphorism that orthopraxis authenticates orthodoxy. And so we establish criteria for cashing out the value of our various theological conceptions in terms of their ability to foster (rather than stifle), for example, intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious development.
I do not want to defend a position that suggests that metaphysical claims are not fantastic, which is likely why I don’t subscribe to any given ontology. But I do defend the project. We do not know, a priori, when it is that our knowledge advances will be thwarted by methodological constraints, epistemically, or will be otherwise halted by some in-principle occulting, ontologically. But we generally eschew the latter assumption because it inevitably leads us down an epistemic cul-de-sac and assume the former, because it fuels our search in hope. The chief problem with any anxiety to annihilate metaphysics, though, is that we do away with speculative theoretical science along with it.
All philosophical theology has ever done is to clarify the nature of our questions and to demonstrate that some of our putative answers are not unreasonable even if not provable. So, there is no denying the series of leaps we take, for example, over against solipsism and nihilism and the humean critique of our common sense notions of causality, and for some, also the leap called faith.
But we need to examine the nature of these leaps and I find that those that go beyond descriptive science and normative philosophy but not without them will much better foster human development. And we can measure same, not without difficulty, empirically. In which civilizations did science eventually flourish and where was it stillborn? Which cultural cohorts are turning out radical fundamentalists, militarism, moral statism and creationism?
Reality is no longer carved into discernible ontological joints or disciplines, but human knowledge still relies on different orders of abstraction and we need to govern this process, best we can. Getting radically apophatic and mysterian is self-defeating and not defensible, a priori. I will say this, that for all practical purposes, the deeper we get into the structures of matter and the closer we get to the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the more intractable are our problems. And I further acknowledge that, from what we observe in emergent processes, there is even novelty in the laws governing properties; ergo, there is a danger in extrapolating such laws as might, for all practical purposes, be as local, cosmologically, as the by-laws of our neighborhood Bridge Clubs. This might compel us to focus our analogia also on Christocentric realities and what Jesus reveals about God’s nature, in particular, and not just on the metaphors that He employed in His parables and discourses employing Mother Nature, in general.
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I’m very sympathetic to radical orthodoxy and some of my ideas, originating w/Lonergan, very much resonate with Hauerwas, Milbank, even Lindbeck. BUT, aside from some very general observations, sociologic metrics that would help us figure out which ecclesiologies have been delivering the goods are difficult to come by and hard to interpret. All of the great traditions have turned out mixed results, each with its own set of problems. And if “we” (the anglo and roman catholics) truly believe in a radically incarnational reality with a profusely pneumatological presence, then we must recognize and affirm the efficacies of the Spirit in all peoples and places, wherever the fruits are manifest, including nontheistic sources. Sanity and sanctity appear to run horizontally across the denominations and traditions rather than within this one or that. I would thus mightily resist any new triumphalism, colonialism, paternalism, hierarchicalism, ecclesiocentrisms, elitism and so on. So, we don’t want to trade one fundamentalism for another. That’s my fear.In my tradition, much emphasis is laid on the fact that we do not want to fall prey to an insidious indifferentism (one approach versus another doesn’t matter), a facile syncretism (one can just wily nilly pick and choose and combine different elements eclectically) or a false irenicism (seeing a peace between traditions and denominations that is not really there). And so, gladly and willingly stipulating to an eschewal of any indifferentism, syncretism or irenicism, STILL, vis a vis the sociologic metrics of what should be the fruits of the spirit of this denomination or tradition versus that, I would ask: SHOW ME THE &*^%ING BEEF!
And I’m afraid the problem is that it might be WAY too early on humankind’s journey to be able to successfully adjudicate such differences between traditions and denominations. So, in my view, we need to chill and dialogue.
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Truth be known, some of the feedback I’ve gotten is that I’m being too hard on or even dismissive of metaphysics. And it is all really the same old teasing out of the differences between our analogical and dialectical imaginations.
We know that analogy and metaphor are indispensable in our attempts to describe unknown causes even in science, where we do not really need a root metaphor in order to proceed profitably. And we know that we employ apophatic and kataphatic modes to increase descriptive accuracy in our ordinary speech, kataphasis proceeding via affirmation and apophasis by negation. So, we recognize and affirm these modalities, in general.
A problem arises, however. And it is the one we were dancing around. Not all analogies are equally direct or strong or useful. In God-talk, we employ only the weakest of analogy, metaphor. Most of this metaphor takes place from a stance within the faith as a theology of nature. As for the type that takes place prior to the faith, a natural philosophy or theology, it can prove nothing, syllogistically.
What I am attempting to do with my method is to preserve analogy, in general, as useful speech, while at the same time providing a rubric for different degrees of usefulness. For example, we need it to advance particle physics as we infer new particles from novel effects of heretofore unknown causes. But it has also been applied to cosmic origins, such as when we employ imaginary numbers using the square root of negative one to devise an hypothesis that the universe is finite but unbounded. And it has been applied to putative primal realities, such as when arguments have been advanced for primal origin, primal being, primal cause, primal goals, primal order, primal meaning and the classical so-called proofs – ontological, cosmological, teleological, axiological, epistemological and so on.
