Discovering What You Already Know but maybe didn’t realize you knew it
1 ) What about hell?
It’s a necessary theoretical construct. But it should only be used to console people who find a relationship with God positively repugnant. We need to comfort them with the notion that God would not coerce anyone into a relationship with Her. Otherwise, for all practical purposes, forget about it.
2 ) What about religion? Is it necessary?
A religion is an axis of interpretation, an interpretive stance or axiology, around which our cosmology spins. Our cosmology is necessary to realize truth, beauty and goodness and, in that regard, it is also sufficient. Religion, then, is not necessary. One can live an abundant life without it. One can realize truth, beauty and goodness without religion. For example, many say they are spiritual but not religious; they are not being disingenuous.
3 ) What do you mean by “our” cosmology? I thought there were as many cosmologies as there were religions?
Cosmology represents the relationship between science, culture and philosophy. Science is a descriptive method that asks: What is that? Culture, an evaluative stance, asks: What is that to us? Philosophy is a normative method that asks: How do we best acquire or avoid that?
Now, humankind celebrates this cosmological reality in many diverse and beautiful ways. But this story of the cosmos and our place in it is not really up for grabs. It’s Everybody’s Story. We are stardust. We are golden. But we’re not necessarily making our way back to the garden (although that’s a rather popular interpretive stance). Our cosmological knowledge has advanced slowly but it does advance inexorably. It includes both cosmic and biological evolution, for example, and the paradigm of emergence.
4 ) How does religion fit in? If there’s no hell (for all practical purposes) and an abundant life of truth, beauty and goodness already available to us, what’s left for religion to do?
Religion looks at cosmological reality and asks: How does all of this tie-back together or re-ligate? Put more simply, it looks at life’s truth, beauty and goodness and asks: Is there, perhaps, more?
Religion, then, is our pursuit of superabundance. To the extent that life is a journey, we aspire to travel even more swiftly and with less hindrance toward truth, beauty and goodness. Religion seeks to augment these value-realizations by amplifying the risks we have already taken in science, culture and philosophy. Religion amplifies these risks through faith, hope and love and realizes these augmented values in creed, cult and code. In creed, we articulate truth in doctrine and dogma. In cult, we cultivate beauty in liturgy, ritual and practices. In code, we preserve goodness in law and disciplines. And this new law, by the way, is love. And its justice is known as mercy. And its methods are not coercive; they’re nonviolent. (Where nonviolence is concerned, I often think of Polanyi’s tacit dimension or of how in semiotic science and Baldwinian evolution there can be a downward causation without any violation of physical causal closure. Such forms of non-energetic or formal causation can be ineluctably unobtrusive while, at the same time, utterly efficacious. This provides a great analog for the gentle, yet powerful, influence of the Spirit on all of creation, always coaxing but never coercive. If it’s any consolation to our human passions, Jesus suggests that our nonviolent responses are experienced by our detractors like the heaping of burning coals upon their heads. ) Above all, we enjoy our unitive fellowship in community. A community (koinonia) of peace or grand shalom, where we find – not perfection – but wholeness.
5 ) If everyone is, so to speak, saved vis a vis any conception of hell and all religions are about the task of aspiring to superabundance, then why all the fuss about, for example, an insidious indifferentism, a facile syncretism or false irenicism regarding different religions?
Well, we are not indifferent in that we want to give God the greatest possible glory, ad majorem Dei gloriam. So, while it is one great image to conceive of us all there together in Eternity, lighting up the firmament to our fullest capacity, fired up by the very glory of God, it might otherwise be a somewhat sobering thought to also imagine that many of us will have escaped as through a fire with our little 40 watt bulbs while folks like Mother Teresa shine forth as a blazing helios. We can believe, in my view, that every trace of human goodness, every beginning of a smile, will be eternalized. Each moment of our lives is ripe for eternalization or will be burned off as ever to be forgotten chaff.
