Posts Tagged ‘Kurt Godel’


Regarding Towards A Responsible Free Will – Stuart Kauffman at NPR below, is a relevant part of my contribution to a conversation:
Clayton’s post-Dennett debate reflection.

I provide more thoughts re: the Mardi Gras debate here: Philip Clayton vs Dan Dennett

I am very sympathetic to Dennett’s conception of consciousness. That is to say that I am inclined to conceive the soul using a physicalist account and I approach the so-called hard problem of consciousness as difficult but maybe not so very hard. Whatever’s going on in human consciousness, in my estimation, will eventually yield to a naturalist explanation.

The hard problem of consciousness stems from our common-sensical notions of wanting to reconcile mental and physical interaction. The eliminativist strategy has been to deny the distinction. The epiphenomenalist strategy has been to deny the interactivity. Both of these stances are a priori positions trying to salvage our a posteriori empirical experiences of an exclusively bottom-up causality. In my view, both the eliminativist and epiphenomenalist positions, at this time, are too strong to defend. While I am not willing to rule either one out, both are “proving too much.”

So, I consider my inclinations to be very much provisional. The problem of consciousness, as I approach it, remains both epistemologically and ontologically open. And these are the necessary and sufficient conditions for any invocation of the heuristic of EMERGENCE. There are insights from both the eliminativist and epiphenomenalist strategies that I find I can reconcile with my own phenomenological perspective, which is inclined toward a nonreductive physicalism. This is not the same thing, though, as reconciling those other positions with each other.

A nonreductive physicalist strategy, to some extent, abstains, or tries to acknowledge both intuitions. In another sense, it seems to suggest, with the eliminativists, that the dynamic constellations of neuronal net physical functionalities, which we might putatively identify as consciousness, are clearly efficacious — thermodynamically, morphodynamically and teleodynamically (which is to recognize a downward causation sans violation of physical causal closure) — and, with the epiphenomenalists, that such efficacies do not otherwise flow from what our common sense suggests is a classical efficient causation but, rather, from minimalist formal and final causations (e.g. tacit dimensions).

In Dennett’s debate with Clayton, as causal layers were explored, Dennett acknowledged the cultural in addition to the mere physical and biological. This acknowledgment is not good enough, however. Because, as is revealed in his and Dawkins’ other writings, they are giving complexity theory a rather short shrift vis a vis genes, memes, symbols, language and coevolutionary dynamics. To equate cognition only with algorithmic or rule-governed computation is the computational fallacy. It is what it is in humans only in relationship to pragmatic and semiotic realities. To characterize genes as active agents or selfish or purposeful is an unhelpful shorthand. They gain their significance only in the context of the same dynamical semiotic and pragmatic realities. To equate memes only with replicators, as if they were analogous to parasites, is to isolate them outside of the dynamical semiotic and pragmatic realities that they should presuppose and is the memetic fallacy. See The trouble with memes (and what to do about it) by Terry Deacon. The practical upshot of Deacon’s critique is that social evolution and human consciousness are much more rich and complex, which is to recognize that they require a more highly nuanced triadic semiotic perspective, which then takes us beyond our classical dyadic formulations, like S –> R in behaviorism.

When we run into problems like the “hard” problem of consciousness, problems that for most philosophers of science would be considered still open, both epistemologically and ontologically, problems that then lend themselves to the heuristic of emergence, we cannot know, a priori, whether our explanatory attempts are being thwarted due only to our methodological constraints, epistemologically, or might otherwise be due to some type of in-principle occulting, ontologically. In the latter instance, the problem would remain irresolute in-principle, while, in the former, the problem might remain rather intractable but could possibly be only temporary, later to be resolved with future technological advances. A methodological naturalism presumes the former and eschews the latter but only because to a priori adopt a stance that any given aspect of reality is in-principle occulted would lead us down an epistemic cul-de-sac, shutting down our research programs, arbitrarily foreclosing on future investigation. On the other hand, a philosophical naturalism is no more defensible in its a priori stance, which is that we are necessarily being thwarted only in the methodological sense due to technological constraints. We do not know that. We cannot know that a priori. And we most especially do not know that when it comes to unraveling reality’s limit questions vis a vis any initial, boundary and limit conditions of the cosmos. The same thing remains true regarding the problem of consciousness and the philosophical promissory notes that some have issued regarding their so-called “explanations.”

If, in the first half of the debate, Clayton and Dennett established that they were both, in fact, methodological and not, rather, philosophical naturalists, then that is quite illuminating because a methodological naturalist cannot coherently self-describe as an atheist regarding reality’s limit questions. Instead, the methodological naturalist must self-describe either as an agnostic, a nontheist or as some type of believer, who is wagering in faith, though not without a confident assurance, in things the believer hopes is true regarding reality’s limit questions and humanity’s ultimate concerns. Such a believer may believe there is a God or even gods or even that there is no God. But such a believer also knows that there was an epistemic and existential leap involved. This differs from the philosophical naturalist, who has conflated the otherwise autonomous methodologies of science and philosophy, concluding empirically, logically, practically and probabilistically that there is no God, denying any substantial leaps of faith were involved, affirming that others are clearly — how do they say it? oh, yeah – deluded.

Archiving my comments at NPR:

This is a fascinating discussion. I’d like to reframe it from another angle.

Essentially, we are asking whether or not there can be downward causation without a violation of physical causal closure, such as via some Cartesian ghost-in-our-machine. In my view, science has already answered with a resounding yes, such as in a putative Baldwinian evolution, such as in Terry Deacon’s account of the possible coevolution of language & brain, such as in Peirce’s triadic semeiotic account of the human employment of symbols.

To a certain extent, the above-listed examples do not aspire to a robustly explanatory account but provide us only some useful heuristic devices or conceptual placeholders. What they have in common is the notion of emergence, the presentation of novelty. So, even from a rather phenomenological perspective, we pretty much have established probabilistically THAT there is downward causation. You have advanced this conversation with a rather compelling account of HOW it may operate at yet another level of emergence?

Very interesting. Compelling, as far as I could follow it, at least.

re: “I think I do not agree with either Ursula or Tom, for despite their nuanced efforts, I feel they remain in a stance in which mind is an epiphenomenon of a deterministic brain.”

Ursula can speak for herself, of course. However, in my experience, she is not one to overreach in her claims but is very circumspect. Neither the eliminativist nor the epiphenomenalist account apply to anything she has written, best I can tell.

The hard problem of consciousness stems from our common-sensical notions of wanting to reconcile mental and physical interaction. The eliminativist strategy has been to deny the distinction. The epiphenomenalist strategy has been to deny the interactivity. Both of these stances are “a priori” positions trying to salvage our “a posteriori” empirical experiences of an exclusively bottom-up causality. Ursula’s account seems more consonant with a nonreductive physicalist stance to me?
I flesh this out here:
Regarding: Towards A Responsible Free Will – Stuart Kauffman at NPR

This is not an over-against anything you’ve written, just a suggestion that your account & Ursula’s, in my view, seem congruent but address different emergent levels.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Does the same problem really exist if we suppose that classical nerve activity rather than quantum cohering-decohering-recohering are associated with consciousness? Why doesn’t it suffice to otherwise recognize that human ecological adaptations became distinctly sapient via such a novel hardwiring that, instead of being algorithmic, relatively closed-ended & inflexible, became also, in certain parts of the neural net, noncomputational, somewhat open-ended & plastic, gifting us w/fast & frugal heuristics in response to stimuli & co-evolving w/language? This improved modeling power of reality was thus language-dependent. Our phenomenal experiences of the algorithmic parts of our bodies precisely don’t lend themselves to such modeling because they are language-independent, wired differently, and we thus cannot communicate or talk about such subjective experiences like pain intersubjectively w/o using those funny little icons in hospitals w/smiley or frowny faces. As versatile as this new wiring was, still, its heuristics were probabilistic, its behavioral repertoire finite, our range of motion “free enough” but not in any absolute sense. IOW, wouldn’t a structural morphological explanation be more parsimonious?

Sunday, March 28, 2010 4:45:02 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Another reframing issue. I’ve often wondered if the self-brain was a distinction w/o a difference like the old Sorite Paradox, which asks at what point in the addition of grains of sand to other grains of sand does one obtain a “heap” of sand? The paradox dissolves when one distinguishes between logical & efficient causation, in this case, the logical cause being our linguistic definition of a heap, the efficient cause the act of adding sand grains. There may be similar confusion between the dynamic activity of our brains and our naming of the phenomenal experience of same as self. And this is reminiscent of Zen’s affirmation of “first there is a mountain,” as raw phenomenal experience, its prescinding to “then, there is no mountain” in recognition that our naming exercise is logically caused, not efficiently, and its reaffirmation of “then there is” as one returns to reality w/a 2nd naivete that interacts w/the mountain “for all practical purposes.” In philosophic terms, this Zen strategy amounts to an evasion of the essentialism-nominalism conundrum via a pragmatic appeal, a cashing out of value: We recognize that humans will reify & conceptualize but that not all concepts successfully refer & some cause pseudo-riddles.

Sunday, March 28, 2010 5:04:48 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

This is not an over-against, just a qualifier re: the relationship between “the truth of an idea & the consequences of believing in that idea” and a connection between “what’s true and what we might want.”

Not every formal fallacy of logic necessarily renders the critical thinking involved void of use. Human thinking involves a recursive interplay of ongoing abductive hypothesizing, inductive testing & deductive clarifying, inferential processes that are not unaided by other faculties, nonrational even. This is to recognize that most critical thinking is informal. While we want to avoid any vulgar pragmatism as a “theory” of truth, pragmatic utility can otherwise serve as an indispensable “test” of truth, alongside other aesthetic criteria like parsimony, facility, symmetry, elegance, beauty. Such criteria are indeed weakly truth-indicative even if not robustly truth-conducive. They may not have a direct bearing, like the wind at our back & in our sails, but they certainly have a storied history of having an indirect bearing, like a sailor who tacks and jibes and progresses against the wind. If what is true is generally useful, the probability of something useful being true improves (better than that which ain’t helpful at all).

Sunday, March 28, 2010 5:51:55 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj Seth (sandalwood23) asked:”John, does your view of the brain-mind issue allow for a non-local aspect of consciousness, such as NDEs where persons describe accurately what is happening in the room, while they are without vital signs?”

Neither non-local CSC nor an immaterial (or immortal) soul seem very likely to me. I don’t really have a horse in the philosophy of mind race. I just enjoy trying to figure out the categories and like to disambiguate the concepts best I can. I do not a priori dismiss the paranormal or psychic phenomena. Neither do I dismiss physicalist or naturalist accounts of the soul.

Sunday, March 28, 2010 6:19:17 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj Seth (sandalwood23) asked:”John, does your view of the brain-mind …?”

To clarify, when I say I’m inclined to a nonreductive physicalism and am affirming a top-down causation, I am drawing a distinction between that and a wholly reductive eliminativist perspective. I don’t hold to a view of consciousness as computational. I am affirming a telic dimension from a semiotic perspective, which recognizes both formal & final causations. This is not the same as the robust telos of theology or classical metaphysics but is, instead, a minimalist telos or a minimalist transcendence. One might think of it in terms of reality’s otherwise tacit dimensions, which can be both ineluctably unobtrusive (hard to see) but still utterly efficacious, like a winding riverbed that redirects the flows of powerful rivers, like cliffs underlying cascading waterfalls, like our own morphological brain-scapes, which might redirect cascading neurotransmitter flows. I suppose this is analogous to what some (Bohm) invoke as an implicate ordering to explain nonlocality and superluminality, but that would be a weak analogue, in my view.

Sunday, March 28, 2010 8:45:38 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

In my view, the best evidence for a noncomputational aspect of the human brain is the fact that we are storytellers or axiom-providers. We know that we are transcending the algorithmic precisely because we propose novel systems with novel axioms in mathematics all the time, because we propose new narratives and metanarratives all the time. Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems prove that a system’s axioms cannot be proved within that system, hence our systems and metanarratives are necessarily going to be either complete or consistent, never both. Like Hawking says, the good money is on incomplete. Turing-machines cannot halt, reboot, re-axiom-atize or JOTS [jump outside the system]. Darwin-machines can. Still, however powerful these open-ended processors are, equipping the critter w/enhanced modeling power of reality and expanded behavioral repertoire, they remain bounded & finite & not autopoietic or free in any absolute sense, just free-enough for all practical purposes, like moral agency. Correcting Dennett re: our nonalgorithmic brains still doesn’t get us an absolute free will, just a very powerful probabilistic processor. Still, I see no need to exaggerate the practical import of this vs our folk psychology concepts.