Peirce drew a distinction between the initial abduction of an hypothesis or the formulation of an argument, itself, and what he called argumentation or the process of reasoning through to a conclusion, syllogistically. We recognize the possibility that there might be a particular question begging and that our attempts to frame up some meaningful categories and heuristics in order to attack it is an eminently reasonable exercise. This formulation of the argument is telltale of the reasonableness of our quest. It validates our wonder. It says: Very good question. So far, so good. But the situation can quickly devolve into an argumentation that, for various reasons, like a lack of sufficient information regarding initial, boundary and limit conditions of a system, Peirce would consider to be, in his words, a fetish.
So, here’s the problem. We need criteria, a method, a rubric, to distinguish between such analogical reasoning as pushes backs the frontiers of knowledge and advances science and such reasoning as manipulates abstractions of varying degrees and truly indicates a fetish of sorts. So, we can ask, for example, what is the pragmatic value that can be cashed out of this conception versus the next, of this analogy vs another. In this way, we can avoid the tu quoque comeback that I’m merely reasoning analogically and speaking metaphorically, which is the same thing you are doing, so, where’s the rub?
And, it occurred to me that the rub is this. Humankind, as a broad community of inquiry (or value-realization), and various of its smaller cohorts or communities, do not just go around wily nilly employing abstractions just for the hell of it (of course we do, but that’s a discussion for another day) but, instead, our employment of signs and symbols are oriented to value-realization and, in that vein, have been negotiated by the community (you know, language convention). So, without delving very deeply into semiotic theory or linguistic analysis or anything, I proposed a heuristic of four broad categories consisting of those concepts that 1) have been negotiated, the theoretic 2) remain still-in-negotiation, the heuristic 3) are nonnegotiable, required for meaning itself, the semiotic and 4) have not been negotiated between persons or across communities, the dogmatic.
In a nutshell, then, the difference in one form of analogical argumentation and another vis a vis one that meets a host of informal, truth-indicative epistemic criteria (pragmatic utility, elegance, parsimony, fecundity, coherence, consistency and so on) and one that amounts to, well, a pure fetish, distills down to the relative mix of theoretic, heuristic, semiotic and dogmatic concepts employed in the argumentation. The higher the proportion of concepts previously negotiated, the better our chances for cashing out some value in practical terms. Yes, we all take leaps, such as the nonnegotiable semiotic leaps we take over against solipsism, nihilism & the humean critique of common sense notions of causality, such as the ones we take in favor of such first principles as noncontradiction and excluded middle, none of the semiotic leaps provable via syllogistic reasoning but presuppositions of reasoning, itself, both formal and informal. It’s the number and the nature of the other leaps, as gauged by our employment of too many non-negotiated dogmatic conceptions and too few theoretic ones that then sets apart meaningful discourse from a fetish.
Much of what passes for natural theology is a fetish. The argument formulation is fine and can demonstrate the reasonableness of our questions, recognizing that we are at the end of our epistemic cable of intertwined truth-indicative criteria. The argumentation beyond that gets us nowhere.
This is why I cannot argue against your view that metaphysical claims are fantastic. This is why I draw distinctions, though, between incomprehensible and unintelligible. I eschew absolute dichotomies when it comes to knowledge and prefer to deal with them in matters of degree per my rubric.
This brings us to our assignment of God attributes and the nature of the analogies and metaphors applied in our putative god-concepts when we are reasoning philosophically prior to any leap of faith. How dialectical and how analogical are such? You used a descriptor vis a vis the attribute of goodness, which was the nth degree. I think that matches my own, which is of an infinite order. Simplistic kataphatic affirmations of primal reality are not philosophically defensible. They are highly problematical. But as you said so very well, and it is one of those turns of phrases that makes me say that I wish it were my own, not all metaphysical claims are equally fantastic. And I think my rubric allows us to provide some rigor and provides us some tools to adjudicate competing claims for who is the most out to lunch epistemically.
Not all leaps of faith are equally warranted. When we leave behind science, we have forsaken the descriptive, positivist and theoretic concepts from which humankind has cashed out a great deal of pragmatic value. When we leave behind philosophy, we have forsaken the normative, logical, aesthetical, ethical and semiotic concepts, which are also indispensable. We proceed beyond them but not without them or we proceed at our own peril. These are the grounds by which we can reject creationism and such a moral statism as claims to be advocating philosophical deontologies when, in reality, because of an inordinate degree of dogmatic concepts are putting forward what are essentially religious positions. This is how we avoid the charges of absolute fideism and radical fundamentalism or even a radically deconstructive postmodernism. These are also the grounds upon which we stand to advance the charges of positivism, empiricism, scientism and an Enlightenment fundamentalism, which imagine that the only meaningful discourse is scientific or philosophic, as if the natural progression of human knowledge has never employed heuristic devices with our concepts proceeding through ongoing negotiation and renegotiation, as if our semiotic concepts were not, themselves, resistant, in principle, to the filters of hypothetical falsification and empirical verification, and as if they were not perduring as nonnegotiables only via an otherwise resilient reductio ad absurdum.