But, far more than any fanciful contemplation of our eternal state, we are not indifferent because not all are equally able to enjoy and realize life’s truth, beauty and goodness, life’s intrinsically good and potentially abundant nature. And, yes, I affirm life’s beauty and goodness and abundance, unconditionally, very much aware of some rather significant cosmic irony, not indifferent to the immensity of human pain, the enormity of human suffering. And, while I haven’t ignored some of those French existentialists (Camus and Sartre), I have paid more attention to their Russian counterparts (Dostoevsky).
I do believe that it is when we awaken to our solidarity that compassion will ensue. So, it seems like we would want to aspire to practice such a religion as would best foster human development and growth: intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious. We want to get religion as right as we can in order to help as many as possible to run life’s race more swiftly and with less hindrance, sharing and enjoying life’s abundance. We seek enlightenment for ourselves, even, out of compassion for our fellow wo/men who would otherwise have to suffer our unenlightened selves.
It may be too early on humankind’s journey to successfully discern which religions are best fostering such growth and conversion, but these are criteria about which we should care very deeply. We need to dialogue deeply and with great humility. I will say this: Religions that get away from Everybody’s Story and tinker wily nilly with cosmology are indeed out to lunch. Cosmology is not something one can just make up; it’s comprised of autonomous methodologies, like science and philosophy.
6 ) Where, then, does the Incarnation fit in?
Well, it is about at-ONE-ment but not, in my view (or that of Scotus and the Franciscans), a penal, substitutionary atonement. In other words, it was not occasioned by some felix culpa (happy fault) as if in response to some grand ontological rupture located in the past. Rather, it was in the divine cards from the cosmic get-go, this, God-is-with-us, Emmanuel. It has more to do with a Teilhardian-like teleological striving oriented toward the future. Most concretely, it’s all about a profound intimacy with a deeply caring Lover. It’s a dance, perichoresis.
7 ) What, then, about soteriology and eschatology?
Well, I’m with all the existentialists in recognizing that we are in a predicament of sorts. But I’m also with those who affirm a radically incarnational view, which sees us as co-creators in an unfinished universe, hence the moaning and groaning in this grand act of giving birth. I suppose I could join the theodicists and suggests that, surely, there must’ve been a better way! But I’ve finally quit beating my head against that wall just because it felt good when I stopped and have decided to just put my shoulder to the plow and plant a few seeds for the Kingdom.
Eternity is not something that happens before or after time. It is an atemporal and thoroughly NOW thing! As has been said, it’s heaven all the way to heaven, hell all the way to hell. Heavenly thoughts that are of no earthly significance will not be realized in eternity because by not being now here they’ll end up being no-where. The truth of religion is found in a soteriology that measures its success in terms of how well we are fostering an eschatological realism grounded in conversion (Lonergan’s) and compassion (leading to diakonia, service), NOW.
8 ) What about God-talk, metaphysics and such?
There is a type of God-talk that begins with cosmology. We could call that philosophical or natural theology. I am a metaphysical realist, even regarding God-concepts. Here we clarify categories, disambiguate vague concepts, frame up questions and formulate arguments. Here we affirm the reasonableness of our questions. This is not unimportant. But it is woefully insufficient for a number of reasons, like the excess of meaning we are dealing with, for example and to say the least. With Peirce, however, after forming the argument and asking the question, we then stop! We don’t pretend to have answered the questions and we don’t proceed with God-proofs via syllogistic argumentation, which Peirce considered a fetish (and I agree).
There is another type of God-talk that proceeds from within the faith. We call that a theology of nature. Here we wax metaphorical with our analogical imaginations. All metaphors eventually collapse of course, but it is my belief that those drawn in fidelity to our cosmology are going to be the most resilient because our analogs will be better, our tautologies more taut.
Of course, there are other descriptors for God-talk, such as kataphatic and apophatic, both aspiring to increase our descriptive accuracy of God, the former through positive affirmations and the latter through negations. These categories apply to both natural theology and a theology of nature. Most God-talk is going to come from our theology of nature. We can exhaust what can be known from the perspective of natural theology in a single afternoon’s parlor sitting. The currency of natural theology is the affirmation: Good question! This does not mean, however, that the lingua franca of a theology of nature is going to therefore be: Good answer! A theology of nature traffics, instead, in iconography. It brings us to value-realizations via a more nondual, contemplative stance toward reality. The chief caveat emptor where icons are concerned is their elevation into idols. In this regard, our 21st Century religion could use a huge therapeutic dose of ancient apophatic mysticism to ensure that our icons do not become idols.
