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Jesus Creed introduced Peter Kreeft’s series on Thomas Aquinas in a post called Learning St. Thomas Aquinas, recently, evoking these thoughts below.

I can relate to people’s ambivalence regarding “proofs” of God.

I like many of the distinctions Charles Sanders Peirce offers. He says that we can interpret Occam’s Razor vis a vis the word “simple” in terms of epistemic facility rather than ontological complexity. In other words, it’s not the needless multiplication of ontologies we need to avoid; instead, we need to pay attention to the facility or ease with which an abduction or hypothesis comes to mind when we’re confronted with a problem because that, in my words, is often truth-indicative. He also distinguishes between an argument, the initial abduction or hypothesis formulation, or, in his words, “any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief,” and argumentation, in his words, “an argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premises.” Peirce devised what he called the “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” but he derisively considered formal argumentation, where God was concerned, a fetish. He distinguished, too, between God’s so-called “existence” and God’s “reality.”

I found it curious, at first, that folks like Charles Hartshorne and Kurt Godel would fool with (modal) ontological arguments but better came to appreciate what they were doing through time. One of the better modal arguments, in my view, has been advanced by Christopher McHugh. Those are all names worth Googling if one likes this type of approach. Also, Mortimer Adler and Ralph McInerny.

Peirce employs a cable metaphor for knowledge, which takes our different arguments to be strands, any which alone could not lift this or that epistemic load without breaking (my crude wording), that when wound together gain strength and resiliency.

In other words, most of our knowledge in life does not proceed from mere formal argumentation via indubitable premises with clearly disambiguated concepts and logical validity to incontrovertible proof. Most of our knowledge comes from a cumulative case-like approach, is very much informal and probabilistic. From a rigorously philosophical approach, formal proofs of God, taken alone, lead only to Scottish verdicts of unproven. Taken together as arguments (facile abductions) along with other evidential, experiential, presuppositional and existential strands, we have quite a strong and resilient cable of belief that is eminently reasonable and existentially actionable, which is to say, with more than sufficient epistemic warrant.

There is a reason that radical empiricism, logical positivism, scientism and modernistic rationalism fell into general disrepute, philosophically: pragmatically, they don’t work. Common sense is a better guide, as fallible as it is. Most people may not be able to articulate the reasons for their beliefs using epistemological jargon and many may thus be unconsciously competent, but they are competent, indeed, and their beliefs are very well warranted.

My chief caveat is that metaphysical formal argumentation, taken to an extreme, can lead to a sterile, scholastic and naive realism, foundationalism and essentialism (with their overly a prioristic, physicalistic, biologistic, absolutistic, infallibilistic and rationalistic approaches to human moral realities, such as regarding gender roles and human sexuality).

Postmodernity has gifted us a more critical realism, which comes in the form of weakened foundationalism, nonfoundationalism or postfoundationalism, all pretty much the same from a practical perspective as long as they affirm metaphysical and moral realism. Of course, it has also “gifted” us with postmodernISM, which as a radically deconstructive approach is epistemically bankrupt. I appreciate aristotelian-like thinkers as long as they do not caricaturize as strawmen all postmodern approaches, such as fallibilism, in terms of radical deconstruction. The postmodern, in and of itself, is not the bogeyman. Sometimes, Peter Kreeft and his ilk can be a tad too syllogistic, in my view.