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RE: I’m not denying that believers are able to trust that their God is benevolent and has some sort of plan that will redeem a long, senseless history of random human suffering. I’m just saying that there isn’t sufficient reason to believe in such a God.
When you speak of reason, here, are you including both epistemic/theoretic and prudential/practical reason?
And in what sense do you mean believe? In my tradition we pretty much mean an unconditional assent that does not depend on inference, or we mean an acceptance disposing one to trust, or even willfully accepting and acting in a way to inculcate trust, all implying that there is no seeing of the complete truth of the matter. I would suppose this also implies that there is going to be more than one interpretation of a reality that is possible, plausible (maybe even variously probable?) but manifestly not demonstrable or provable.
In some sense, then, the very definition of belief vis a vis the faith life will preclude, in principle, epistemic reasons in that we are dealing with an unconditional assent?
And to the extent such belief will involve our unconditional assent, hence willfully accepting and acting in a way that might further inculcate trust, then it would seem that a suitably nuanced pragmatic appeal might at least provide us some prudential reasons to go on and accept one interpretation rather than another and then act on it. I’m thinking a nuanced Pascal & James here.
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RE: Pragmatic displays may provide sufficient reason to choose one interpretation over another, but never can they provide sufficient reason to choose one interpretation over all others. Neo-Anabaptist Christianity, Buddhist Atheism, Marxist Humanism, etc. etc., all are capable of offering a pragmatic account displaying the functionality of their truth claims. It’s a moot point.
This would take some unpacking for me to grasp, much less accept. In my view, in theory, I could conceive of a host of criteria that might be indicators of the relative practical efficacies and inefficacies of different interpretive stances toward reality, in general, and a vague god-concept, in particular. I addressed them in prior posts. The present constraints would seem to be methodological vis a vis properly gauging various sociologic metrics. Our provisional closures regarding same may not be universally compelling, but this approach does not seem to me to be unreasonable or unhelpful. The truth claims in question are not only a/theological but also often cosmological and anthropological, and the latter are accessible to scientific and philosophic critique.
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RE: That coupled with the fact of the evolution of God concepts throughout history provides good reason to think that “God” is only ever the best thing humans can conceive of in a given context. That is not sufficient reason to assent to the latest ontology.
It’s a reason to consider our “closures” provisional and our conceptions fallible. It’s not a reason to get radically apophatic, radically deconstructive or nonrealist. Your argument dissolves in parody if you substitute Science in the place of God.
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I am very interested in delving more deeply into Wittgenstein’s thought. I very much buy into the autonomy of different human enterprises, as I’ve set forth at length in this thread (science vs philosophy vs meta-interpretive stances). But I otherwise integrally relate them, axiologically. From what I have seen re: Wittgenstein’s thoughts, there does seem to be some controversy re: who has faithfully engaged them and who may have misinterpreted and misappropriated them. For example, what would you say re: so-called Wittgensteinian Fideism? Is that a faithful rendering of his thought or a caricature? Language games, including the religious variety, in my view, are most definitely subject to criticism on pragmatic grounds. Religion is most definitely subject to external cultural criticism. If this locates an impasse for us, then, I’ll just accept that for now and dig deeper into his thought on my own.
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RE: If you can’t see that pragmatic displays are viscously circular, I don’t know what to tell you.
Not all tautologies are created equal. Some are more taut as measured by pragmatic, prudential and practical criteria, albeit fallibly. I think the theme that is now running in our exchange is that some of the things that you interpret as epistemic catastrophes for me are but weaknesses with work-arounds. Most pomo-theos seem to have retreated from a naive realism to a critical realism/fallibilism, while others have run the white flag of a nonrealist surrender up the epistemic pole.
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RE: I think you’ve misread me. I never claimed that religions aren’t subject to criticism on pragmatic grounds. I’ve said they’re all equally subject to such criticism. More importantly, I’ve said that the pragmatic display of, say, one variety of Christianity isn’t enough to make it more plausible than say, Buddhism, even if the display passes critical muster, since it is just as possible for Buddhism to be pragmatically displayed and to pass critical muster. Just as it is possible for Buddhism to be critiqued pragmatically, it is possible for Christianity to be critiqued pragmatically, and there is no value-free criteria by which to critique them in the first place. If Christianity fails a pragmatic test, it can draw from other resources within its tradition in order to critique the assumptions of the critic, thus defusing any threat. This happens all the time. The resort to “divine mystery” is of course the ultimate trump card.
At first, you seem to affirm it in principle, on theoretic grounds, but then subvert that with the suggestion that there are no value-free criteria available for critique?
I appreciate that a problematic can exist on methodological grounds re: the difficulty of gathering sociologic metrics & then rigorously interpreting them.
The pragmatic criteria proposed in my own tradition – orthopraxis authenticates orthodoxy – employs Lonerganian “conversions” (developmental processes akin to Piaget, Kohlberg, Fowler, Erikson et al) as criteria asking how well institutionalized practices foster intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious development. These are cross-cultural anthropological criteria and difficult to gauge but these are legitimate questions.