Monday, March 29, 2010 10:38:29 AM

Tom Clark (twclark) wrote:

@John: Here’s Dennett from his fascinating review of Penrose, original emphasis: “So even if mathematicians are superb recognizers of mathematical truth, and even if there is no algorithm, practical or otherwise, for recognizing mathematical truth, it *does not follow* that the power of mathematicians to recognize mathematical truth is not entirely explicable in terms of their brains executing an algorithm. Not an algorithm *for* intuiting mathematical truth–we can suppose that Penrose has proved that there could be no such thing. What would the algorithm be for, then? Most plausibly it would be an algorithm–one of very many–for *trying to stay alive*, an algorithm that, by an extraordinarily convoluted and indirect generation of byproducts, “happened” to be a superb (but not foolproof) recognizer of friends, enemies, food, shelter, harbingers of spring, good arguments–and mathematical truths!” http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/penrose.htm

Monday, March 29, 2010 11:39:32 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Tom Perhaps Dennett proves my point and not his. Humans are able to JOTS [Jump Outside The System] of trying to stay alive through suicide, whether self-sacrificial or not. Dennett, Dawkins et al would counter with the sociobiological tautology of selfish genes and memes, adding genetic and memetic fallacies to this computational fallacy. See The trouble with memes (and what to do about it) by Terry Deacon. But there’s a qualitative difference between human kamikazes and bees that die after losing their stingers. Both are biosemiotic realities but the human employs symbols to model reality. It is precisely this symbol manipulation that allows for the reification of a concept of self and self-transcendence. The most stinging critique (pun intended) of Dennett’s stance comes from Peirce’s semeiotic account. [I attempted this post 5 minutes ago & it was rejected for inappropriate language, hence lost. Trying again. Maybe it's the "suicide" reference?]

Monday, March 29, 2010 12:33:33 PM

And now this from Homebrewed Christianity:

John Sobert Sylvest on March 29th, 2010 at 11:52 am:

Ben, this is an excellent recap and faithful to the way I experienced that particular Mardi Gras afternoon (the ONLY person in New Orleans virtually at Claremont and not actually on Bourbon Street; forgive me, Lord.).
I would say that we all need philosophical norms to provide a meta-metaphysical perspective but that essential Christian dogma are not inescapably loaded with any particular scientific, philosophical or metaphysical presuppositions, including such as a soul, metaphysical self or even a wholly autonomous free will. There is a probabilistic middle ground, for example, between absolutely free choices and seemingly free choices that can be established even within a so-called hegemony of the physical. I have imported some of my own reflections on the Clayton-Dennett debate into another discussion we’ve been having at National Public Radio about related matters re: philosophy of mind, where I offer an expanded critique of Dennett that keeps his baby but cleans up his bathwater. Should one go metaphysical, that’s fine as long as it is fallibilist.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

In 2 parts, my ideas re: why CSC appears to be an energy-free lunch

Part 1

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

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

What we call system levels or hierarchies have no ontological status but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically, situated where we happen to be within a network of systems.

Monday, March 29, 2010 6:19:26 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Part 2 – or why Emergence isn’t THAT special

That system feature which provides better predictability is the one we tend to call emergent. Ordinarily, this will be that autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature that tends to exhibit downward causation. (Self-organizing and self-constitution are two different things.)

These autopoietic features of a system will exhibit an entropy decrease. Entropy decreases interest us precisely because they have adaptive significance. They are significant because we can better exploit spatiotemporal order, or regularities, for vital resources.

The total system entropy will always increase but we tend to ignore those system features that serve as energy sinks. Because we ignore those features, from a folk psychology perspective, we tend to buy into the illusion that semiotic processes are a free lunch energetically, somehow transcending the space-time-energy plenum.

Thus CSC, while nonalgorithmic, is not contra-causal. It just looks and feels that way.

Monday, March 29, 2010 6:21:38 PM

John Sobert Sylvest on March 29th, 2010 at 4:07 pm:

Ben, another distinction: I tend to lump metaphysics into the same category as natural theology and natural philosophy, where it is useful in framing up our ultimate concerns, disambiguating our concepts, clarifying reality’s putative initial, boundary & limit conditions, maybe even formulating our arguments thru abductive inference but going no further, chastized by past overreaches, attempts to prove too much or to say more than we can possibly know. With a contrite fallibilism, we explore the nature of our questions and the form of our meta-talk. This critique is not the radical apophaticism that’s exhibited by some of those with overly dialectical imaginations; rather, it affirms metaphysical realism but suggests that our deontologies should then be considered as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. IOW, we might severely question how much normative impetus our metaphysics can claim as we move from what we think IS to what we think OUGHT to be.

What I whole-heartedly affirm is the robust engagement of our analogical imaginations, employing analogies and metaphors in what is a essentially poetic rhetoric that has its starting place within the faith and is thus a Theology of Nature. This is how I receive most of the work of Clayton, Bracken, Haught et al. These are elaborate tautologies filled with nature references and even technical scientific jargon that are nevertheless on par with the psalms, St. Francis’ Hymns to nature and such but brought up to date for our postmodern milieu. They have a tremendous amount of interpretive and evaluative significance and the more consonant with what we already know from descriptive science and normative philosophy, the more taut will be the tautology, which means that, while all metaphors eventually collapse, our metaphors can be rather resilient and versatile. IOW, such theologies of nature find their usefulness among those who have already taken the leap of faith, not unaided by reason and not inconsistent with science, but not so much as argumentation for faith, like the classical proofs which were metaphysical. Such a theology of nature-enlivened imagination can, indeed, recursively help further illuminate our understanding of life, in general, as we believe in order to know.

Anyway, that’s my parsing. As for competing metaphysical tautologies, the way I would adjudicate between those is by asking which one might best foster the normalization of gravity and quantum mechanics. Otherwise, they aren’t terribly interesting or helpful. We know that religion as a value-realization approach enjoys epistemic virtue, just like science. But we can’t deny that they otherwise differ in the amount of epistemic risk; we can only suggest that the increased risks have commensurate rewards.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Kris That sounds right-headed to me. One of the ways we cut through the types of paradox that confront us when logical causes (like concepts) get conflated with efficient causes (like dynamic neural net activity) is to proceed FOR ALL PRACTICAL purposes. As it is, our laws and jurisprudence do recognize different levels of culpability and exculpability and our sentencing guidelines are nuanced to take into account mitigating circumstances. Society writ large has responded to the human sciences and we do take into account formative, deformative and reformative influences and developmental trajectories. I think one practical take-away from discussions like this one is that we could do even better if we can get more citizens educated to a more naturalized humanism and away from their facile folk psychology. IOW, we could advance legislative and judicial reforms much further and much faster and could much more efficaciously treat and reform our prison populations. We don’t need metaphysics to do morality. When people do not agree on basic concepts, those ideas will have very little normative impetus in a pluralistic society anyway.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 11:45:49 AM

John Sobert Sylvest on March 30th, 2010 at 7:29 am:

Well, as Radical Orthodoxy might say, Dennett does have a few rather confessional stances, himself. One way to bust the religious move is to avoid getting so apophatic that one imagines that what is wholly incomprehensible is not, at the same time, partly apprehendable or thinks that a failure to successfully describe a reality necessarily forecloses on one’s ability to successfully refer to it. Each stance has risks and rewards. Perhaps one measure of the amount irony that will attend to any given stance is its risk:reward ratio vis a vis what Lonergan has described in terms of a growth in human authenticity through various conversions?

+++

In my approach to Peirce, I distinguish between 1ns and 3ns in terms of the in/determinate and un/specifiable, respectively. The indeterminacy is epistemic in nature and results from methodological constraints. Any unspecifiability is ontological, or modal, in nature and results from a putative in-principle ontological occulting. One way these would differ is that any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while that due to indeterminacy is potentially temporary and could be conquered with future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. aha moments, abductions, paradigm shifts). Our semantical vagueness thus treats the modal possibilities of 1ns such that excluded middle holds while noncontradiction folds (in epistemic indeterminacy) and the modal probabilities of 3ns such that excluded middle folds while noncontradiction holds (in ontological vagueness). Which modal realities will later present as the actualities of 2ns, where EM & NC both hold, remains to be seen because we cannot a priori know when it is that our ignorance is invincible due to an in-principle ontological occulting and when it might otherwise be conquered due to our overcoming of methodological constraints. Of course, we adopt a methodological naturalism precisely because to otherwise presuppose that our ignorance results from an ontological occulting would be to drive into an epistemic cul-de-sac. A philosophical naturalism a priori presupposes that all ignorance results from what is temporarily indeterminable, epistemically speaking, and issues a metaphysical promissory note for future ontological specificity.

I say all of this to provide me a framework for grappling with your directionality distinctions. Stipulating to the indexical nature of human knowledge, it would seem that any intentionality that moves from humans in the world reaching toward what is unknown, which we cannot a priori presuppose as either temporarily indeterminate or invincibly unspecifiable, would entail a fallibilist, speculative metaphysic, which necessarily employs both positivist and philosophic methodologies. And it would seem that any reversal of that claim in Dewey’s notions of intending symbols mediating the world back to humans is also an integral part of the same triadic inferential process as 3ns plays its mediating role in an ongoing recursive interplay with 1ns and 2ns. This would thus correspond to the Peircean rubric that the normative sciences (3ns) mediate between phenomenology (2ns or science) and metaphysics (1ns, incl speculative cosmology and highly theoretical physics). This is to say that it seems that Neville is talking about Peircean 1ns and you are talking about 3ns (vis a vis your reversal). And it is also to suggest that, while your insights are indispensable, they are supplemental and not wholly over against Neville’s account, which would be incomplete per your description.

You appear to be making an additional move, as I see it. I appreciate that the context of Neville’s work hereinabove was theological, but my treatment above prescinded from that theological take to the strictly phenomenological, philosophical and metaphysical. In your treatment of 3ns, you are taking an essentially phenomenological category and coloring it with a theological hue, analogically imagining that the world is mediating to us not only our local environs but also expressions of primal reality (reality’s initial, boundary & limit conditions). Thus you are making a distinctly theological turn and have segued from a natural theology to a theology of nature.

The reason I thus characterize your thrust as a theology of nature is because our natural theology is confronted with what is very likely an immeasurable amount of information erasure due to entropic processes. The deeper we go into the structures of matter and the closer we get to t=0 near the Big Bang, the less information available re: our initial, boundary and limit conditions, much less ultimate reality. The world certainly mediates info to us re: our own horizons but any temporal critical realism looks like it will indeed be methodologically constrained if for no other reason than temporality, itself, collapses, a spatiotemporal reality on which we rely in our common sense notions of causation. The human experience of ultimacy remains fraught with mystery as reality appears terribly ambivalent toward us and incredibly ambiguous to us in the symbols it has intended for us. Thus, if with Blake we do see the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower, holding Infinity in the palm of our hand and Eternity in an hour, we are doing a theology of nature. And so it is that I call my own theology of nature a pan-semio-entheism. I make that theological turn with you and take that existential leap even while suggesting THAT Ultimacy is mediating Herself back to me through manifold and multiform symbols (physical signs at that) even if I cannot give a robust account of just HOW that may be so. On that front, I prefer to remain ontologically vague, if only to return the favor to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. This indeed supports a robustly pluralistic approach to the world’s Great Traditions and indigenous religions.

BTW, and that’s also why I characterize Dennett’s confessional stance as a(n) (a)theology of nature, also ;) Someone is saying more than one can possibly know, proving too much, taking a leap but not looking over one’s shoulder at the leap and considering its distance and nature.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Regarding the ontologically real POSSIBLE. One can prescind from a robustly metaphysical account (as in the examples above) to a more vague phenomenological approach (which is what Peirce did).

Peirce’s “modal categories” included the possible, actual and probable. Each category employed its own grammar vis a vis such first principles as noncontradiction [NC] & excluded middle [EM]. As we all know, in the actual, both NC & EM hold. In the possible, NC folds & EM holds. In the probable, NC holds & EM folds. What distinguishes this from metaphysics as usually conceived is that metaphysics employs the modal categories of possible, actual and NECESSARY. And THAT is its fatal error. That is what leads to all sorts of castles in the air and angels dancing on pinheads (like Bill O’Reilly, I suppose?).

By prescinding from the necessary to the probable, we are acknowledging our inescapably fallible nature but honoring, at the same time, our slow but inexorable advance of knowledge. We also avoid the types of paradox that will ensue from our presumptions that the concepts we have employed NECESSARILY successfully refer to reality.