Another good distinction between natural theology and a theology of nature is that the former is philosophical and engages our problem-solving dualistic mindset while the latter is robustly relational and nondual. Even some of the best theologies of nature, like Jack Haught’s aesthetic teleology and Joe Bracken’s divine matrix, with all of their sophisticated references to the biological and cosmological sciences, are poetic ventures, metaphorical adventures, much more akin to St. Francis’ hymns to nature than, for example, Gödel’s modal ontological argument.
9 ) What do you make of institutional religion and such approaches as involve clerical and hierarchical models?
Well, for starters, we shouldn’t confuse means and ends. And, once we’ve identified the means, we shouldn’t so quickly insist that they are the only means. The Spirit, it seems, is well capable of work-arounds?
Even the hierarchical structures I’m familiar with are conceived in a way that gives primacy to bottom-up dynamics. In other words, in theory, the top-down dynamic is a dissemination of what’s been received from below, not a de novo fabrication emanating from above. When a hierarchy, on occasion, loses this integral relationship or integrity, it is in a state of ex-communication, a reality that travels a two-way street.
10 ) What about interreligious dialogue?
We have made progress in moving from our exclusivistic ecclesiocentrisms to a more inclusivistic Christocentrism. I think our next good step is a pneumatological inclusivism, which needn’t bracket our Christology but should lead, at least, with the Spirit.
Those of us with a radically incarnational view of reality can affirm the Spirit at work in science, philosophy and culture and can recognize the truth, beauty and goodness realized on the human journey, which is pervasively graced. And we can recognize the value-realizations that have been augmented by our great religious traditions, affirming the efficacies and recognizing the inefficacies in their attempts to foster intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious growth, development and conversion. We need to dialogue regarding what we’re getting right and what we’re getting wrong — not preoccupied with heavenly destinations, but — in order to give God the greatest possible glory and in order to compassionately console and help others to travel more swiftly and with less hindrance on life’s journey, realizing life’s deepest values and greatest goods.
In Dialogue with the Great Traditions
Walker Percy spoke of Kierkegaard’s On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle:
Like the readings that mean most to you, what it did was confirm something I suspected but that it took Søren Kierkegaard to put into words: that what the greatest geniuses in science, literature, art and philosophy utter are sentences which convey truths sub specie aeternitatis, that is to say, sentences which can be confirmed by appropriate methods and by anyone, anywhere, any time. But only the apostle can utter sentences which can be accepted on the authority of the apostle, that is , his credentials, sobriety, trustworthiness as a newsbearer. These sentences convey not knowledge sub specie aeternitatis but news.
The Art of Fiction XCVII: Walker Percy by Zoltan Abadi-Nagi/1986.
This reiterates the distinction between our cosmology as knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and our axiology as Good News.
A Movement Toward Praxis?
A movement toward praxis might be one of the value-added takeaways for any who resonate with this speculative account. Such a movement is embedded in every aspect of this hermeneutical spiral.
Peirce leads one away from what can often become an endless and fruitless cycle of abductive hypothesizing and deductive clarifying, such as can happen with a sterile scholastic metaphysic, by leading one always back to inductive testing. Indeed, one will there enjoy a recovery of the measure of concrete reality; but this is only a recovery of logical import. Such a pragmatic turn is but a test of truth; it is merely informative.
Neville’s
axiological turn leads us to a recovery of the measure of that which has
vital import, which is
performative. Lonergan’s conversions provide us the categories through which we recover the measure of this Peircean-Nevillean
axiological epistemology in terms of the
transformative.