Of course, it only works if one accepts, at least, semiotic and moral realisms (e.g. w/such distinctions as real and apparent needs, lesser and higher goods & some coherent approach that pays homage to aretaic/virtue ethics, deontological, consequentialist & contractarian ethics and so on; or at least a Sartrean view of our shared human condition leading us to devise similar prescriptions for what ails humankind despite our differences, such as we encoded in the UN Declaration of Human Rights).
And we need to consider such evaluations on the whole. I think it is too early on humankind’s journey to do this very well, but I affirm this in principle and think it can help us on micro- if not macro-levels. Further, it is not unreasonable to imagine our methods will improve. As I mentioned earlier, we can discern where it is that science flourished and where it was, rather, stillborn. We can discern who is cranking out the most fundamentalists, creationists, militarists. The caveat is distinguishing between, for example, Christendom and Christianity, between where Buddhism has failed and where it may not have even been tried. And, yes, the results are mixed. Per my tautology, the Spirit’s at work all over. And this has nothing to do, in my view, with classical soteriology re: who’s saved but only to do with running the human development race more swiftly and with less hindrance. I have a radically ecumenical outlook, but not because I don’t believe that we can exercise discernment between traditions, but precisely because we can.
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I have repeated myself in an attempt to draw out extra responses from you for the purpose of seeing if I heard you correctly, especially when I’ve been left incredulous by certain answers.I see progress in science, philosophy, culture and religion. And while theological science is mostly practical, I see progress in our theologies of nature and natural theology (which is essentially a philosophical advance). And some of this progress is precisely a retreat away from the old nominalism-essentialism conundrum and other sterile dualisms, such as via semiotic science and analytical philosophy. And thus it is that our categories and conceptions have improved as well as our self-critical analyses. And so I do not accept your false dichotomy between incomprehensibility and a final theory of everything. Rather, we are advancing slowly but inexorably even in the manner in which ultimate reality becomes more “intelligible” is my fallibilist, provisional closure, which is backed by a host of truth-indicative criteria.
We do not know enough about reality to say what will remain unknowable. (GKC)
But let me say this in Wittgensteinian terms that you might better grasp my meaning: “To draw a limit to thought you must think both sides of that limit.”
And that is where you have grievously erred in your defense of nonrealism, both metaphysical and theological.
You may wish to consult the life’s work of Wittgenstein’s literary executor, Elizabeth Anscombe, for a more universally compelling appropriation of his thought.
This is a difficult medium without the benefit of nonverbal gestures. You were right that I misread the nature of your religious epistemology, at first. There is a gulf, it appears. It is only in my desire to bridge it that I may have gotten a tad tedious. So, I apologize if I offended charity in any way. It was not my intent.
See you in the funny papers.
Below is an archive of a conversation at National Public Radio on the blog contribution by Ursula Goodenough: Are You A Religious Naturalist Without Knowing It?
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
I resonate with so much of Ursula’s account of Religious Naturalism [RN] & take Everybody’s Story as my core descriptive narrative. I would like to give an account of how I bust a particular move that I consider to be a theistic RN, which will suggest that there are some of us who broadly conceive RN as having a rather Big Tent!
What I do is exploit the ambiguity that adheres in the word nontheistic, which can entail many different interpretive stances. I adopt RN, then, as a PRE-theistic normative stance, which is to say – not as an alternative axis of interpretation, but – as my core normative narrative, which accounts for my philosophic & spiritual concerns.
It is scripted like this: “Nature is all that we know there to be; its source is a mystery; its dynamics generate emergent phenomena of increasing complexity. Full stop. How might one find Purpose & Value in such a perspective? What about the moral/ethical, which entails outward communal responses to one’s core narrative?”
And my answer to those questions: What Ursula said!
The intrinsic rewards of truth, beauty, goodness & unity are ours to reap in abundance; indeed, Everybody’s Story. RN provides my core normative & evaluative narrative.
And then, I do religion.
Ursula Goodenough (Chlamy) wrote:
@ John Sylvest How cool to have you with us! John and I have never met but we are long-time episodic e-correspondents on the topics at hand. And I love the choice that he so wonderfully lifts up. One can immerse oneself in Everybody’s Story as the narrative from which to construct one’s religious orientations, or one can so immerse oneself, and then do religion. It’s a more challenging move — I trust John will agree — than for those of us who only work with one story, but I find descriptions of these moves to be most intriguing (if not yet dispositive!).
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Robin wrote:”It feels like religion and ideas shouldn’t be bounded by nature, somehow. Like by relying only on what we see and hear and know, and holding only that sacred, we are losing something essential, fantasy and imagination and possibility maybe? It just feels sad to me somehow and I am not sure why.”
Robin, what if we say that Everybody’s Story, which is what we all know (from descriptive science), is both necessary and sufficient to provide humankind with morality, ethics, logic, aesthetics and such (our normative understandings) and with what we value, like truth, beauty, goodness & unity (our evaluative posits), which are intrinsically rewarding (iow, the pursuit of same is its own reward)? These descriptive, normative & evaluative stances would form one’s core cosmology. It’s a cosmology that really works for me & speaks of abundance, even given life’s tragic aspects. I’m relying only on what we see and hear and know to discern a cosmology, something I feel like we all share as spiritual quest. My interpretive axis of interpretation, or axiology, while not essential for morality & value-realization, is theistic, something I pursue as a religious quest, hoping & believing (not w/o warrant) there might be MORE!