This Peircean rigor supports circumspection & keeps me metaphysically agnostic. Stu’s categories work well.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:59:34 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Stuart Kauffman (SAK43) wrote: I just don’t yet see how an emergence, much as I love it, gives answers to the standard philosophy of mind ! questions I posed in a past blog. Do you? And if so, help please! Stu <<<

Emergence is a heuristic device for properties that defy explanation. So, in principle, if one is in possession of an answer to the hard problem, it wouldn’t be emergent (or hard). There are three ways to look at the possible relationships between levels of complexity. If a lower level completely explains a higher level, then we have reductionism and the strongest relation possible. When speaking in terms of parts & wholes, properties & laws, it is possible that reductionism will not explain a higher level, but we can still maintain supervenience, which is to say that any differences in parts, wholes, properties and laws at a higher level must have corresponding differences at the lower level (covariance without reduction). If a theory explaining higher level properties & laws is, in principle, unpredictable from a theory at a more fundamental level, then we have emergence, which is to say, novelty.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 5:22:18 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Just a point of information: The Catholic church considers science & philosophy (hence metaphysics) autonomous disciplines. It thus has no official position on the soul, a metaphysical concept, or the mind, a philosophical construct, or the brain, a scientific term. It only takes dogmatic positions regarding putative theological realities. For those interested, see Theology & Anthropology – body, soul, spirit?

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:36:55 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

The Searle quote reminds me of a quote attributed to Jerry Fodor: Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:39:37 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

One may wish to add this to favorite mind-body problem quotes; William James wrote: We are thrown back therefore upon the crude evidences of introspection on the one hand, with all its liabilities to deception, and, on the other hand, upon a priori postulates and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice doubts need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like Mephistopheles to Faust, he can say to himself, “dazu hast du noch eine lange Frist” [for that you've got a long wait], for from generation to generation the reasons adduced on both sides will grow more voluminous, and the discussion more refined.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:43:30 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

As we consider the dance between continuity & discontinuity, pattern & paradox, chance & necessity, order & chaos, random & systematic, causal & noncausal, determinate & indeterminate, specifiable & unspecifiable, predictable & unpredictable, the grammar of our Peircean rubrics seems to be providing a helpful heuristic?

Of course, this would not be the first walk through the particle zoo for Peirce’s phenomenological modal categories and sign classes. A few years ago, I came across an intriguing post on a rather obscure complexity listserv. From what I could gather, Terry Deacon had derived ten sign classes from Peirce’s nine sign types and this facilitated the formulation of a quark model of signs by Sungchul Ji, PhD. I have been
unable to retrieve that post today but the original link to this conversation was http://necsi.org:8100/Lists/complex-science/Message/6518.html

I’d like to introduce a few more distinctions to see if they can help. Causation transfers information (incl temporal or spatial nonlocal causation). Types of causation associate w/different system features: material = parts; efficient = interactions incl semiotic; final = functions; formal = environment. Information involves coupling of 2 systems.

cont

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:14:55 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Actualization of information requires a third system to interpret the causal coupling or exploit the coupling (use it somehow). System levels (hierarchies) have no ontological status but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically. An autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature exhibits downward causation & entropy decreases but the total system entropy increases. Physical information (like signs) have a non-zero value only in systems at nonequilibrium with their environment. While prediction requires information in an effect to be computable from information in its cause, unpredictability (unspecifiability) is not the same as indeterminism. Peircean grammar rubrics apply to indeterminacy (re: possibility), which is epistemic in nature & results from methodological constraints, & to unspecifiability (re: probability), which is ontological, or modal, in nature and results from a putative in-principle ontological occulting. One way these would differ is that any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while any due to indeterminacy is potentially temporary & could be conquered with future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. abductions, paradigm shifts).

cont

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:21:35 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Concluding from the prior 2 posts:

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

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

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:37:40 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

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

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 3:56:50 PM

Moving on, now, to Telos: a Lost Cause

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

I thank Ursula for inviting Deacon & Sherman. Most all that I shared on Stu’s thread re: The Hard Problem: Consciousness was based on intuitions informed by my rather inchoate grasp of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce [CSP]. I won’t reiterate those comments on this thread but I do want to submit them as a relevant reference HERE. What I am most looking forward to is having someone (Prof. Deacon) with a very firm grasp of Peirce to address what CSP called a “minding of matter and a mattering of mind.” I know this can correct my misunderstandings, clarify my proper understandings and provide me a way to articulate my own perspective in a much more accessible form. Anything I’ve gotten correct, so far, mostly comes from articles co-authored by Deacon & Goodenough re: different orders of emergence (Polanyian), thermo- morpho- & teleo-dynamics and so on. Where I’ve gone astray, well, I managed that all by myself. I am so glad to finally “meet” Prof. Deacon and look forward to his & Dr. Sherman’s contributions.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 11:51:43 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

I’d like to offer a distinction between telos and TELOS, where the former entails a downward causation w/o violation of physical causal closure, while the latter is nonenergetic. Classical TELOS is a tautological metaphysical “concept” that adds no new info to one’s system & invites causal disjunction paradoxes. Biosemiotic telos has been a helpful theoretic heuristic (conceptual placeholder) that may fast become a rigorous scientific “term.” Conceptual confusion might arise between them b/c biosemiotic telos relies on but then transcends a formal causation contributed by a system’s environment. This structural environment (formal cause) may be at rest or in equilibrium in relationship to the rest of the system (material & efficient causes). As a “tacit” dimension it might be assigned a zero value re:its distance fr equilibrium hence would mimic what would be a nonenergetic analogue in TELOS, but it’s in an integral relationship to a thermodynamic system, iow, a system feature, and thus robustly efficacious, like a river’s bed & banks, like a waterfall’s cliff, like a mind’s neuronal network. Maybe telos is, in part, non-energetic, while TELOS is, more properly, a-energetic, a lost cause, indeed? Does this make sense?

Thursday, April 01, 2010 12:31:25 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Another distinction: chance & coincidence, which might have a bearing on intent and INTENT. Chance pertains to the future & the epistemically unavailable, while coincidence involves the present or past. Science, is probabilistic and deals w/chance not coincidence. Any weak anthropic principle is trivial; a strong anthropic principle deals w/coincidence. Only if we knew enough about the initial conditions of the cosmos could we do probabilistic thought experiments to test an anthropic principle. Fast forward to the origins of life and next to the emergence of consciousness where a “design inference” is often invoked; the inference may be logically valid but cannot be demonstrated as logically sound b/c it eludes probabilistic analysis & thus is not scientific. The dictionary definition of intent suffices: firmly directed. Reality is firmly directed, intentional, inasmuch as it is probabilistic. To the extent a bounded probabilistic reality presents along a continuum of degrees and exhibits an orderliness, or far from equilibrium decrease in entropy, it might be thought of as virtually free as its intentionality approaches the asymptotes of firm directionality. So would things go re: human consciousness.

cont

Thursday, April 01, 2010 1:19:56 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

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

Thursday, April 01, 2010 1:25:16 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Pankaj Peirce said that the normative sciences mediate between phenomenology and metaphysics. Let me put forth my own parsing. I say that the normative mediates between the descriptive and interpretive to effect the evaluative. This, in my view, is a naturalized or evolutionary epistemology. So, we might say science = descriptive, asking: What is that? And culture (we are radically social animals) is evaluative asking: What’s that to us? And philosophy is normative, asking: How might we best acquire or avoid that? Worldviews are interpretive, asking: How do we tie all of this back together (or re-ligate = religious)? Jacques Maritain said that we distinguish in order to unite. I thus suggest that science, culture, philosophy & worldviews are different foci of human concerns, or methods, and as such are methodologically-autonomous (asking different questions) but axiologically-integral (all necessary, none sufficient, in every human value-realization). To your points: 1) Buddhism is interpretive, not descriptive. 2) Science is inherently normative. 3) RE: an emergent consciousness, I am saying more than we know, proving too much. I agree & stipulate that what I offer is strictly for argument’s sake. 4) What cool people, here!

Thursday, April 01, 2010 2:04:34 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Erin no non sequitur for me. Heidegger once asked: Why not rather nothing? which also translates as Why is there something rather than nothing? Some protest that “nothing” is a reification & one that does not successfully refer to reality. Still, another question might beg: Why is there something & not rather something else? Questions beg regarding primal reality & we may not even have the categories & concepts to formulate them. For example, what about the concept of a cause? What could that possibly mean in an atemporal reality where t=0? So, those aristotelian causes, which we invoke in this scientific consideration w/in the space-time-mass-energy plenum in a thermodynamic context which admits to a very broad continuum of intentionality, can also be imaginatively conceived in a platonic-like reality independent of temporal features where there may be “things” but NO THING we can describe. We wonder whether this may be Heidegger’s NO-THING, which may or may not successfully refer to reality? Questions DO beg! maybe more so on reality’s perimeters & less so in its gaps. Religious fundamentalists put gods in gaps. Enlightenment fundamentalists issue explanatory promissory notes. Our discussion differs by having a narrower focus.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 2:50:46 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj yes, yes, yes! I’m a big believer in what I call interpretive pluralism, a radically pluralistic stance toward the values realized by all of the Great Traditions as well as by humanity’s indigenous religions. The different worldviews & religions, as interpretive axes, each an “axiology,” around which our “cosmology” spins when we realize life’s deepest values, have great gifts to offer each other in dialogue. Science, however, tells us what I believe is Everybody’s Story.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 3:03:51 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Indeterminacy (re: possibility) is epistemic & results fr methodological constraints. Unspecifiability (re: probability) is ontological, or modal, & would result fr a putative in-principle ontological occulting. Any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while that due to indeterminacy could be temporary & could be conquered w/future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. abductions, paradigm shifts). Which modal reality will later present as an actuality remains to be seen b/c we cannot a priori know when it is that our ignorance is invincible due to an in-principle ontological occulting & when it might otherwise be conquered due to our overcoming of methodological constraints. Of course, we adopt a methodological naturalism precisely because to otherwise presuppose that our ignorance results from an ontological occulting would be to drive into an epistemic cul-de-sac. A philosophical naturalism a priori presupposes that all ignorance results fr what is temporarily indeterminable, epistemically speaking, & issues a metaphysical promissory note for future ontological specificity. It’s a confessional stance, which I begrudge no one (as long as one keeps it to oneself). [smiley]

Thursday, April 01, 2010 7:15:55 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj, in the philosophy of science, there are a host of criteria we can apply to working hypotheses in addition to internal coherence & pragmatic utility. We also look for external congruence, logical consistency, inferential fecundity, interdisciplinary consilience, hypothetical consonance, symmetry, parsimony, elegance, abductive facility and so on. Energy medicine research in the US is guided by an NIH division devoted to Complementary & Alternative Medicine. It is practiced in many clinical settings. It is not a scientific hegemony that segregates it as complementary or alternative but the fact that it meets fewer scientific criteria than conventional medicine. This has much practical import. For example, we have limited fiscal & technological resources & must prioritize our research funding. Also, for a serious illness, I personally would want to have exhausted conventional options before seeking alternatives, precisely b/c of such meaningful criteria. At the same time, energy medicine has a place, a very legitimate place, in my view.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 7:31:49 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Some paradox we can resolve such as in a dialectical synthesis. Some we can dissolve via a paradigm shift, perspective change or conceptual clarification (dis-ambiguation). Some we can evade practically, ignoring it for all practical purposes. There are different types of paradox incl the veridical, falsidical, conditional & antinomial. Some paradox we can exploit transformatively by nurturing its creative tensions. There’s no single prescription for paradox vis a vis what we are to resolve, dissolve, evade or exploit. It all depends. In our modal ontology, where we consider the categories of possible, actual & probable (& necessary), we precisely employ semantical vagueness as we apply first principles like noncontradiction & excluded middle, as they alternately hold or fold.

Thursday, April 01, 2010 8:06:08 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

In this ongoing discussion, I think of Peirce’s inferential triad of abductive hypothesizing, inductive testing & deductive clarifying. It reminds me that we can get caught up in a nonvirtuous cycle of abduction & deduction w/o the inductive rubber of falsification hitting the epistemic road. And Mike’s right; it’s a muddy road. And Phil well described the difficulty we can have in devising helpful analogies. Our human knowledge advances not only via our cognitive propositions (conceptual map-making) but also thru our participatory imagination (think hometown knowledge). We very well know how to get to the grocer then the pharmacy & back home but can find such knowledge difficult to articulate to an inquiring stranger who’s unfamiliar w/our hometown. Peirce’s triad conveys only LOGICAL import. But we are also biosemiotic INTENDERS & thus attend to what has VITAL import. Peirce thus reminds us to cash-out the practical value of our conceptions, to attend to distinctions that make a difference. He notes that our knowledge gains its strength in a way more like a cable, from the intertwining of strands of different informal arguments, than a chain, from the unbroken linkage of a series of formal syllogisms. IOW, we’re fallible.

Friday, April 02, 2010 11:02:00 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

The opening blog post included the following qualifiers: absurd, impossible, unlikely, improbable, chance, impossibly, improbable, probable, tendency, future possibility, predictable & plausible. These correspond to what used to be called scholastic notation, where one designated various assertions as im/possible, im/plausible, im/probable & un/certain. They relate to the modal distinctions I discussed in:
The Hard Problem: Consciousness, where noncontradiction & excluded middle would variously hold or fold. They also speak to the distinctions made between epistemic in/determinacy & ontological un/specifiability. Finally, they also bring to mind the distinctions between chance & coincidence.