In Merton’s encounter with the East and his excursus on humanization, socialization and transformation, one can see these pragmatic and axiological turns playing out in categories that correspond to a naturalistic, evolutionary epistemology that then extends to an existential phenomenology. Phenomenologically, any robust description of the human species will require a radically social ontology. This is because Homo sapiens is not merely social but, singularly, the symbolic species (Terry Deacon).
Merton was known for his emphasis on the
relational and situated the human in a tetradic relationship to
self, other, world and God. To robustly describe the distinctly human experience, any authentic social, hence
participatory, ontology must break open such categories as self, other, world and
horizon. It must also provide a semeiotic account that recognizes the
telic dimension of this experience. One does not yet encounter, here, telos in the classical sense or transcendence as a theological notion. One is grappling, rather, with a minimalist telos and a minimalist transcendence. One has crossed the threshold of spirituality when gazing over this philosophic horizon of human concern (Daniel Helminiak) but not in any robustly
pneumatological sense (Amos Yong).
If philosophy and theology are both confessional exercises, what will characterize the theological turn to telos, transcendence and pneumatology, all robustly conceived?
This question brings us full circle back to the creative tension that presents between the speculative and practical, between justification of beliefs and critical engagements of praxis, between our exoteric mythical accounts and our esoteric mystical experimentations, and even between radical fundamentalisms (including Enlightenment narratives) and radically deconstructive postmodernisms (such as Rorty’s vulgar pragmatism).
Our postmodern milieu has had believers searching for an apologetic to articulate what it is that the common folk of all religious traditions, in every culture and age, have always known in their bones. This has been a difficult search because the philosophers of religion, at every so-called “turn,” have repeatedly buried this apologetic by variously misrepresenting it in many different forms of rationalism, evidentialism, fideism, presuppositionalism, existentialism and perspectivalism.
For philosophers of religion, there has been, then, a rather frantic attempt to recover a measure of certainty, which was lost with the demise of various foundationalisms, by establishing some type of epistemic parity between, for example, the beliefs of science, culture, philosophy and religion. It will be the nature of the strategy employed in any given argument for epistemic parity that will distinguish one apologetic from the next.
Certainly, one must attend to the validity and soundness of the reason, the quantity and quality of the evidence, the nature of the leaps, the basicality of the presuppositions, the existential actionability of the options and the integral relations of the perspectives. However, as we sort through our various scientific, cultural, philosophical and religious beliefs, it is too facile a notion to suggest that their epistemic playing field has quite simply been leveled by the postmodern critique such that, for example, one can merely claim that these beliefs are all confessional (and unapologetically so) or all basic (and properly so).
We have already demonstrated, in our consideration of the Peircean semeiotic, that rationality is robustly participatory and imaginative and not merely conceptual and cognitive. From our axiological epistemology, we have gathered that it is value-oriented but horizon-situated, thus establishing both a minimalist telos and transcendence over against any facile charge of an unmitigated nihilism in secular approaches to reality. This is to recognize that the human condition offers an abundance of value-realizations, juxtaposed though they may be with the cosmic irony of its value-frustrations.
How, then, do we evade the charges of either rationalism or fideism? Our axiological epistemology aspires to value-realization and thus to epistemic virtue. Any epistemic parity we enjoy vis a vis our various scientific, cultural (social, political, economic), philosophical and religious beliefs will derive from a shared virtue (when they meet such criteria, of course, which they can but often do not). We must otherwise concede that, even when equally virtuous (being neither unreasonable nor unwarranted), not all beliefs entail the same amount of epistemic risk, hence the perceived (and undeniable) epistemic disparity. This is not to suggest that any increased risks will necessarily take our hermeneutical spiral out of its otherwise virtuous epistemic cycle; rather, we look to each risk-amplification for some concomitant value-augmentation. It is this epistemic maneuver, then, that characterizes any theological (or atheological) turn. Such augmentations of value become cultural data (anthropological, psychological, social, political and economic).