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Ursula Goodenough (Chlamy) – I am very pleased to see your thoughts made available in this NPR forum, which I hope expands your audience. I still struggle for ways to articulate my own outlook in a manner that is accessible to more people, shorn of philosophy-speak & techno-jargon. No one worked with me more patiently and longsufferingly to help me better tell my story than you, Ursula, which is a testimony to a great heart in addition to that incredible head of yours! From my response to Robin and other category parsing exercises, one might see that I am in agreement with Wim Drees that axiology may be a more apt focus for theology than cosmology.
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Let me more directly address one thing @Ursula addressed: “It’s a more challenging move — I trust John will agree — than for those of us who only work with one story …”
Yes, Ursula. The Everybody’s Story narrative and the RN response that you describe both well articulate what I call my cosmology, which is something I feel like I KNOW (without getting rigorously philosophic about what “know” might mean). What I call my axiology, my axis of interpretion, is oriented to a putative reality for which I feel like I can HOPE and in which I feel like I can TRUST, and not without a great deal of difficulty at times, faith & doubt being a single polar reality.
For those of a more philosophic bent, I feel like my cosmology enjoys an epistemic justification, which means that I look at competing cosmologies and feel like they are not equally probable, and I feel morally compelled to go with the most probable account, even if it is a provisional closure. Now, when it comes to my axiology, or my interpretive stance toward reality’s putative initial, boundary & limit conditions, competing stances do seem rather equiprobable, more so equiplausible. A normative justification, pragmatic criteria, then govern this wager (cf. Wm. James).
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@All – I echo all of these sentiments. Whether one employs good old common sense or a rigorous philosophy, we can reasonably say that questions beg. And it seems that – not only do we not have all the answers – we don’t even have all the questions. And of all the possible questions, it is highly problematic knowing which questions successfully refer to reality.
Emergence, itself, is a powerful heuristic device that provides us some conceptual placeholders. It does not aspire to explanatory adequacy. Along with novel structures and properties, new laws emerge. In some attempts to probe the depths of nature, folks will often extrapolate these emergent laws into putative descriptions of a primal reality. But some of these laws, for all practical purposes, may be as local as the by-laws of our neighborhood bridge club.
We often see such terms juxtaposed as chance or necessity? pattern or paradox? order or chaos? random or systematic? But nowhere in reality have we seen a physical instantiation of a so-called necessity. And reality is clearly not wholly described by chance or randomness. We do see nature presenting us with probability. But probability is premised on a temporal reality, which also emerged. Metaphysics? Caveat emptor.
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
This speaks to our wonder regarding reality’s intelligibility. Haldane said reality was not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we CAN imagine. Chesterton, otoh, cautions that we do not know enough about reality to say that it is unknowable. Clearly, we cannot say, a priori, when it is that our knowledge advance is being thwarted due to methodological constraints, epistemologically, or due, instead, to some type of in-principle ontological occulting. As far as final TOE’s, Gödel instructs us that we cannot prove a formal symbol system’s axioms within that system, itself. But human knowledge does not advance solely thru formal argument. Few need to proceed halfway thru the Principia w/Whitehead and Russell where the axioms for 2+2=4 are proved, but can taste and see the truth of those axioms. Perhaps someday a TOE will be put forth, the axioms of which we’ll find variously non/trivial, or un/interesting, or whatever? Pragmatically, when thwarted, we assume temporary methodological constraints & not ontological occulting, which would be an epistemic cul-de-sac. This is to say that a formal TOE will always be coupled w/an informal narrative. An utterly incomprehensible reality just might be infinitely intelligible?
John Sobert Sylvest February 2, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Ira, re: Is there no merit to admitting that maybe things won’t all be well, no matter how earnestly we believe (or want to believe) otherwise?
Of course there can be merit in thinking maybe things won’t be well. That has a lot to do with why faith and hope are theological virtues. And insofar as faith & doubt, hope & a lack of expectation, are single polar realities, there is no nonvirtue in play when, in the pursuit of truth and beauty, one fails to take such additional risks as faith and hope. I have friends, for example, who self-describe as religious naturalists. See
National Public Radio: Are You a Religious Naturalist?. They pursue truth, beauty and goodness in a nontheistic way that is undeniably sufficient to live a life of love and to realize life’s abundance, neither unaware of nor indifferent to life’s tragic aspects.
John Sobert Sylvest February 2, 2010 at 6:11 pm
Ira, are there unresolved questions on Thom Stark’s theodicy thread? I had sent Thom a private e-mail and am awaiting a response but perhaps it didn’t make it past spam filters.