Prigogine invites us to consider the giganormous number of bifurcations & permutations that have gone into the universe’s dissipative structures. And while it’s true that the greater this number, the more fragile the structure, it also seems that the more fragile the structure, the more beautiful. This beauty doesn’t seem absurd or implausible, but, w/o knowing the universe’s initial conditions, one can’t really say what’s im/probable.

Friday, April 02, 2010 11:49:49 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

One take-away from my last post is that, while I noted in one of our recent discussions that the weak anthropic principle was trivial and the strong anthropic principle was misguided, our ignorance re: the universe’s initial, boundary & limit conditions also speaks to such an interpretive stance as would disingenuously suggest that, after 13.7 billion years, this world we inhabit is exactly what one should expect! Still, setting aside my confusion re: both cosmic origins & life’s origins & why thermo- & morpho- dynamics present the way they do, once stipulating to the fact of teleo-dynamics, using neo-darwinian evolution as my starting point, it DOES seem to me that Deacon’s account of the co-evolution of language & brain & the emergence of our ROBUST intentionality in consciousness is more than plausible. I’m betting that it “won’t stay a mystery” & is one of the most likely candidates for soon being considered PROBABLE. It already “feels” that way to me, but my grad school focus was neuroendocrinology & I’m thus biased.

Friday, April 02, 2010 12:18:25 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Ergo, I’m inclined to the Copenhagen interpretation. Wave-functions aren’t physical realities. Possibilities, what Peirce called Firstness, in my view, are predicates stripped from subjects & abstracted by our brains. They get applied retroductively (e.g. reasoning backward from known predicates to unknown subjects) & analogically (e.g. metaphors) whenever we encounter the effects of unknown causes, which get ontologically specified, for example, as new species or new elements on the periodic table, or even as a mistaken identity. As neurological correlates, they lie dormant, often “adjacent,” as structures of memory, providing a system environment feature (formal cause) w/a zero-value distance from that local system’s equilibrium, a tacit dimension that is nevertheless utterly efficacious as its nonalgorithmic open-ended processor (material & efficient causes) “works” (i.e. decreasing entropy locally), which is to say, “functions” (final causation) via a telic system feature we call intent, which is variously strong or weak across the phylogenetic spectrum. Symbol employment is novel, gifts us w/the abduction of SELF, a bundle of predicates gathered from others & reassigned to ME, setting us apart as sapiens.

Friday, April 02, 2010 12:45:49 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj, re: using words correctly, in my view, our transition from algorithmic to non-algorithmic processors resulted when closed circuitry got short-circuited in our brain’s hard-wiring, allowing subject-object cleavage, predicate dissociation from subjects, properties to be abstracted away from entities and mis-assigned. We became, in part, open-ended processors. We then exploited the MIS-TAKE as adaptively significant. That’s what an analogy or metaphor is, in a way, a mistake, a mis-assignment of predicates. But it allowed us to enhance our modeling power of reality, making our tautologies more taut, with story-telling. Boon or bane? A non-virtuous cycle of abductive hypothesizing & deductive clarifying becomes a sterile metaphysic unless interrupted by inductive falsification. Will our bio-semiotic leap to symbol-usage preserve or destroy our species? The evidence in favor of boon or bane is mixed. Conversations like this one are indispensable to our survival, in my view. We lack SELF-understanding to our peril, maybe even doom.

Friday, April 02, 2010 3:41:57 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Jane re:causes, only speaking for me: In a sense, we are exploring the relationship between causation & information in biological systems. I associate aristotelian-like causation w/different system features: material = parts; efficient = interactions incl semiotic; final = functions; formal = environment. Information involves a coupling of 2 systems. Actualization of information requires a third system to interpret this causal coupling (or exploit the coupling or use it, somehow). Intent would be associated w/function. Only if one invokes such causations in a platonic sense would one encounter such paradox as causal disjunctions; these are all situated in a thermodynamic system that is far from equilibrium. It’s the formal cause, it seems, that throws people for a loop. I think this is b/c folks are confusing non-energetic (at equilibrium) with a-energetic (having nothing to do w/our space-time-mass-energy plenum). The formal cause is structural, an environmental milieu that matters, including such as physical signs. Nothing spooky.

Saturday, April 03, 2010 1:20:17 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv re: Peirce, the heuristic I described is consistent w/Peirce. A lot of folks apply Peircean categories & grammar in complexity theory, systems theory, info systems theory, artificial intelligence theory & such. It’s not so much explanatory as it is heuristic. As a heuristic, I find it powerful, like emergence. Combine such heuristics as Peirce’s triadic semeiotic & emergence & we get new & exciting ways of looking at what are otherwise intractable problems. A combination of Peirce & Emergence would not thus lead one algorithmically to one philosophy of mind vs another; it just makes it easier for different schools of thought to read off the same sheet of music, clarifying those distinctions that might make for pragmatically “real” differences vs those that make for idle, sterile tautologies. It helps me discern what’s at stake in eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, nonreductive physicalism & so on. It does seem, however, to foreclose on a computational (algorithmic) account of consciousness, making an improvement on Dennett’s approach. I’m willing to admit that some nonenergetic aspects of formal causation could be indistinguishable from putative acausal features, but methodologically approach acausal features as epistemic not ontological in origin (but who knows? No one knows, a priori!).

Saturday, April 03, 2010 3:26:43 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics for how the semiotic applies to music, theater, art and so on, where it is necessary but not sufficient. I call my own stance a Peircean-Nevillean integral axiological epistemology [PNIAE], which refers to Robert Cummings Neville, who emphasized axiology or value-realization. It is a naturalized or evolutionary epistemology that recognizes our human encounter with a surplus of meaning. Our signs & symbols include more than words. Our deepest value-realizations transcend the semiotic. A contemplative stance goes beyond our problem-solving, dualistic mindset with its empirical, logical, practical & moral foci of concern (and extrinsic reward systems) with a more nondual, relational approach to reality (and its intrinsic reward systems). Many of us, as naturalists, are also religious (but not all are also theistic).

Saturday, April 03, 2010 9:33:13 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv, Stu may not have been explicitly employing peircean categories but you may recall that I thought his modal distinctions were consistent w/Peirce & a semantical vagueness vis a vis the application of 1st principles like noncontradiction & excluded middle. Also, re: emergence, I, myself, consider it to be an epistemic artefact of where we as observers are situated in relationship to a system and its features. As I said, in my view, that system feature which provides better predictability is the one we tend to call emergent. Sometimes we may be dealing with layers of explanation, not ontological levels? and they may be redundant? For example, folks talk of supervenience (re: emergence), which when called strong is trivial, when called weak is question begging. I also consider the quantum acausal in epistemic terms, hence not a suitable ontic structure for contra-causal free will. Nonalgorithmic CSC, while necessary for Stu’s hypothesis, is thus not sufficient, in my view. Peirce & Emergence as heuristics don’t rule out Stu’s hypothesis, which could be consistent w/both. Only my interpretation, or sneaking suspicion, that our semiotic formal causes are nonenergetic & not a-energetic, lead me to that provisional closure.

Saturday, April 03, 2010 10:11:14 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv – I call my own stance a Peircean-Nevillean integral axiological epistemology [PNIAE] and it combines “our problem-solving, dualistic mindset with its empirical, logical, practical & moral foci of concern (and extrinsic reward systems) with a more nondual, relational approach to reality (and its intrinsic reward systems).”

The nondual, relational approach = a contemplative stance. It complements other stances, which include descriptive (science or positivist), normative (philosophic), evaluative, interpretive and so. Such stances (each methodologically autonomous, asking different questions of reality) are integrally-related – all necessary, none sufficient – in realizing reality’s values. As in a symphony, one note or instrument or section may enjoy a certain primacy while others rest, but it is only in relationship to the other notes or instruments or sections that it realizes its purpose and meaning. Or, think of notes in a chord. We do not cling to an individual note – not because it isn’t beautiful, but – because we don’t want to miss the symphony.

Saturday, April 03, 2010 11:19:56 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Irv, to the extent the value one is after is an enhanced modeling power of reality, I would turn to the audience, a community of value-realizers, for their opinion. And, in the audience, I would try to spot those maestros who’ve been the most earnest in their inquiry & faithful in their practice. That would be more distinctly Peircean, a turn to community.

I see what you are driving at with your metaphor vis a vis the ego. And it is on the mark, for example, in the way Thomas Merton approached such things. He employed the concept, “false self,” for that aspect of personhood that resulted from our socialization; it roughly maps over the freudian concept of ego. False Self was an unfortunate use of words, though, because it conveys the same type of notion as ego-less. Merton did not mean to suggest that we might travel without the False Self or ego; rather, in my words, we travel BEYOND it and not WITHOUT it. The contemplative stance does transcend or go beyond the problem-solving stances but not without them. The integrality is preserved.

Monday, April 05, 2010 11:01:40 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

This sounds like Peirce’s appeal to a suitably chastised epistemic optimism and a contrite fallibilism. Perhaps we have come to better realize that features like parsimony, elegance, beauty, symmetry and such have never been robustly truth-conducive but, rather, only weakly truth-indicative. Perhaps we have traded in a modal ontology with such categories as possible, actual and NECESSARY for one that employs, instead, the categories possible, actual and probable. Perhaps we have realized with Gödel that our systems can be either consistent or complete but not both, that we cannot prove our system axioms within those systems. No more a prioristic, rationalistic foundations; no more privileged metaphysics. No more gnostic claims to moral imperatives as we reason humbly together from the best IS we can formulate for the moment to the most universally compelling OUGHT we can derive together at the time, all translated into a language that is transparent to human reason and thus given such a normative impetus as would not rely on appeals to revelations or special pleadings grounded in so-called indubitable metaphysics. The sense of sacredness would derive from our radical solidarity with & compassion for nature & each other.

Monday, April 05, 2010 6:24:09 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Adam – I conceive of 2 challenges: 1) how to devise a more universally compelling morality 2) how to proceed in our speculative endeavors, especially regarding our highly theoretical sciences. Peirce said we should speculate boldly in theoretical matters but proceed more cautiously in our vital affairs (roughly speaking). I like to say that our deontologies should be considered at least as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. What I am driving at is that, for the most part, humankind already knows enough from evolutionary biology & our human arts & sciences to “do” morality. Modern philosophers, for the most part, embrace some type of critical realism, even though some are pragmatic realists, others “weak” foundationalists, others coherentists, etc Slowly, but inexorably, we should be able to get radical fundamentalisms on the wane. This is also to say that I don’t think we need to quickly resolve philosophy of mind’s “hard” problems, choose a given quantum interpretation or renormalize gravity w/quantum mechanics. Laws we observe might be as local, for all practical & theoretical purposes, as those of our neighborhood bridge club? Extrapolating them to anywhere NEAR T=0 is likely illicit, much less BEYOND T=0?

Monday, April 05, 2010 11:05:22 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Everywhere in reality it seems that “the necessary” has suggested itself, while nowhere in reality has it been encountered as a physical instantiation. Haldane said that reality is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we CAN imagine. Chesterton might’ve countered that we don’t know enough about reality yet to say that it is unknowable. Wittgenstein said it’s not HOW things are but THAT things are which is the mystical. Heidegger asked: Why not rather nothing? But what if ‘nothing” doesn’t successfully refer? Our question becomes: Why is there something rather than something else? Gödel said we couldn’t prove a system’s axioms w/in that system but that doesn’t mean we might not otherwise be able to SEE their truth. How many of us need to travel w/Russell & Whitehead halfway thru the Principia where they prove the axioms that support 2 + 2 = 4 in order to see the truth of those axioms? We don’t a priori know whether the unprovable axioms of a putative TOE will be trivial or interesting, grounded by truths we can taste & see even if not formally prove. We do well to assume we are methodologically constrained, epistemically, rather than occulted-in-principle, ontologically, ever-mindful it’s a pragmatic assumption.

Tuesday, April 06, 2010 12:13:41 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Adam Let me give some soft push-back re: “We need catagories (classes, constellations of ideas) which can help us wrap our thinking around the irreducibility, primacy and unity of experience.”

Maybe you subvert your own critique of the empirical as you press for yet more conceptual map-making? Instead, you could press your logic to a more radical, but still consistent, conclusion, which would indeed resonate with the Buddhist imagination. Buddhism gifts us via our participatory imagination w/practices not conclusions, w/experiences not systems, w/realizations not arguments, stories of unitary reality not ontologies.

See my thoughts here:
One: Essential Writings in Nonduality – a review, where I wrote: “After all, there is no room to presume that folks — who, self-described, would kill the Buddha — are returning from ineffable experiences only to clearly effable about reality, or that they are telling us tales about, what they claim to hold in-principle as, untellable stories. Something else is going on, which is an invitation into an experience and not an initiation into a philosophical system.”