Thus would go any apologetic which recommends the theological turn in terms of risk-amplifications and value-augmentations. Thus we’d describe the movement from a minimalist telos, transcendence and spirituality as a participatory phenomenology and ontology would conceptually map them onto reality with a much more robustly telic, transcendent and pneumatological imagination in play. The cultural data of just such a hermeneutic (the ubiquity of which makes me want to equate it with an open-hearted common sense) has universally been sought after and variously conceived in terms of gifts (risk-amplification encouragement) and fruits (value-augmentations) of a spirit. It is not only the task of the comparative theologian, then, but that of cultural anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, historians, economists and even political scientists, to discover and discern when and where and whether (or not) it is the Spirit, whom we call Holy.
Below are the methodological presuppositions that situate my outlook as articulated above.
This is the precis for a theological anthropology that seems to be coming together in an emerging postmodern pentecostal theology. One day I may be inspired to substantiate these claims. They describe, in part, what I believe might best correspond, cross-culturally and inter-religiously, to what Professor Amos Yong calls the pneumatological imagination.
1 ) However one conceives different value-realization approaches to reality, those approaches are each methodologically-autonomous but all axiologically-integral. That is to simply say that all are necessary, none sufficient, in every human value-realization. (See note below for various approaches.)
2 ) My value-realization conceptions are irreducibly tetradic. Each tetrad functions as a holon or fractal unit which, in various ways, will correspond to truth | beauty | goodness | unity.
3 ) Sometimes explicitly and well formulated, at other times implicitly and inchoately, such an axiological epistemology finds expression in Continental phenomenology and American pragmatism, also in various strands of Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist philosophies.
4 ) An authentic axiological epistemology will necessarily extend from an evolutionary (naturalistic) epistemology.
5 ) An authentic theological anthropology, as a theology of nature, will then necessarily extend from both an evolutionary epistemology, scientifically, and an axiological epistemology, philosophically.
6 ) In each of the Great Traditions and in many indigenous religions, an authentic theological anthropology typically emerges whenever a cohort of practitioners moves beyond an exoteric mythic spirituality to also practice an esoteric mystical spirituality. Both mythic and mystical spiritualities are practiced in all traditions and some mystical elements are introduced at every stage of faith development. So, the emergence of a mystical cohort then presents in varying degrees of mystical realization and not, rather, as an either-or binary reality. This is a profoundly relational and participatory reality, which cashes out its value in terms of intimacy.
7 ) Counter-intuitively to many, humankind’s aspirations to inter-religious unity would proceed more swiftly and with less hindrance — not first by unitive strivings on the exoteric plane of religious reality via some putative reconcilement of otherwise disparate mythic elements vis a vis our cognitive propositions between our traditions, but rather — by better fostering greater degrees of esoteric experimentation and mystical realization vis a vis our participatory imaginations within our traditions. This is to suggest that, transformatively, the performative enjoys primacy over —but not autonomy from — the informative. Good News, then, enjoys a primacy over good knowledge.
8 ) Put differently, orthopraxy authenticates orthodoxy and is first mediated by orthopathy in orthocommunio. Put simply, belonging precedes behaving which precedes believing.
9 ) Esoteric experimentation and mystical realization can be pragmatically cashed out in terms of a growth in human authenticity. That is to say that they will result in conversion, growth and development in our intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious spheres of existence.
10 ) In each of the great traditions, the esoteric and mystical will present in terms of a) some form of critical realism in their axiological epistemologies b) a critical scriptural scholarship c) a nondual, contemplative stance toward reality d) social justice component in their eschatological realism e) an eternal now awareness permeating their temporal milieu f) an institutionally marginalized yet still efficacious voice of prophetic protest g) a solidarity with and preferential option for the marginalized h) a deep compassion ensuing from an awakening to a profound solidarity i) broadly inclusivistic and ecumenical sensibility j) emergent, novel structures that are radically egalitarian.