At any rate, it does seem like we were able to locate our impasse between theological realism and nonrealism. And that’s cool. There were certain arguments that I put forward that Thom considered moot. And I took that, from the context of his other counters, that he meant that in the sense of being not worthy of consideration (2nd dict. def.) rather than open to debate (1st dict. def.). I was offering criteria for adjudicating between competing worldviews and acknowledging that they were problematical, which is not the same thing as being moot. I will be blogging tomorrow at
http://christiannonduality.com/blog/ on what might be involved in busting those moves called faith, hope and love in the 21st Century or postmodern world.
+++ +++
Let me play John Lennon here. Imagine.
Imagine that what is right and wrong, good and evil, is transparent to human reason. Imagine, too, that we can distinguish between apparent and real goods and lesser and higher goods and then reason our way from an is to an ought without religion. Imagine that, except for a few very complex moral realities, we mostly enjoy a consensus about life’s deepest values and have already articulated them in such documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and codified them in such documents as The US Constitution & the Bill of Rights and the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Imagine that, with such a moral consensus, politics was the art of the possible and dealt more so with practical solutions and prudential judgment, even on matters of war and peace, but especially with regard to keeping everyone healthy, optimally educating everyone and striving for full employment.
Imagine, too, that rather than having Republicans and Democrats, with such practical biases as so often morph into ideological absolutes, we would have, instead, the Tenders of the Golden Goose (because they are experts in keeping geese healthy, geese like business & industry & individual taxpayers) and Distributors of the Golden Eggs (because they were experts in delivery of essential products and services). Imagine, too, that all the Goose Tenders & Egg Distributors were all astute enough to know not to stress the Goose and fair-minded enough to optimally distribute the eggs. Imagine, too, that rather than having Conservatives and Liberals, we would have Settlers and Pioneers, folks that were gifted with such charisms as, on one hand, boundary establishment & defense, on the other hand, boundary negotiation and transcendence.
Now, what in the world would religion have to do if it were not otherwise preoccupied with moral and practical realities, much less encroaching on such empirical realities as fall under the purview of science.
There is no question that as one’s axis of interpretation, or axiology, an interpretive religion would transvalue our cosmological pursuits, those being descriptive science, normative philosophy and evaluative culture. Our cosmology serves the end of socializing humans, making us able to function in society, meeting one another’s needs. It deals with empirical, rational, moral and practical realities, as Merton would say, first taking us through the process of humanization, then through socialization. The problem is that our religious institutions have become more so instruments of socialization and less so of transformation.
Religion gains its traction, then, not primarily or directly through the means of socialization and political institutionalization of services and political coercion. Religion gains its traction by fostering transformation, or Merton’s True-Self-realization, or the Ignatian contemplation to attain love, or the Buddhist awakening to our solidarity that compassion might naturally ensue. Religion is a risk-taking adventure whereby we amplify the risks involved in our cosmological pursuits of truth, beauty & goodness into the axiological pursuits of faith, hope & love toward the end of augmenting all human value-realizations. But religion has been domesticated into one more social institution alongside others. The sense of adventure has been lost and the risk-taking aspects have been tamed. It’s become a vehicle of respectability and social amenity when it should be, instead, instilling passion and shaping of desires. We need to honestly ask ourselves: What if science, morality and politics were already in good hands, then what value-added contribution would religion be expected to make? And we need to get on with THAT!
The question then becomes, what if I told you that reality, at bottom, was friendly and that Someone loves you and has dreams for you beyond your own wildest imaginings? How would you respond to that Good News? That you are BE-LOVED! And what if we did all we could to sacrifice ourselves in kenotic, self-emptying for this person, these people, with whom we are sharing this Good News?
There ain’t no Religious Right and Religious Left. Those are nominal socio-political realities cloaked in the garment of so-called religion. We need to emulate Ghandi and Martin Luther King and do an end-around all of these institutions with their sick identity structures trying to suck us into some machine on their own terms. In the end, it can change who’s in Congress and so on, but that would be a by-product not the designed end-product.
The Spirit moves when He wills, where She wills, how they will — and is ineluctably unobtrusive even if utterly efficacious, subtle but powerful, triumphing without coercion. Non-violent civil disobedience and other tools of the trade are out of vogue. WHY? We’ve got viral memes and blogs to publish treatises. Why not?
I’m engaging in provocative hyperbole and could play devil’s advocate with much of this. But I want to offer some food for thought.
+++
John Sobert Sylvest February 3, 2010 at 5:12 pm
A worldview, in my view, is an axiology, or an axis of interpretation, around which our cosmology spins. This distinction between an axiology and cosmology is explicated in an article I’ve often cited: Drees, Willem B. “A Case Against Temporal Critical Realism? Consequences of Quantum Cosmology for Theology.”
Such interpretive stances lend themselves to three verdicts: proved, disproved and unproven. Some worldviews can be disproved, but only to the extent they’ve committed category errors that place them at cross-purposes with other autonomous methods, like science and philosophy (e.g. epistemology). For example, an anti-evolution creationism is untenable. Equally untenable would be an epistemic nihilism, solipsism and stances that abandoned common sense understandings of causation.