The East, in my view, has gifted us w/insights re: our mastery of our internal milieu, incl a better awareness of what takes place between sensation & abstraction and incl what we might call our affective attunement to reality. The West, for its part, has gifted us w/insights re: our mastery of our external milieu, incl a better awareness of what takes place between abstraction & judgment and incl what we might call our practical alignment w/reality. Had Einstein & Bohr a better familiarity w/both Eastern & Western philosophy, perhaps they would have realized that, to some extent, they were talking past one another, precisely by committing category errors, Einstein now speaking of the ontic w/the West, Bohr now emphasizing the epistemic w/the East. We thus distinguish between epistemic in/determinacy and ontological un/specifiability. Still, Peirce provided the necessary distinctions, too. Subjective experiences are fine but carry very little NORMATIVE impetus for others until processed in and by community, a turn in religion known as communal discernment, a turn in science involving replication of results & peer review, a turn to community in philosophy we call phenomenology, a Peircean turn to a community of inquiry.

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

re: model & myth

It has always seemed to me that, precisely because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, any TOE would require both model & narrative. The model would comprise our formal symbol system which describes reality. The narrative would comprise our informal apologetic for why the axioms of our system, even if unprovable, are compelling. Of course, with Tolkien, we’d be searching for True Myth, a story which, not literally true in every way, would nevertheless evoke an appropriate response to “ultimate” reality. One would anticipate a great diversity of expression of such truth, an authentic religious pluralism (vis a vis a constructive pragmatic realism).

Tuesday, April 06, 2010 1:16:39 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Pankaj, re: would you consider Godel’s contribution to be equivalent to that of Nagarjuna?

Considering when Nagarjuna lived compared to Gödel, Derrida, Wittgenstein et al, one can only be astounded at his wisdom. In the same vein, as much as I love Peirce, I only discovered him when someone confused one of my disquisitions as being Peircean, when it was otherwise grounded in Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart & Duns Scotus; my interlocutor then described me as an accidental-Peircean. Many years later, I’m now an on-purpose Peircean. Finally, Nagarjuna addressed more than epistemology and theoretic concerns of logical import, but had much to say about praxis & compassion; those latter contributions had great vital import!

Tuesday, April 06, 2010 2:15:42 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

The Western dualistic conceptions of God generally lack that deeper ontological ground, which would be needed to provide for divine interaction with the world. But there are also problems, both with Western fullness of being conceptions of God, such as in the Perennial Philosophy, Thomistic & Neo-Platonic conceptions, and the Buddhist conception of the fullness of nonbeing, with regard to how novelty might arise other than via negations & limitations insofar as pure negations are as utterly indeterminate as pure being. These are precisely problems related to so-called broken symmetry. To be determinate is to be this rather than that. Neville appeals, instead, to Scotus’ realistic theory of common natures, expressed in modern form by Peirce. This leads to an asymmetrical conception of God. Any novelty arises from a creative act ex nihilo, not from limitations of being, with questions begging as to why the world’s not entirely good, leading us not to aspire to repose but to participation in bringing about an alignment. This doesn’t evoke images of a Fall or broken symmetry or of some ontological rupture located in our past but of a teleological striving oriented toward a future, such as in Jack Haught’s aesthetic teleology.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 9:09:07 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@ECM who wrote: perhaps we should change our views about God’s aesthetics.

Interesting point, Eric. As a point of information, Robert Cummings Neville (a postmodern) following Peirce and Scotus (a medieval) elaborates an asymmetrical conception of God. See Chapter 12 of his Realism in Religion – A Pragmatist’s Perspective (2009 SUNY Press) where he defends this conception at length.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 7:42:24 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

I realize that the God’s eye view or God’s mind is being evoked metaphorically here and that this thread is not about exploring the nature of God vis a vis any putative god-concepts. So, I offer my discussions below in the vein of expanding our metaphor & not as a theological argument per se. What we are more directly interested in is how truth-indicative are such features as parsimony, elegance, symmetry, simplicity and such. Is there a feature of reality that might be more heavily nuanced than a/symmetry? What about harmony? Wouldn’t it require the shedding of monotony and the appropriation of novelty? A harnessing of asymmetry in the service of complexity? and of aesthetics? In other words, beauty might continue to guide us but needs to be more broadly conceived beyond mere symmetry.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 9:33:31 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Pankaj right, there are different Buddhist conceptions of nonbeing & my discussion relates to one developed by Nishitani & perhaps the Kyoto school. As a general rule, I do not take away ontological conclusions from the Buddha, himself, including those regarding one’s so-called authenticity. Any experience of unitary being is merely phenomenal & its nondual take-away is epistemic not ontic.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 10:00:28 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@Pankaj, that was well stated, too. Any putative “ultimate” would very much less lend itself to our conceptual map-making, descriptively, and very much more lend itself to our participatory, imaginative and interpretive engagement.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 10:57:27 AM

Then, I will press forward a tad (as most have moved on). And our participatory, imaginative and interpretive engagements, collectively, get systematized and with great practical effect. These systems are truth-laden — not in the manner in which they conceptually describe the ultimate, but rather — in the manner they foster human value-realizations vis a vis our concerns re: ultimacy. One must inhabit the symbol systems of such systems, existentially, to real-ize their value & truth, as they do not readily lend themselves to mere propositional analysis. This hermeneutical spiral of imagination, interpretation, systematization & practical application might thus ground such a stance as affirms an authentic religious pluralism (& could be interpreted a/theologically or not).

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

Science is inherently normative. The findings of science are indispensable to any moral calculus that aspires to reason from a descriptive IS to a normative OUGHT. There is no need to set aretaic (virtue), deontological (is to ought), teleological (consequentialist, utilitarian, pragmatic) and contractarian ethical approaches at odds. By pulling such threads together, the fabric of our moral fiber can be strengthened. We can recognize, with Sartre, that, since we are similarly-situated in this somewhat universal human condition, the prescriptions (OUGHTS)we devise for this situation we describe (IS) are going to be remarkably consistent, for all practical purposes, even if the interpretations in which we ground them are otherwise very divergent or, sometimes, even relativistic, theoretically speaking. Morality is, then, transparent to human reason. In our increasingly pluralistic society, when different perspectives gather in the public square, and all should be welcome, each has a responsibility to articulate its moral reasoning using concepts and categories that are widely accepted; otherwise, one can hardly expect one’s reasoning to have much normative impetus for others, much less to be universally compelling.

Thursday, April 08, 2010 11:03:31 AM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

@twclark Well said, Tom. While interpretive stances, like various religious & secular ideologies, might assist in augmenting the values to be realized from our moral calculus (a descriptive, normative & evaluative hermeneutical spiral), our moral calculus has all that is necessary & sufficient for moral & prudential judgments even without the “benefit” of special revelations or authoritarian appeals grounded in either god-concepts or atheology. And value-augmentations by interpretive stances rely on an authentic scientific anthropology.

Thursday, April 08, 2010 1:35:40 PM

John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:

re: Can Science Answer Moral Questions?

Category error.

Science doesn’t ask moral questions. Science is a descriptive method. Moral questions are normative, philosophic. Still, while the descriptive and normative are necessary in answering moral questions, they are insufficient and require, also, a culture with its evaluative posits.

Thursday, April 08, 2010 1:28:00 PM

One might also want to take a look at my post:

Theology & Anthropology – body, soul, spirit?

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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.

proofI 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.

proof2In 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.

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Human knowledge advances incrementally, building on what we learned in and from the past. We see how this plays out in our word usage as we add various prefixes and suffixes and come up with new words (neologisms). Three prefixes come especially to mind: 1) post-, 2) trans- and 3) meta-.

In the way I most often use these prefixes, 1) post- means after, 2) trans- means beyond or through and 3) meta- means more comprehensive. None of these prefixes necessarily also means without (which is most often indicated by the prefix a-). Not even the prefix non- necessarily means without; it primarily means we are talking about something else.

The postmodern critique remains a critical assessment of modernism. In my view, it suggests, for example, that modern methods should not be considered systems, modern practices should not be confused with conclusions and philosophical approaches should not misconstrued into schools of philosophy. It recognizes that the best methods, practices and approaches are fallible but self-subverting, self-critical, self-correcting and guided probabilistically (in other words, neither absolutely, infallibly nor apodictically). Our closures are then provisional. postmodernism01

Ironically and tragically, there has been a perversion of this critique from a method into a system, a practice into a conclusion, an approach into a school of thought. This tragedy, postmodernism, mimics the failed school of modernism in its over-reaching. Modernism, for its part, was guilty of epistemic hubris. Postmodernism, a tonic turned toxic, proceeds with an excessive epistemic humility, which is manifestly unwarranted. postmodernism02

Silliness thus abounds. Modernity gone awry with its conflation of methods into systems gave us scientism, an arrogation of science into a full-blown philosophical school, as well as fideism, a subjugation of faith via its divorce from reason. A metaphysic, misconstrued, imagines it can decouple from physics and many claim to be transrational whose approach is, in fact, arational. All manner of insidious -isms abounded as the approaches of modernity were inflated into such schools as logical positivism and radical empiricism. Religious approaches were perverted into encratism, pietism, rationalism, quietism and every variety of absolutist fundamentalism, including both sola scriptura and solum magisterium approaches of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. science

As a therapeutic critique, the postmodern perspective would have us go beyond the modern not without it. We go beyond science but not without it. Faith, narrowly conceived as an epistemic leap beyond such nonrational presuppositions as nihilism, solipsism and relativism, is an indispensable prerequisite to knowledge. More broadly conceived, faith is a super-reasonable and existential response to reality that can be considered a forced (not to choose is to choose), vital (pertains to our ultimate concerns, most urgent and insistent longings, and most deeply cherished values) and live (neither empirically measurable nor logically demonstrable but still rationally equiplausible and practically defensible) option.

Our great traditions, with their interpretive approaches to ultimate reality, and our science and philosophy, with their descriptive and normative approaches to more proximate realities, are all ordered, evaluatively,  toward human value-realizations, which can be in turn assessed for how well they institutionalize our ongoing conversion and transformation, intellectually, affectively, morally, socio-politically and religiously (what Gelpi building on Lonergan might equate with a growth in human authenticity).

What is the way forward? Plato_Aristotle

If it is indeed going to be posthierarchical, in addition to being more dialogical and democratic, will it necessarily be ahierarchical? or even necessarily noninstitutional? Or will some hierarchical and institutional apparatus inevitably emerge as a necessary evil, at least where it is, so to speak, developmentally-appropriate? For that matter, if authentically post-Western, post-European and postcolonial, won’t we much more narrowly conceive the meaning of developmentally-appropriate, especially vis a vis language, practices and cultural traditions? Under any other circumstances, it positively must be postpatriarchal and postpaternalistic?

Certainly, it will be postfoundational, recognizing a plurality of methodologies and the primacy of narrative in all human knowing, but will it also acknowledge certain indispensable propositions and essential metanarratives? Certainly metaphysical and moral realisms are indispensable presuppositions?

It will affirm that science, philosophy, culture and religion are methodologically-autonomous but will it acknowledge that they are also axiologically-integral?

EuclidWill it eschew evidentialism, rationalism, presuppositionalism and existentialism in favor of a more holistic perspectivalism but without defining holism in terms of a facile moderation or simple balancing act, acknowledging that certain approaches will sometimes enjoy at least a primacy if not an autonomy? This is to ask, then, if the dual and nondual approaches to reality might better be described as the transdual, which necessarily goes beyond, but not without, our dualistic, problem-solving mind in approaching life’s most important values, primarily, from a nondual approach?

Whatever we do, let’s not be silly. Let’s avoid modernism and postmodernism as we embrace the best of the modern and postmodern, as we embrace reality, one another, ourselves and our God.

When we encounter a seemingly insoluble conundrum or deep mystery, we will not a priori know whether such a paradox might resolve dialectically (in an Hegelian-like synthesis), dissolve perspectivally (from a simple paradigm shift, changing how we approach the problem or overcoming a category error), best be maintained in a creative tension between competing aspects in a both-and manner or might present in a truly antinomial fashion (such that a reductio ad absurdum cannot be overcome without sacrificing the basic presuppositions of reason, itself).

For life’s most important questions and most pressing concerns, don’t expect easy problem resolutions and dissolutions. One best learn to nurture creative tensions and to live with absurdity. All of the great wisdom traditions are in agreement about this reality; in Christianity, it’s called the Cross. In the end, our trust in this process must go beyond our rational problem-solving and apologetics to be grounded in a relationship, which believes and hopes for the sake of love, alone, and loves for the sake of love, itself; in Christianity, this relationship is grounded in Jesus.

Note: Most of the posts on this blog deal with epistemology, an exploration of how we know what we know. And they eschew any notion of a religious epistemology over against any other epistemologies, defending a stance that says that epistemology is epistemology is epistemology. I invite you to explore both the Christian Nonduality Blog and Website and to connect with me, Radical Emergence, on Twitter.