Note: tetradic — employing categories like truth|beauty|goodness|unity and orthodoxy|orthopathy|orthopraxy|orthocommunio and creed|cult|code|community and descriptive|evaluative|normative|interpretive and science|culture|philosophy|religion and theoretic|heuristic|semiotic|dogmatic and objective|subjective|intraobjective | intersubjective
In Dialogue With Ken Wilber
The most important take-away from what I am trying to say is that our different perspectives (subjective, intersubjective, intraobjective & objective) and methods (descriptive, normative, evaluative & interpretive) or disciplines (science, philosophy, culture & religion or even empirical, rational, moral-practical, relational) are methodologically-autonomous but axiologically-integral. In some sense, this seems to differ from what Wilber has said at times about, for example, the trans-rational. His work is very highly nuanced and he does, after all, say AQAL. However, what seems to come across, for all practical purposes, is that Wilber is saying that these perspectives are both methodologically-autonomous and axiologically-autonomous.
The difference in what we are saying boils down to my suggesting that each of these perspectives (methods, disciplines or approaches) is necessary but none, alone, sufficient in every human value-realization. Wilber seems to be saying that each perspective is both necessary and sufficient, now for this value-realization, now for that. That said, I’m not suggesting that mine is a devastating critique. I do think there are important differences that deserve high nuance and that have great import, for example, in our religion and science dialogue.
I suppose we could say that, when I am using the word integral, I mean all quadrants, all levels, all the time. This is to say, then, that the trans-rational does well to go beyond the rational but has nothing to say to us when it goes without it. What I want to very much affirm is the value in listening to, during every human value-realization (think truth, beauty, goodness and unity), our pre-rational, non-rational, rational, trans-rational (maybe even irrational) voices, allowing them to mutually critique each other. What I positively want to avoid is giving any one of these voices the last word, which would not be an authentic trans-rational approach, but would be, instead, arational.
In other words, authentic integrality does not come from our willingness to give each perspective its say about reality, now this voice for that value-realization, now that voice for another value-realization. Integrality employs a harmonic symphony of voices in every value-realization, all quadrants, all levels, all the time (AQALAT).
Of course, this requires nuance because we do recognize that, as we move from one value-realization to the next, certain of our perspectives or voices will enjoy a certain primacy as it steps up to the microphone and others take their place in the chorus waiting for the conductor to to signal a pause or crescendo or what have you. For example, in apophatic, contemplative silence, other voices may be muted but any value-realization from that nondual moment will necessarily ensue from its place in the choral arrangement in relationship to other voices or moments, even if they occupy, in that instant, a rather tacit dimension. Tacit dimensionality plays a prominent role in semiotic science, as I like to say, ineluctably unobtrusive but utterly efficacious. A person formed in an Eastern tradition may be present to a moment of apophasis with an interiority that will receive its flow like a cliff receives water in a cascading waterfall while a westerner may experience the same moment with an interiority shaped like a winding riverbed. Different efficacies might thus ensue from these different semiotic sea-scapes (however otherwise tacit).
On one hand, I have never worried much about not having an audience because most of what I have written is a defense of common sense and a subversion from within of sterile philosophies and metaphysics. In other words, I think your average Joe and Mary are at least mostly unconsciously competent, which is sometimes more poignantly beautiful than the self-inflated conscious-competents. On the other hand, the average person is thus susceptible to being radicalized precisely because they depart from common sense to inhabit these elaborate tautologies which they then cannot escape, unable to JOTS [jump outside their systems] of apodictic certainty. They do not need a LOT of hermeneutical help, only to be encouraged that their original native state of doubt even in faith is their salvation, that their ability to tolerate ambiguity and live with paradox is their true glory (ortho-doxy). It’s the only thing that can save our species: Healthy doubt, Therapeutic uncertainty.
In Dialogue With Gadamer
Cynthia R. Nielsen, at Per Caritatem writes:
“In a sense, the C major triad is both a one and a many-it is a C major triad and thus has an integral unity of meaning; yet, it is a many because of its intimate connection to and function within the symphony itself-that place where it lives and moves and has its being. The dialectical self-cancelling movement occurs due to the fact that as the C major triad emerges from the background of the whole, it must “cancel” part of itself (the whole) in order to do so. (This sounds very Heideggerian, which is no surprise given the latter’s influence on Gadamer). Yet, to avoid mis-interpretation, it must not become completely severed from the whole, lest in a very real sense it die. If this is a correct understanding of Gadamer on this point, there are some interesting Christian connections to be made.”