Of course, we can not prove such principles as noncontradiction, common sense notions of causation or even a critical realist stance, itself, or disprove such stances as nihilism and solipsism through formal argumentation or syllogistic reasoning. We proceed, instead, with an informal reductio ad absurdum or the essentially pragmatic criterion that going there just doesn’t work, while going here does. The foundation remains bare and we are immersed in irony long before we start busting a/theological moves, which, if they cohere with our cosmology, are rendered, at best, the Scottish verdict unproven. My point is that a metaphysical realism and natural theology are necessary to at least get us to this Scottish verdict while avoiding the disproved verdict. This is what Peirce would distinguish as an argument, a coherent framing of the question, as distinct from argumentation, which, when it pertained to the putative reality of God, he considered a fetish.
When it comes to coherence, some adopt it as a theory of truth. As a semiotic realist, I still hold the correspondence theory of truth but employ coherence, along with a host of other truth-indicative criteria, as a test of truth. Now, for my part, I do not vacillate between solipsism, nihilism and critical realism based on whether I had Cheerios or bacon & eggs for breakfast, even if the irony of my situation is ineradicable. Others might, but I see no sense in arguing with them. While I appreciate that, in a theological move, one will have to further amplify the risk that one’s already taken (already taken to get past a more fundamental absurdity), my point is that any irony arrived on the scene long before one busts that move.
As to whether or not one is open to such charges as have been leveled by Marx, Feuerbach, Freud or even the sociobiologists, those are impoverished anthropologies, which fall prey to what many semiotic scientists, nontheists included, call the adaptationist fallacy. It engages but a caricature of the life of faith. But that’s not a controversy I feel called to settle or even further address.
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John Sobert Sylvest February 3, 2010 at 5:46 pm
My point is, Ira, that ALL of our moves are essentially pragmatic and that your ironist assumptions apply to ALL of our encounters of reality. (But I am not employing pragmatism as a theory of truth. There is a difference between what Peirce was doing versus Dewey, James and others in that lineage, much less Rorty.)
As to your second question, no. I am simply suggesting that our essentially pragmatic moves, whether applying to common sense, or metaphysics, or theology, differ in degrees and not in kind. The same might be said of irony?
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12 John Sobert Sylvest February 3, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Ira, let me say this. I have enjoyed exploring where it is that folks like you and Thom and I resonate and also where it is that we diverge. I am not that anxious to precisely locate any philosophical or theological impasse just to eliminate dissonance between our views for the sake of eliminating it. (And I’m not suggesting you do either. This is an aside.)
I very much like hanging out with folks who care very deeply about the same things I do, who share a certain passion. This has always been infinitely more gratifying to me than hanging around in hermeneutical echo-chambers where everybody in a forum is reinforcing and parroting my ideas back to me. That thwarts growth and polarizes society. Dissonance, done right, can be something we carefully nurture and exploit creatively, engaging others’ views as a foil that helps us to not only deepen our understanding of others but to deepen even our own self-understanding.
One thing I do challenge my religious naturalist friends to do is to not miss the opportunity to articulate their vision on strictly their own terms and not in an over against fashion vs other approaches. This can better serve as a credo of sorts to be celebrated with other like-minded, like-hearted people. (This is not to suggest that they will not also want to return to the marketplace of ideas and engage in an over against way.)
Now, there are some dissonant approaches out there that simply must be discredited, even demolished, because they are dangers to humankind and the planet. In my view, yours is not one of them.
At any rate, my original resonance w/your view is likely rooted in our shared American pragmatist heritage and even shared linguistic/analytical trajectories. RE: the points at which we diverge, philosophically and theologically, well … make for rich reflection.
Reality is pregnant with irony, not a little bit pregnant, not a lot. We can admit this even on the level of common sense. Also, metaphysically. Beyond that, theologically. That reality is pregnant we agree. Is she having twins or even triplets? There is no ultrasound available but there are some equiplausible takes in attempts to answer this question. And we do want to be circumspect.
In conversations with my nontheistic religious naturalist friends over the years, a fondness for Rorty surfaces from time to time. In exploring their minimalist religiosity, I found that we shared a cosmology (e.g. science, epistemology & values) and I’ve actively explored and have been trying to tease out the differences between our interpretive stances or axiologies (Catholic vs nontheist, for example). And I have resisted attempts to categorically dismiss Rorty for reasons I mentioned previously, feeling there was something there to be exploited.
The phenomenon of faith is a reality that, in my view, needs to be more broadly conceived. If we too narrowly conceive it, we do violence to the depth dimension (or immense complexity) of human beings. If we get too vague, it means nothing. But I still feel like, for example, that there is more than the conventional understandings and more than even my nuanced Peircean understanding that can count for what we call faith. For some, it is not a Kierkegaardian leap but more like a single Petrine step out of the boat. In other words, a Rortian Ironism could be appropriated as a type of faith and might well describe, in fact, the type of faith that untold numbers practice and have practiced. I’m not the only Catholic who has mused about this; others have engaged it: The Theological Uses of Rortian Ironism.
This is all to recognize that in science we advance hypotheses that are inherently falsifiable and call them “working hypotheses.” In philosophy we adopt what we call “provisional” closures. In metaphysics our speculation is inescapably fallible. In theology our faith can proceed moment by moment with a response that is “right enough.”