This conversation continues here>>> (more…)

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religiousTim King, at his Post-Christian Blog, writes about change and says: “I hope I’m around to see a world where diverse and disparate faiths learn to celebrate what each has to offer to help all of us understand the Numinous a bit better than we do now.”

The changes Tim describes, the moves he prescribes, very much resonate with what I have gathered from reflecting on Thomas Merton’s writings over the years. And I have been trying to say it in so many ways myself and keep trying different approaches.

Today’s thought is this:

Our disparate faiths, including many indigenous religions as well as the great traditions, have a certain core competency. From that core competency derives the nature of their distinct contribution, their unique role, in our lives. This role is not to describe reality scientifically, not to prescribe reality morally or ethically, not to norm reality philosophically, not to manipulate reality practically, and not to govern reality politically. These functions belong, rather, to the cosmological story told by science and philosophy, what some have called Everybody’s Story, and rightly so, because it transcends cultures. And it does include our rather rudimentary, vague understanding of a Creator Spirit, one could say, pneumatologically.

There are other stories to be told by religions and cultures, which are axiological. Their role is to help us interpret reality evaluatively. More plainly, their distinct contribution is to help us celebrate and value reality.

The opposite of good religion is neither bad science nor bad morality, although many would leave us with that impression. The opposite of religion is indifference and nihilism, an attitude that reality offers nothing of enduring value to celebrate. We cannot talk people out of such an attitude with empirical evidence, logical reasoning or moral persuasion because these basic attitudes are not constructed of formal arguments. Instead, good religion forms people through exchanges of stories about lives well-lived, and through moments of celebration, and through the handing down of formative and transformative practices and through the comfort and enjoyment of fellowship in community.

Inter-religious dialogue, then, is much more an exchange of practices and has very little to do with conclusions. It has a lot more to do with celebratory methods and transformative processes and very little to do with philosophical systems and products of moral reasoning. Religion is more so a participatory engagement and much less a propositional exchange.

peaceIn my view, then, much of the strife on our planet comes from religion masquerading as cosmology, attempting but failing to co-opt the prerogatives of good science and good philosophy with  pseudo-religion. Creationism isn’t bad religion; it’s bad science. Theocratic rule isn’t bad religion; it’s bad political science. Misogyny and homophobia aren’t bad religion; they’re grounded in bad anthropology and are bad morality. Such dysfunctional approaches to reality inevitably result when religion departs from its core competency, strays from its distinct role and fails to attend to its own unique contribution, which Merton emphasized was transformation not socialization.

Below is a more philosophically nuanced discussion of these dynamics. (more…)

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Thom Stark at Jesus Politics is sponsoring a competition, which I couldn’t really enter because I don’t buy the contest’s premise that would require me to demonstrate that Thom employs erroneous presuppositions that control his interpretive options, especially regarding Biblical hermeneutics. The whole discussion is evocative though and, in response, I wrote this tongue-in-cheek parody, below.

Hang Down Your Head Thom Stark

A thoroughgoing solipsist, still, Thom finds it useful to suspend his disbelief in other minds. An incurable nihilist, still, Thom finds it useful to suspend his disbelief in reality’s intelligibility.

vonnegut01As did Kurt Vonnegut, Thom enjoys his life in this incredible chronosynclastic infundibulum, where all is at once both true and false (this recognizing that Thom has also suspended his disbelief in the silly notion that such concepts as true and false successfully refer). While so-called First Principles, like noncontradiction and excluded middle, certainly entertain Thom, he sees that they only work within formal symbol systems, the axioms of which remain otherwise unprovable within that system, which, itself, remains either incomplete or inconsistent. Incompleteness and inconsistency are concepts which, paradoxically, do appear to make successful references to reality insofar as they add no new information to Thom’s otherwise unintelligible tautological accounts.

Even if these interpretive stances remain otherwise empirically indemonstrable and rationally unprovable, still, Thom finds them practically indispensable. Of course, Thom’s pragmatism is strictly strategic and in no way philosophical. Thom feels this way notwithstanding any reductio ad absurdum arguments, which could only serve to suggest that his approach is to many unpalatable and not to otherwise demonstrate that it is – to use their categories, not Thom’s – untrue. So, Thom actively suspends his disbelief in other minds, in reality’s unintelligibility and in so-called First Principles because he finds such noninferential, nonpropositional, evaluative posits just positively liberating.

This silliness continues below. (more…)

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I appreciate the insights that folks like Campbell & Jung brought to anthropology. They are important & deserve serious consideration from a scientific perspective. However, I’m not among those who consider them theologically competent.

For some, all religious myth is mythopoeia, God’s expressions thru the minds of poets.

For the Christian, the true myth of Christ is God’s expression of Himself through, with & in Himself.

For the Christian, for whom God’s moral nature was revealed in Christ, God’s essential nature remains an unfathomable mystery. We do NOT, however, say that God is inapprehensible (in part) even as we maintain that God is wholly incomprehensible.

We do not consider mystery to be wholly unintelligible even as Yahweh remains the UnNameable One.
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Richard Rohr speaks of the four pillars of the Emerging Church 1) honest Jesus scholarship 2) peace & social justice 3) contemplation & nonduality and 4) noninstitutional vehicles.

I would like to unpack this a little because I think it speaks directly to his approach to apologetics, which is merely “doing it better,” this over against any overt proselytizing or critiquing of others (putting them down, maybe, to preserve our own sick identity structures). This fits well with the approach to evangelism articulated by the founder of Richard’s order, the little man from Assisi, whom I’ll roughly paraphrase: Take every opportunity to evangelize and, only if absolutely necessary, use words!

There is clearly a self-subversive reform underway in the Emerging Church. The first pillar of honest Jesus scholarship, in its efforts to articulate the truth we have encountered, addresses an orthodoxy that eschews dogmatism . The second pillar of peace & social justice, in its efforts to preserve the goodness we have encountered, addresses an orthopraxy that eschews legalism . The third pillar of contemplation & nonduality, in its efforts to celebrate the beauty we have encountered, addresses an orthopathos that eschews ritualism. The fourth pillar of noninstitutional vehicles, in its efforts to enjoy the fellowship (unity) we have encountered, addresses an orthocommunio that eschews institutionalism.

So, in some sense, the great traditions have always been about the articulation of truth in creed, preservation of goodness in code, celebration of beauty in cult (or ritual) and enjoyment of fellowship in community.

An authentically integralist approach, then, will recognize Wilber’s quadrants such that the objective enjoys its moment of primacy in our pursuit of truth, the interobjective in our pursuit of goodness, the subjective in our pursuit of beauty and the intersubjective in our pursuit of community. In what I have called 1) the descriptive focus of human concern, we pursue truth in asking What is it? 2) the normative focus, we pursue goodness in asking How do I acquire/avoid it? 3) the evaluative focus, we pursue beauty in asking What’s it to me? and 4) interpretive focus, we pursue unity in asking How does all this tie-together (re-ligate)?

Each focus is a distinctly different value-pursuit and entails distinctly autonomous methodologies, which is only to recognize that science, philosophy, culture and religion are, indeed, autonomous disciplines, methodologically. What relates them integrally is that they are anything but autonomous, axiologically, which is only to recognize that none of these value-pursuits, alone, can effect a value-realization without some involvement of the other foci of human concern, each which presupposes the others, each which nests within the others, holonically. We can say that they are intellectually-related but not logically-related; this is a vague heuristic and not some purely formal system.

Where we are headed, ecclesiologically, in my view then, is toward a model of church that, respectively, vis a vis Rohr’s pillars, is 1) pneumatological, which is to say that it will primarily engage in interreligious dialogue from the perspective of the Spirit, this over against any ecclesiocentric approach and perhaps even bracketing our various Christological approaches 2) servant, which is to actively grapple with the questions of social justice & peace 3) herald, which is to recognize the orthopathic efficacies of the contemplative, nondual stance, inviting others to transformation via a shared social imaginary as cultivated by authentically transformative liturgical approaches, this participatory approach emphasized over (while complementing) the sterile and stale propositional apologetics of yesteryear and 4) mystical body, a visible manifestation of an invisible reality, to be sure, but dropping our old and insidious overemphases on the manifold and varied institutional structures. (cf. Dulles’ models of church)

Wim Drees defines theology as a cosmology plus an axiology. Drees notes that, and serious emergentists might pay special attention, the discontinuity in emergent reality threatens the unity of the sciences. Because laws, themselves, emerge, we are on thin theoretical ice when speculating metaphysically re: the nature of primal reality, causal joints for divine prerogatives, and so on.

While cosmological and axiological approaches are integrally-related, they are methodologically autonomous. Cosmology answers the questions 1) Is that a fact? (descriptively) and 2) How do I best acquire/avoid that? (normatively). Daniel Helminiak, a Lonergan protege, would describe these as positivist and philosophic activities and rightly affirms, in my view, the philosophic as spiritual quest.

Even if one concedes, for argument’s sake, our ability to travel from the descriptive to the prescriptive, given to normative, is to ought (and Mortimer Adler well-demonstrates that we can get from an is to an ought) still, due to our universal human condition, wherein we are all, for the most part, similarly situated, even if our reasoning differs for certain precepts & would be theoretically relativistic, still, from a practical perspective our precepts are going to be remarkably consistent.

The practical upshot of all of this is that cosmology, thus narrowly conceived, is truly Everybody’s Story, which is to say we really shouldn’t go around wily-nily just making this stuff up because it isn’t really negotiable but is given.

Axiology answers the questions 3) What’s it to me? (evaluatively) and 4) How’s all this tie-together? (interpretively). Here we are dealing with human value-realizations, their definitions and prioritization, and with religion. The reason we even have such a category as interpretation results from our radical human finitude. It is not that we don’t affirm such a metaphysical realism as recognizes the validity and soundness of a putative best interpretative “vision of the whole,” but that, at this stage of humankind’s journey, it is exceedingly problematical to fallibly discern and adjudicate between competing interpretations, especially as they fit into elaborate tautologies, all which are variously taut in their grasp of reality.

In some sense, our cosmology comprises the propositional aspect of our metanarratives (aspiring to successful and robust descriptions with indications of correspondence) and our axiology comprises the narrative aspect (aspiring to vague but successful references with invitations to particpate). The postmodern critique does not instill incredulity toward our metanarratives per se; rather, it takes note of how every narrative aspect of our metanarratives is rooted in myth (yes, including scientism no less than fideism).  Analogous to Gödel‘s incompleteness theorems, we cannot prove our system’s axioms within the system (evidentially, rationally, presuppositionally or propositionally), itself, but this does not mean that we cannot taste and see (existentially, as recommended by Ignatius, the Psalmist & enlightened speculative cosmologists …) the truth of those axioms, which we would necessarily express – not formally, but – through narrative, story, myth.

This framework establishes a certain amount of epistemic parity between worldviews and religions, which then get authenticated by how well they institutionalize conversions: intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious and adjudicated with an equiplausibility principle, which looks for life-giving and relationship-enhancing criteria when choosing between otherwise ambiguous courses of action. We can also remain on the lookout for Gospel norms like a language of descent or “downward mobility” and a prophetic element (self-criticism). So, we do draw distinctions between a theory of truth and a test of truth and we do recognize that some aspects of reality are best grasped through correspondence while other aspects grasp us through participation.

One lesson we take away is that our reliance on myth reveals that reality overflows our ability to process it, that creation, Creator and people present unfathomable depth dimensions that no encounter can capture or exhaust. If in our cosmologies, with their empirical, logical and practical foci, it is very much our intent to get the right answers, when it comes to our axiologies, with their relational foci, then, our quest is to get the right questions (Whom does the grail serve?).

Our fundamental trust in uncertain reality requires no apologetic, then, and fashioning one is as futile as explaining why we love our Beloved in empirical, logical and practical terms (as if only extrinsically rewarding). Embodiments of truth, beauty, goodness and unity are their own rewards (intrinsically); they grasp us and possess us as we participate in these values with our existential orientations to these transcendental imperatives. As we distinguish between wants and needs, real and acquired desires, lesser and higher goods, our axiologies orient and dispose us to the higher goods, which we can enjoy without measure, and properly dispose us to the created goods that we really need in moderation and not in a disordered (John of the Cross) or inordinate (Ignatius) way.

Our cosmology, which is scientific and philosophic, descriptive and normative, also includes our essentially spiritual quest, which is shaped by the positivist and normative sciences and addresses the orthopraxes of our ethical and moral strivings as well as those ascetical practices and disciplines that enhance awareness, including certain meditative practices, many which come from the East and are not inextricably bound to any religion or worldview (hence some are indeed spiritual without being religious, explicitly anyway). In our cosmology, we better come to grips with our empirical, logical and practical foci of concern and foster intellectual, moral and social conversions.