In Dialogue With Walker Percy
1 ) I suppose all we’ve really done in saying that the descriptive, interpretive and normative are methodologically autonomous but axiologically integral is that we have affirmed, with Peirce, that a descriptive, inductive science and an interpretive, abductive metaphysic and a normative, deductive philosophy are irreducibly triadic (Walker Percy’s Delta Factor). This is not unrelated to Walker Percy’s consideration of the various antinomies of science and philosophy vis a vis culture in that the source of antinomy lies in the limitations of the methods, themselves. Thus the need for mutual critique and meta-critique. Thus our recognition of manifold and multiform dynamics: teleological, perspectival, methodological, developmental, paradoxical and integral. Think here, too, of Percy’s treatment of the irreducible character of intersubjectivity.
2 ) And, perhaps, with Neville, our affirmation of the evaluative (culture) is but the application of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, a recognition of the end to which the triad is ordered, teleologically.
3 ) Our distinctions between the theoretic, heuristic, semiotic (Walker Percy’s protocol statements) and dogmatic thus recognize degrees of pragmatic realization in the cashing out of values from our various conceptualizations.
4 ) Our distinctions between semantical, ontological and epistemic vagueness are recognitions of the fallible nature of semiosis.
5 ) Our suggestion that usefulness, beauty, goodness, elegance, parsimony, symmetry, facility and other aesthetic, pragmatic and ethical sensibilities (including, then, various pre-rational, nonrational and supra-or trans-rational approaches) can serve as truth-indicative signs is but a recognition of the probabilistic nature of semiosis as we reason, retroductively, from predicates back to putative subjects, for example, very often from effects to causes (and such known, or even unknown, subjects or causes to which only those predicates or effects could be proper). This is also to recognize that deductive, inductive and abductive inferences get progressively weaker even as we recognize that they’re all we’ve got to work with.
6 ) Our equiplausibility principle recognizes this probabilistic nature of semiosis and affirms such distinctions as between information and news (Walker Percy’s Message in a Bottle) or informative and performative knowledge, affirming that our solutions to many of life’s paradoxes, ironies and questions are not so much theoretical as they are practical in that they provide us with existentially actionable knowledge, employing more so our participatory imagination than our propositional (conceptual map-making) cognition.
7 ) Finally, we step back from metaphysics, with Percy prescinding entirely from final ontological constructions as befits an empirical science, and approaching existential realities solely in light of an empirical finding – the uniquely human symbolic transformation (Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism).
In Dialogue With Reformed Epistemology & Radical Orthodoxy
This is really an outline for a book. But it also reflects an attempt on my part to identify exactly what it is that I am trying to offer to postmodern theological discourse. Of course I have rejected foundationalism but I am also rejecting the “solution” offered by Reformed epistemology. I am deeply sympathetic to Radical Orthodoxy and its aim to mediate between faith and reason but am offering what I think is an indispensable corrective.
Too many in RO seem to be saying that philosophy, metaphysics and theology are integrally-related methodologically and thereby overcome any insidious dualisms with their claim that all approaches are at bottom confessional. Their intuition that all of these approaches to reality have confessional elements is spot on but these approaches to reality remain, indeed and nevertheless, methodologically autonomous. If these approaches stay out of each others’ way, it is not because they’ve been methodologically conflated, it’s because they are asking distinctly different questions, employing distinctly different commitments, all as explicated in our own heuristic. RO is correct in that these approaches are integrally-related. Our corrective is that this integral relationship is axiological and not methodological.
All put another way, we do want to affirm faith and reason while avoiding fideism and rationalism. The Reformed strategy reclassifies faith as a basic presupposition, immunizing it from an autonomous philosophy. RO’s strategy reclassifies faith AS reason so fideism and rationalism dissolve in a categorial disappearing act.
If, in the first instance, a belief in God is basic (and supposedly properly so, at that) and, in the next, all presuppositional beliefs are confessional (and unapologetically so, at that), both fideism and rationalism indeed disappear and, along with them, so do philosophy and metaphysics and, along with them, any lingua franca for conducting interreligious dialogue and, further, any autonomous methodology for adjudicating between competing truth claims.