Faith, by definition, has never proceeded with the premise that we have captured God as She “really” is but, still, even our apophatic (via negativa) predications are clear attempts to increase our descriptive accuracy and differ from our kataphatic (via positiva) predications only insofar as they can be both literal and analogical. In other words, our positive affirmations are metaphors and have always only been metaphors.
None of this, necessarily, entails a nonrealist approach. It might get the ironist out of the predicament of imagining she’s not getting closer to reality or feeling that he’s not able to take himself seriously? At any rate, I see a Rortian Ironism as eminently reasonable as either a secular or religious response to reality, all of these positions, again, describing various degrees of pragmatism and irony. I appreciate that Rorty might’ve found such an appropriation repugnant. But I wonder if we have discovered the position where someone like Thom, stands, for example, in between you and me? My own Peircean pragmatism is vague enough to include a quasi-Rortian, religious ironism within a minimalist realism. If this needs more unpacking to be accessible, I’ll certainly try to do that when I get the chance.
John Sobert Sylvest February 3, 2010 at 9:21 pm
So, we have established an accord that irony and pragmatism (albeit pragmatism variously conceived, perhaps … no definitely) are in play all the way up and all the way down, influencing common sense, epistemology, science, metaphysics and theology. Further, we have agreed that realism is in play in common sense, epistemology, science and metaphysics (minimalistically in the last instance). Cool. We can save further explorations for a rainy day.
See http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/offer-declined-10
John Sobert Sylvest February 7, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Well, Ira, I am deeply sympathetic to the idea that some stuff is socially constructed. And I affirm metaphysics as an enterprise that helps us clarify helpful categories, disambiguate vague concepts (not specific terms), frame-up coherent arguments and validate meaningful questions. To that extent, we can at least adjudicate between those provisional interpretations of reality that are totally out to lunch and those that are at least asking meaningful questions. The approaches that are most coherent, in my view, will acknowledge irony, abide with paradox and will not proceed to advance their arguments through some type of syllogistic argumentation, as if life’s deepest questions can be thus answered.
But you describe a threshold (and acknowledged it could be deconstructed, so here it comes) and all things epistemological just ain’t that tidy. It’s too neat, too facile, too arbitrary, to say now I’m a realist and now I ain’t. Our grasps of reality, instead, admit of degrees and these differing degrees require increasing amounts of risk. And faith, hope and love are risk maneuvers and these risks are not just epistemic but existential. That’s the type of candor one might reasonably expect of believers.
But one goes too far with one’s iconoclasm, in my view, to suggest that believers are just making stuff up. Thom Stark’s framing of the issue invites parsing? What does he mean by “reason” or even “sufficient”, when he writes:”I’m not denying that believers are able to trust that their God is benevolent and has some sort of plan that will redeem a long, senseless history of random human suffering. I’m just saying that there isn’t sufficient reason to believe in such a God.”
It is one thing to say that the case for God cannot be conclusively adjudicated through evidence. It would be quite another to suggest there is no evidence.
It is one thing to say that the rational arguments for God cannot coerce belief. It would be quite another to suggest that belief in God is wholly nonrational much less irrational.
It is one thing to say that there are no empirical and scientific reasons to believe in God. It would be quite another to suggest that there are no coherent philosophic and pragmatic reasons for belief in God.
It is one thing to say that our approach to God and reality does not proceed from indubitable foundations. It would be quite another to suggest that post-foundational epistemology and theology must be necessarily, then, nonrealist.
It is one thing to recognize life’s irony and paradox and to affirm, even, an essential pragmatism. It would be quite another to suggest that Rorty’s vulgar pragmatism is definitive.
It is one thing to suggest that our belief in God takes us BEYOND the evidential, rational and presuppositional. It would be quite another to suggest that we make such an existential move WITHOUT them.
It is one thing to lament that there are many who remain stuck in a naive realism with an unnerving certitude and dangerous fundamentalism. It would be quite another to suggest that there can be no coherent cumulative case approach to the reality of God, mitigating against the distance one must leap, or, in some cases, perhaps, step (as a Rortian ironist), with a rather confident assurance in what one might “reasonably” hope for, with no small conviction regarding certain things unseen.
Alas, Rorty’s neo-pragmatism resembles Peirce only superficially. Susan Haack, a neoclassical pragmatist, wrote an enjoyable play that demonstrates their otherwise profound disagreements. “We Pragmatists” Peirce and Rorty in Conversation. She explains: The point of my “conversation” between Peirce and Rorty was, of course, to bring out how utterly different Rorty’s literary-political, anti-metaphysical “pragmatism,” with its disdain for logic and repudiation of epistemology, is from Peirce’s pragmaticist philosophy. And Rorty’s neo-”pragmatism” is not only very different from Peirce’s; it is also quite distant from James’s, and even from Dewey’s. The old pragmatist whom Rorty most resembles is F.C.S. Schiller — the British philosopher whose radically relativist position James once described as “the butt-end foremost” version of pragmatism.
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