Our axiology, which is interpretive and evaluative, goes beyond but not without our cosmology and is shaped by our religious myths and liturgical celebrations, which address the orthopathos of our prayer and worship, public and private, forming and reinforcing our aspirations and hopes, answering the question “What’s it to me?” in a manner that is properly ordered, truly fitting and proper, which is to say, Eucharistically. There is no worldview or metanarrative without either an implicit or explicit axiology that is integrally related to one’s cosmology (so we’d best tend to an explicit axiology in a consciously-competent manner). In fact, in addition to their methodological autonomy, our axiologies enjoy a primacy in relation to our cosmologies, although otherwise axiologically-integrated.  It is our orthopathos that mediates between our orthodoxy and orthopraxis to effect an authentic orthocommunio. If our unitive strivings come up short, whether geopolitically or in our primary communities and families, we might look at our prayer lives for, if we invoke, it is only because we have been convoked. In our axiology, we better come to grips with our relational foci of concern, where our value-realizations are trust, assent, fidelity, loyalty, faith, hope, love, eros, philia, agape and so on and we better foster affective and religious conversions.

We do our best to discern where Lonergan’s conversions have been institutionalized, looking to see which interpretive approach best fosters ongoing intellectual, affective, moral and social growth and development, leading to human authenticity. But we’re clearly in more negotiable territory here with discourse dominated more by dogmatic (non-negotiated) and heuristic (still-in-negotiation) concepts, this contrasted to cosmological discourse, which has more theoretic (negotiated in community) concepts and semiotic concepts (non-negotiable b/c meaning, itself, is invested in them).

In defining what my own Radical Emergence approach would be about, then, I see it as an axiological vision of the whole. In such a metanarrative, cosmology is left to the positivist, empirical scientific methodologies, and to the philosophic, normative sciences. Religion, an interpretive endeavor, is constrained by the positivist & normative sciences, and employs a different & autonomous methodology (myth and liturgy), even though integrally-related to the other methodologies in every value-realization. To be clear, by “integrally-related,” I am suggesting that a cosmology presupposes an axiology and vice versa, that our descriptive, normative, interpretive and evaluative foci of human concern presuppose each other.

As an axiological endeavor, the Emerging Church would foster the intentional evolution of the interpretive and evaluative aspects of human value-realizations, which would enhance (and transvalue), also, our cosmological modeling power without interfering with its autonomous methodologies (faith illuminating understanding). Over against both scientism and fideism, the Emerging Church would not conflate or compromise the autonomous methodologies of science, philosophy and religion, of descriptive, normative and interpretive endeavors, but would integrate them axiologically.

What would intentional evolution address? Nothing less than creed, cult, code and community (institutionalized), which are deconstructible, as semiotic realities ordered toward truth, beauty, goodness and unity, which are not deconstructible. How would it address them? Through the amplification of epistemic risks as ordered toward the augmentation of human value-realizations.

Less abstractly and more concretely, how does one amplify epistemic risks? Understanding yields to faith, memory to hope, will to love and alienation to community.

More programatically, what route do I advocate? A Radical Emergence, rooted in the orthopathos and orthodoxy of tradition, as articulated and valued by some in the Radical Orthodoxy movement, and open to the orthopraxes and orthocommunio of the future, as articulated and valued by some in the Emerging Church conversation.

Specifically, one efficacious route to ecclesial and personal transformation is the surrender to the contemplative stance, the 3rd Eye seeing, of nonduality, which is what http://christiannonduality.com/ is all about.

Update on 06 Sept 2009 -See Tom Roberts “In Search of the Emerging Church” the contemplative tradition grounds emerging Christianity

Emerging Church Pillars:

I orthodoxy = honest Jesus scholarship

II orthopraxy = peace & social justice

III orthopathy = contemplative tradition, nonduality

IV orthocommunio = noninstitutional vehicles (complementary & happily on the side)

There are rather clear archetypal themes playing out in our cosmologies and axiologies, likely related to brain development and individuation processes.

A cosmology engages mostly our left-brain (thinking function of the left frontal cortex & sensing function of the left posterior convexity) as the normative and descriptive aspects of value-realization alternately establish and defend boundaries; we encounter the King-Queen and Warrior-Maiden with their light and dark (shadow) attributes as expressed in the journeys of the spirit and the body, primarily through a language of ascent.

An axiology engages mostly our right-brain (intuiting function of the right frontal cortex & feeling function of the right posterior convexity) as the interpretive and evaluative aspects of value-realization alternately negotiate (e.g. reconciliation of opposites, harnessing the power of paradox) and transcend boundaries; we encounter the Crone-Magician and Mother-Lover with their light and dark attributes as expressed in the journeys of the soul and the other (Thou), primarily through a language of descent.

Our propositional cosmologies and participatory axiologies seem to best foster transformation when, beyond our passive reception of them as stories about others, we actively engage the archetypal energies of their mythic dimensions with a contemplation ordered toward action, and also, when in addition to our rather natural expectations, they include 1) a priestly voice that sings of the intrinsic beauty to be celebrated  in seemingly repugnant realities 2) a prophetic voice that is robustly self-critical when speaking the truth 3) a kingly voice that articulates a bias for the bottom, expressing both a privileging of the marginalized and a principle of subsidiarity when preserving goodness 4) a motherly voice that, seeing and calling all as her children, draws every person into her circle of compassion and mercy with no trace of exclusion, only a vision of unity.

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Tim King‘s inaugural essay, The Truth (?) of Sacred Narratives, articulates the The David Group International‘s vision for sacred transformation. Essentially, Tim’s calling us all to dialogue about dialogue with his primary focus on epistemology. This is no wimpy, radically deconstructive postmodernism like that of the false prophets, who have suggested we should tear everything down, raging against the machine but offering no earthly idea regarding how to rebuild it. Neither is it one of those visions that would do us no earthly good because it is so heavenly-minded. Implicit in Tim’s call to meta-dialogue is an affirmation that we can move from an is to an ought, from the given to the normative, from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from facts to values, notwithstanding Hume’s objections, and that we can distinguish between apparent and real goods, lesser and higher goods, notwithstanding any supposed naturalistic fallacy. In other words, if a good meta-dialogue can lead to a good meta-ethic, then a good global dialogue can lead to a good global ethic.
I want to unpack these ideas and place them in a categorical framework that, in my view, might best advance this dialogue and hopefully foster this ethic. Before I do this, however, I simply must address an exciting dynamic that is unfolding before our very eyes. Phyllis Tickle has well described The Great Emergence, a monumental phenomenon in our world, a massive transition in our churches, taking the form of an emerging ethos, which is nothing less than a sacred transformation. This transformation is clearly religious but also playing out at individual, organizational, societal, cultural and global levels. Now, admittedly, I bring a hermeneutic of suspicion to any accounts that seem to so facilely describe historical and sociologic realities in such broad terms while also leading to such sweeping conclusions. It is my inclination to suppose there is a natural tendency in all visionaries, who so clearly see what ought to be, to describe reality in terms of how they would prescribe reality, to take what they feel should be normative and show how it is presently germinating in what’s already been given, to turn one’s historical accountancy into one’s futurist advocacy.  While I am not competent to evaluate the empirical accuracy of the details of Tickle’s account, I would invite even her harshest critics to look beyond the text and to listen actively for an authentic voice of prophetic protest. Whatever else may be going on, her’s is also a clarion call to repentance and conversion through both personal and ecclesial self-examen and self-criticism.
Tickle recognizes the contributions of different movements: 1) conservative, 2) liturgical, 3) social justice and 4) renewal. Richard Rohr has described the four pillars of the emerging church conversation as 1) honest Jesus scholarship, 2) contemplation & nonduality, 3) peace & social justice and 4) noninstitutional vehicles. Both of these descriptions, each in its own way, are nothing less than an affirmation of creed, cult, code and community, the timeless transcendental imperatives of humanity’s irresistable existential orientations to truth, beauty, goodness and unity. Humankind has always sought to articulate the truth it has encountered in creed, celebrate the beauty it has realized in liturgy & ritual, preserve the goodness it has engaged as code & law, and foster the fellowship it has enjoyed in community, this notwithstanding that our dogma has so often deteriorated into dogmatism, our ritual decayed into ritualism, our law ossified into legalism and our community degenerated into institutionalism. What emerges beyond Tickle’s text, in my view, is the reformada, semper reformanda (reformed, always reforming) dynamic that we all can recognize and affirm. Even when we cannot precisely determine the when and how of the reformative aspects of our transformative dynamics, no one can credibly deny that these are perduring aspects of any robustly transformative ecclesial realities.
Rohr has rightly, in my view, reinforced Tickle’s recognition of the powerful convergence aspect of this emergence dynamic. For the first time ever, earlier this year, Roman Catholics came together with Protestants, Evangelicals & Anglican Catholics in the emerging conversation as Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle and Shane Claiborne joined Rohr at the Center for Action & Contemplation for a conference exploring this emergence and convergence. Once again, this convergence aspect presents itself as I survey the riches being mined by Tim, Kevin Beck, Jay Gary, Frank Spencer and others in The David Group International. No one has raised my awareness and warmed my heart more than Richard Rohr and Thomas Merton when it comes to understanding our transformative journeys. Observing the convergence between their hermeneutics and others like McLaren and Tickle has been eye-opening and inspiring. It is nothing short of astounding, a few short months later, to now see Tim King inaugurate The David Group articulating the very principles and aspiring to the same lofty goals of two other of my personal heroes and coreligionists, Leonard Swidler and Hans Kung, whose work toward a Global Dialogue and Global Ethic I have followed with active interest through The Dialogue Institute and Center for Global Ethics . I do not need a brick wall to fall on me to know that this convergence game remains truly afoot!
Thanks to Mike Morrell, I became aware of an exciting conversation in the ecclesial blogosphere, recently, which was sparked by Richard Sudworth‘s reflection The Betrayal of Betrayal. The discussion really got rolling after Kester Brewin and Peter Rollins teased out the nuances of a provocative but evocative piracy metaphor, where they explored, in Sudworth’s words, “piracy” as motif of Christian innovation and faithfulness. Of course, all metaphors eventually collapse and I received much of the conversation in that vein as diverse viewpoints weighed in suggesting, for the most part, just how resilient the metaphor was or just how fast they saw it collapsing, all very instructive in either case. At the same time that I commend this exchange to any who are seriously interested in the emerging conversation, it is precisely because I recognize it as depthful and nuanced that I hesitate to further characterize the issues that were at stake, here, in this short space. I mentioned it here, however, because I do want to say  that it rekindled one of my own recurring themes, which directly bears on the topic at hand. How should one deal with tensions between competing ideas and values? When should such tensions resolve dialectically? When might they otherwise dissolve from a simple perspectival shift? When should they be maintained in a creative tension? Or, perhaps even, some combination of these approaches based on emergent novelties?
The answers to these questions are very much related to how we deal with paradox and mystery, very much involved in formation, deformation, reformation and transformation, clearly related to Tim’s focus on good epistemology. They bear directly on our considerations of what is core versus peripheral, essential versus accidental, central versus marginal, enduring versus ephemeral. In some sense, then, I think it is key to place our methods before our systems, our processes before our products, our practices before our conclusions as we are philosophical without necessarily having a philosophy, are cosmological without having a finished cosmology, are epistemological without having a definitive ontology and so on. This is also to recognize that, regarding life’s most ultimate concerns and most primal realities, getting the questions right is more important than having the right answers.
Clearly, then, truth, beauty, goodness and unity are the intrinsically rewarding values, the “pursuits of same” being their own rewards, the “journeys toward” being their own destinations, the “quests for which” are, themselves, the sought-after grails. The human spiritual quest, then, is essentially philosophic and normative and our transformative journey is oriented toward an authenticity that grows as we develop in our relationship to the truth, intellectually, to beauty, affectively, to goodness, morally, and to unity, socially.
Thomas Merton describes our human journey in successive stages of humanization, socialization and transformation, wherein our very first years we, beginning as little animals, are humanized, soon after to be socialized in order to be able to successfully function in society and to obtain the extrinsic rewards that derive from such functionality. Such humanization and socialization processes correspond to the early stages of our intellectual, affective, moral and social development, all which are very much fostered also by our religious upbringing, to be sure. Less often, Merton often lamented, do our religious institutions seem to foster authentic transformation, instead, turning out, as they most often do, the same performance-based, merit system-oriented personhoods as their secular counterparts, i.e. educational, vocational, occupational, legislative, judicial and military-industrial structures.
When the “products” of religious creeds, cults, codes and communities far more resemble those of our schools, entertainment venues, legislatures & judicial systems and workaday worlds, while we can surely and suitably congratulate ourselves for the indispensable socialization we have thus fostered, we must also introspectively and self-critically ask ourselves whether or not we are also, and more importantly, making our more distinct contribution to a growth in human authenticity, which is supposed to be that of transformation, which lifts our hearts and minds to life’s higher goods and more intrinsic rewards, where we better and better realize that we are valued for who we are as God’s creatures and not for what we do as a member of society.
It is not that our socialization is in any way dispensable; rather, as Merton points out, it’s just that it is totally crazy, a wooden nickel, to imagine that our relationship to God and ongoing transformation are just more of this same socialization dynamic. This is why it is so critical that we understand what Rohr emphasizes as our contemplative mind or nondual thinking. Our empirical, rational and practical, problem-solving, dualistic mindset is of course a gift from God and indispensable to our functioning in society but we must go beyond it, through faith, in our God-encounter (as we must in all of our personal relationships), cultivating the contemplative stance, employing our nondual engagement of reality.
Let me break open some categories and unpack their meaning. Wim Drees, the new editor of Zygon, which is published by the Institute of Religion in an Age of Science, draws a distinction between the cosmological and the axiological and suggests that a theology equals a cosmology plus an axiology. I affirm this distinction and further define these categories where the cosmological is comprised of science and philosophy, or our descriptive and normative sciences, respectively, asking of reality the questions: What is that? and How can one best acquire or avoid that? A human, then, has already embarked on a spiritual quest, cosmologically, by virtue of being an inherently philosophic animal, prior to having a religious interpretation, axiologically. The axiological is comprised of culture and religion, which are typically inextricably bound, further defined as our evaluative and interpretive stances, respectively, asking of reality the questions: What’s that to me? and How does all of that tie back together or re-ligate?
Science, philosophy and culture, then, however primitively or crudely, have always been interacting implicitly and unconsciously on each person’s and each culture’s journey, individually and collectively, feeding humankind’s spiritual quest for meaning in its inextricable relationship to truth, goodness and beauty. And this quest inevitably becomes religious, for each person and each culture, as the interactions become explicit and conscious, properly ordering these relationships in the creeds, codes and cults of our religious communities. The implicit and unconscious journey is no less sacred or holy but it is certainly more whole when articulated, celebrated, preserved and enjoyed explicitly and consciously. Such an interpretive stance, which is essentially religious, even while explicit and conscious, will not always be formal vis a vis an organized or institutional religion and, in some cases, may not even be theistic.
Archetypally, our kings and queens establish boundaries, our warriors and maidens defend boundaries, our wizards and crones (alchemists) negotiate boundaries and our lovers and mothers transcend boundaries. These boundaries exist for truth in creed, beauty in cult, goodness in code and unity in community. For each of these existential orientations as transcendental imperatives, there are roots to be cultivated (boundaries established and defended), shoots to be nurtured (boundaries negotiated) and fruits to be enjoyed (boundaries transcended). There are tensions to be resolved dialectically, dissovled perspectivally and maintained creatively. It is no small task requiring no facile analysis trying to sort out one reality from the next as we discern in community radically, which are our roots, emergently, which are our shoots.
I do know this. We know what fruits we must look for and we know that an institution that does not foster human authenticity via intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious growth and development needs reformation even if reformed. All institutions that are properly self-critical and attentive to their prophetic traditions will welcome ongoing reformation.
Properly ordered, our creeds, codes and cults are means to an End, Whom most cultures consider, pneumatologically, as Spirit. All too often, once disordered, these means get confused for ends, the signs get taken for the realities. What generally happens is that a richly textured and depthful experience of our multidimensional reality which we understand, primarily, through our participatory imagination via concrete, imaginative and practical engagements and shared story-telling, will quite naturally get processed by our propositional cognition via abstract, conceptual and theoretical ratiocinations and shared map-making, thereby augmenting our ability to recognize certain common touchpoints for the journey and translating what might otherwise be ineffective ways of communicating into a lingua franca with more rigid but more universally accepted categories. Much, of course, gets lost in translation.
Pretty much all gets lost, unfortunately, when we mistake our maps for the reality they represent.
What the emergence and convergence conversation is about is avoiding that so incredibly sad but all too frequent reality where, curiously and tragically, you or I get satisfied with a folded and creased glossy, black & white 3×5 of our Lover in our wallet, having gotten totally out of touch with the former but glorious ecstasies of our Beloved’s bridal chamber. Now, quite honestly, if a well-intended iconoclast comes along and tears up your 3×5, in their own way, they are sadly missing the point, too, and do not understand the role that semiotic realities play in our radical human finitude, quite often as sacramental signs that can fully bring into this incarnational reality precisely what it is that they have brought into our hearts and minds.
This is January 2010. I am archiving some of my musings here from my recent responses on other blogs:

Humans 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. +++

Resurrection? Yeah, I agree, essential. At-one-ment? Also essential. But not the old penal, substitutionary trope. Bad theodicy. Might there be a grand cosmic Justice System, robed in a garment of legal and moral realities? That’s not an unreasonable question. Not unimportant either. Sounds to me like a cosmological question that science and philosophy can get after. In addressing our ultimate concerns, religion, in general, and Christianity, in particular, go WAY beyond these questions (even if they don’t go entirely without them). It addresses realities like the nature of the Father and of the Kingdom.
+++ I view science as a descriptive methodology, philosophy as a normative methodology, culture as an evaluative enterprise and religion & other meta-perspectives as interpretive enterprises. Each approach is autonomous in asking reality, respectively, 1) what is that? 2) how does one best acquire or avoid that? 3) what’s that to me/us? and 4) how does all of this tie (or re-ligate) together?Every human value-realization integrally relates these otherwise autonomous approaches. Science, then, is inherently normative. Philosophy, for its part, must employ the “is” provided by descriptive science in order to reason its way to a normative “ought.” Taken together, science and philosophy are cosmological enterprises. I distinguish them from culture and religion/ideology, which I consider axiological enterprises. The rubric works like this: the normative mediates between the descriptive and interpretive to effect the evaluative. These autonomous approaches are not logically-related (applying distinctly different methods & asking very different types of questions), but they are, one might say, intellectually-related, working together whenever we realize a human value. In my view, what is necessary to lead a good and moral life is transparent to human reason and we do not need some special divine revelation in order to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong. We especially don’t need religion providing answers to what are essentially scientific questions. Science and philosophy employ autonomous methodologies and “get after” one set of human concerns. The presumption is that religions and ideologies and metaphysicians are more than welcome in the public square to speak to moral realities but need to translate their propositions and reason together with others of goodwill. And I’m very cool with defining “get after” as speculation or question-asking. I am only circumscribing different horizons of concern, suggesting the nature of the questions they ask. I am not suggesting how conclusive anyone’s proofs or answers might be. But I do have rubrics for that, too.
+++ In my view, Christianity remains in search of a metaphysic, just like the rest of the world. I prefer to prescind from metaphysical-like interpretations to a much more vague phenomenological perspective. Thus, I tend to look at Scripture and Tradition and come away with the vague notion of an event, which is just to say that “something happened.” And I call this happening and what ensued in its wake the Resurrection Event. Now, what that means literally for either Jesus or anyone else? Well, different takes on this are naturally variously compelling to different people and peoples. I think, again, we can back up and look at the overall thrust of Jesus’ life, and that of other traditions even, from a more vague perspective, and we can reasonably come away with the idea that the saints and mystics and authentic practitioners of these traditions are testifying to profound experiences of a reality that is ultimately unitive and love-filled, that awakens us to solidarity and inspires in us compassion, and that inspires a trust-relationship with and toward reality, itself. This, then, is a rather universal testimony to the idea THAT reality is, at bottom, friendly, even as we might be left to wonder exactly HOW this may be so, because the evidence, as you note, is ambiguous. Once we situate Christianity and its specific message in the context of the other great traditions, its specific hopes, that all may be well, do not appear wholly unreasonable. I think the novelist Walker Percy was very faithful in his articulation of the human predicament, as informed by his appreciation of the French existentialists and folks like Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. Sartre and Camus et al and their perspectives on the human condition are not to be facilely engaged and then casually dismissed. Tillich was spot on in recognizing that faith was a polar reality with doubt an indispensable element, a state of being ultimately concerned and not, rather, propositionally certain.

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. +++

In Philip Clayton & Tripp Fuller’s gift to us, a book called Transforming Christian Theology (Fortress Press, 2010), there is a chapter called A Theology of Self-Emptying for the Church, Chapter 13. <<< This link brings one to Bob Cornwall’s treatment of Phil’s wonderful meditation. I’m with the Jewish mystics, who thought God had to shrink to make room for creation. And also with John the Baptist in that He must increase and I must decrease. This is also what at-one-ment means to me, nothing penal or substitutionary. With Duns Scotus, I believe that the Incarnation was in the cards from the Grand Cosmic Get-Go and was not occasioned by any frail human felix culpa!
+++
There is a certain irony in that my neologisms mark an attempt to make certain ideas more accessible (what’s that? what’s that to us? how does one avoid or acquire that? how might we tie all this together?). Normative methodology = how does one avoid or acquire that? using logic, aesthetics & ethics.
This is no attempt at a meta-theory. It’s a simple heuristic device, the articulation of a few conceptual placeholders. It is grounded in Bernard Lonergan’s theological anthropology and Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic approach. It is Peirce who defines the normative sciences as logic, aesthetics and ethics. All I’ve done is to translate Peirce’s observation that the normative sciences mediate between phenomenology and metaphysics and then suggested that indeed they do and are, in fact, purpose-driven or value-oriented. It is Lonergan’s protege’ Daniel Helminiak who describes the progressively expanding horizons of human concern, the positivist (science) nested in the philosophic. It is Wim Drees, Zygon editor, who has suggested that theologians might better focus on the axiological and leave the cosmological to others and I heartily agree.
It’s a shared vision captured by Amos Yong and myself, and we do accept the burden of proof & have 30 pages of it tied up in peer review, presently. It is precisely our point that our concepts with their implicit & explicit pragmatic cash values must be negotiated in progressively larger communities of human value-realizers (truth-seekers, beauty-creators, goodness-preservers, unity-lovers).
You suggest that “if there is justice to be had, or solace to be sought, it’s not something out there to be discovered, by some kind of magic, but something we are left to create once we finally figure out that no one else is going to do it for us.”
That’s neither unreasonable nor uncontroversial. For my part, I remain open to the notion that humans might both create as well as discover various aspects of reality that might ground our visions of justice and solace. A theological nonrealism can critique a naive theological realism and urge us to retreat from any facile notions that the reality of God would be comprehensible or that divine action would be determined by necessity. Of course, positive attributes like comprehensibility and necessity can only be applied to a god-concept analogically. Such a nonrealism would go too far, however, in a priori suggesting that the reality of God must be unintelligible or that divine action must be random if God is also like what we might consider to be good. That would amount to a caricature of how predicates are assigned to the God-concept.
I know it might appear that folks like Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas and Charles Hartshorne are taking us on one too many trips around the theological barn in applying philosophical nuance and qualification of predicates to god-attributes, but it just might go with the enormity of the territory, don’t you imagine?
One could coherently and consistently say that a putative God (or concept) would be incomprehensible but not that it’s unintelligible, even while suggesting that His goodness would be something LIKE human goodness. One could coherently and consistently say that divine action would be probabilistic but not that it would be random, even while suggesting that His goodness would be something LIKE human goodness. How could one apply an analogical predicate like random to God when it is not otherwise physically instantiated in reality? Now THAT would amount to trafficking in total abstractions!
Now, it may be that one might find oneself totally scandalized by the notion of such a God as would seemingly treat human creatures like dogs, feeding them, patting them on the head, worming them, playing with them and occasionally sending them scampering off by kicking them in the gut, while these importunate creatures keep coming back, again and again and again, to their Master for care and affection, sometimes with their tails between their legs and sometimes with their tails wagging. One can dismiss such a God-concept on evaluative grounds and tear the Glad Psalms out of one’s hymnal, singing only the Mad Psalms and plaintively lamenting the Sad. But to dismiss a highly nuanced God-concept on epistemic grounds as unintelligible and to describe its putative divine action as necessarily random does not withstand philosophical rigor or theological scrutiny.
I’m not here to acquit the Most High and I am not a professional apologist. But I thought it might be best to disambiguate the concept of this God we’re often invited to defend. And I’m here in the spirit of Emerson, who said that God will arrive as soon as the half-gods depart. In helping folks dismiss their straw-gods, perhaps they might better worship the God Almighty?
And I’m not picking a nit in suggesting a distinction between incomprehensibility and unintelligiblity, or between random and probabilistic. Those are distinctions that do make a difference and they are cashed out in the manner in which we choose to live lives of vibrant faith, vital hope and earnest love of self, other, earth and God.
+++
In my view, a philosophical goal to which we might reasonably aspire is to frame up our questions regarding our ultimate concerns in a manner that is congruent with reality (doesn’t contradict established scientific theory), logically consistent (employing concepts and arguments that reflect good critical thinking) and internally coherent (don’t have us working at cross-purposes with our own approaches to reality).

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?

Analogia Entis Revisited

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.

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

John Sobert Sylvest February 3, 2010 at 8:44 pm

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.