Our axiological epistemology employs another strategy to overcome both fideism and rationalism a) affirming the confessional nature of our methods via a contrite fallibilism and b) integrally-relating the distinct approaches to reality axiologically but c) maintaining the methodological autonomy of those approaches. Unlike the Reformed strategy, we do not redefine the essential nature of different types of belief but do otherwise distinguish them vis a vis epistemic risks. Unlike the RO strategy, we do not invoke epistemic parity between different types of belief vis a vis their different risk profiles but we do recognize and affirm an epistemic parity vis a vis their shared epistemic virtues. Faith remains. Reason remains. Philosophy remains. Metaphysics remains. Because all play an indispensable role in every human value-realization, fides et ratio are preserved and fideism and rationalism are thus avoided. (Essay for another day: John Duns Scotus is the wrong theological whipping boy for RO!)
Click on the Questions symbol above to meet Bill & Jacki Dahl, whom I “met” via Ron Cole!Bill &
Below, I will employ a Strategic Plan paradigm to characterize and organize the emerging church conversation employing what might, at first, appear to be characteristically Catholic categories. In doing so, I hope to emphasize how this conversation proceeds more from a consideration of questions rather than answers, practices rather than conclusions, methods rather than systems.
Before laying out a Cathlimergent approach, I want to build a conceptual bridge to the approaches taken by many of our Protestant sisters and brothers. Dialogue about prescriptive realities is very much dependent on fair and accurate descriptive representations (avoiding unnecessary strawmen and ad hominems). When it comes to good scholarship and civil discourse, few have gone about it better than the author of 
The outline below is meant to be comprehensive but not exhaustive. In each category are sample strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities and sample resources. It is intended as a catalyst for constructive conversation and a guideline for dialogue, a conceptual bridge-builder or heuristic device. It is expected that you will engage this outline, perhaps even suggesting an entirely different paradigm, certainly adding different strengths, weaknesses, threats, opportunities and resources, raising new questions and concerns, breaking open new categories.
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In the John Keats poem, Ode On A Grecian Urn, we hear: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I see what he was driving at but that doesn’t withstand philosophical scrutiny.
The pattern that seems to inevitably emerge in most human enterprises seems to be a matrix that includes, on one axis, the values of 1) truth 2) beauty 3) goodness 4) unity, and, on the other axis, the different approaches to those values of the 1) objective 2) subjective 3) intraobjective 4) intersubjective.
The postmodern critique did not challenge correspondence theory or metaphysical realism, a radically deconstructive postmodernism did that but was not successful, theoretically, which is not to say that we do not see a practical nihilism playing out in various aspects of postmodernity. It is to recognize that, as a system or school or conclusion, radical deconstruction was philosophically bankrupt and intrinsically incoherent.
The interpretive, the subjective, the logical, the rational, the ritual, the cosmological, beauty for beauty’s sake, virtue for virtue’s sake – all represent the intrinsically rewarding dynamics of pure play, of art, of symmetry, elegance, parsimony, simplicity, of pattern dancing with paradox, of order mingling with chaos, of chance teasing necessity, of the systematic emerging from the random and similar fugues in reality. Like utility and coherence, such realities as symmetry, parsimony and elegance are not robustly truth-conducive but are, instead, more weakly truth-indicative. What is useful or beautiful will not necessarily be true, but since what is true is useful and beautiful, we have some probabilistic indication that a reality that is pragmatic and beautiful is certainly more likely to be true than other alternatives. Such is pragmatism, properly conceived, which has no relationship to the corrosive pragmatic so-called theory of truth, which most folks suitably deride.
As it is, with so many different authorities (religious traditions) around, all appealing to diverse foundational sources (scriptures & traditions & natural laws) and no way to successfully adjudicate between them in a logically coercive way, appeals to a foundational epistemology coupled with an authoritarian deontology aren’t going to take us very far, either meta-ethically or toward the articulation of a more global ethic.
