Interestingly, formal and/or final causation or philosophic verisimilitudes present fairly often, not just in Aristotelian-Thomism. While, true enough, many seriously misconstrue the role of purpose in nature, such as in common misconceptions regarding evolutionary processes, one risks caricature of other more thoughtful conceptions by cursorily dismissing all appeals to formal or final causation. Very roughly mapping over the A-T conceptions are Peirce's modal category of Thirdness, which is not fully derived from but certainly influenced by what Scotus called his Formal Distinction. There are others notions like Tacit Dimensionality, as developed by Polanyi. What's often in play are observed effects such as those of landscapes, which can redirect the flow of water, or of synaptical patterns, which can redirect the flow of neurotransmitters. Even Baldwinian evolution arguably exhibits effects that fit these general characteristics.All of these examples are consistent with emergentist paradigms. Terry Deacon, who's immersed in Peirce's semiotics, proposes an emergentist account of thermodynamics, morphodynamics and teleodynamics. What's in play in all of this is the notion of downward causation in nature, a reality few would deny. All of the above accounts in the lineage of Scotus, Peirce, Polanyi and Deacon, at least, while realist, are not necessarily robustly metaphysical, just vaguely phenomenological. In fact, they can be interpreted as ontologically agnostic, where a metaphysic is bracketed, leaving others to substitute their root metaphor (or philosophy of mind, for example) du jour. So, lam suggesting, only, that these causations as vaguely considered can and do have heuristic value, acting as conceptual placeholders, especially where explanatory gaps present.So, where's the rub? Facilely and succinctly, the arguments ensue regarding — not downward causations per se but, instead - whether or not there would be "violations" of physical causal closure. Now, of course, this vagueness leaves room for both a minimalist telos and a more robust telos and those who subscribe to the latter don't cotton to having their concept allegedly coopted.That's when the real metaphysical circus comes to town. But that ain't my circus and those aren't my monkeys. But, for an informative read, do Google: + Deacon + Goodenough + teleodynamics What drives such an interest in any given apologist's terminology? Locating her logical inconsistencies might make for great philosophic sport but the more salient concern would seem to be whether anylogically consistent god-concepts have been constructed and used in valid arguments? Of course they have. Of interest, next, would be whether or not that concept more or less corresponded to any recognizable "orthodox" formulations of a deity. One might cursorily dismiss such a concept on the grounds that it doesn't appear to match many popularized understandings of the masses, who never progressed in faith formation, who never were sufficiently catechized, who belong to fundamentalistic cohorts of a tradition ... but one best engage, instead, the full tradition, its academic theologians, apophatic mystics and - not just exoteric, but — esoteric expressions. Yes, even if they represent minority reports. Again, the answer will be that those god-concepts cohere internally, have been used in valid arguments and do correspond to orthodoxinterpretations, which, btw, engage such as the Bible with modern literary criticism. All of this would still have only established a logical possibility. Few serious atheological apologists would dispute this. The next move for the apologists, whatever their persuasion, is evidential. As the subject matter refers to putative realities beyond our domain, the evidential appeals rely on abductive plausibility, what's intuitive and counterintuitive, what's commen sensical. Each side tries to build a cumulative case. Philosophically, all that's ever yielded has been the Scottish verdict: not proven. So, it seems to me that the more salient concern would be, aside from the fact that so many engage bad epistemology or naively embrace a dubious metaphysic, and aside from the issue of insufficient epistemic warrant to decisively adjudicate primal realities --- What normativejustifications obtain or not - for those who, being otherwise epistemically virtuous and metaphysically modest, choose to live a life of faith and/or hope? What I'm suggesting is that pragmatic arguments as engaged by Wm James, Clifford, Pascal, Hume and JS Mill might make for an interesting consideration. As it is, beneath all the argumentation, informal and syllogistic, logical and evidential, we eventually mine down to what are essentially pragmatic appeals, that essentialism and nominalism are obverse sides of the same bankrupt epistemic coin. After all, if we just witnessed exchanges with a consensus regarding how logical validity doesn't guarantee soundness and abductive plausibility is insufficient for decisive philosophic demonstration, why keep playing the silly game on such weak epistemic grounds? What are the normative implications?William Rowe focuses on evidential arguments precisely because he believes that logical arguments demonstrating the so -called incompatibility of traditional divine attributes are too strong to successfully defend, in fact conceding that Plantinga's defense succeeded in defeating Mackie's argument. The ontological arguments are indisputably valid in several modal logic systems. Most argumentation in philosophical circles regarding the problem of evil do not involve logical defenses, only evidential theodicies. The main reasons the formal arguments for God are otherwise not decisive are because they are tautological, often employing concepts that may or may not successfully refer, throwing their soundness in doubt. That's the rub, it seems to me. Modal arguments by Godel, Hartshorne, Peirce and, lately, Christopher McHugh, appear valid also, just not, necessarily, sound. At least, that's thenature of the controversy as I've most often encountered it — almost always theodicies, seldom defenses. Not to say there are no dissenters, just to observe what's more vs less controversial. That people communicate poorly, including me, might be unfortunate. That' doesn't strike at the substance of what's at stake. This is a mighty big issue to squeeze into a combox, anyway. As for equivocation, any theory of everything will refer to unknown putative realities necessarily predicating some terms univocally, some equivocally, some analogically, some metaphorically (weaker analogy), some variously increasing descriptive accuracy thru affirmations (kataphatic) or negations (apophatic), in an effort to halt infinite regressions, avoid causal disjunctions, limit circular referentiality, navigate past incompleteness theorems and a plethora of other matters,the complexity of which inheres in the subject matter. As long as one constructs the argument with external congruence, internal coherence, logical consistency, interdisciplinary consilience, hypothetical consonance and so on, the equivocations are legitimate and not in bad faith. Only if someone equivocates on an ad hoc basis on the fly should that raise an objection. Quite frankly, while I'm pretty sure | don't share Prof Feser's epistemology and I know I| don't subscribe to his particular metaphysic, to charge him with equivocation seems facile and unjustified. His responses derive from his system and not from ad hockery, doc. lam a metaphysical realist, an indispensable philosophical preamble to Christianity, but no particular metaphysic is required and a thousand blossoms bloom requiring the sorting of wheat from chaff. Like most of the great traditions, Pxtnty only relies on a metaphysical realism, forwhich a rather vague phenomenology suffices. That vagueness is not a rhetorical device but the tacit recognition of explanatory gaps. At any rate, re: omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, omnipresence and omnipathy, these are sufficiently nuanced dating back to Augustine (implicitly, then). To condense a few books into a combox in response to what have been no more than facile quips: Both the free will defense of classical theism (e.g. A. Plantinga) and process theism (e.g. D. Griffin) qualify Cimit) divine power, the former implicitly, the latter explicitly. St. Augustine qualified omnipotence in a way that made it logically consistent with omnibenevolence. As succinctly as | can, sacrificing nuance, essentially, divine omnipotence would be that power greater than which would otherwise be inconsistent with humanity's optimal free will as ordered toward the greatest love and not inconsistent withother divine ends re: higher goods. THAT this would be the case, as a logical possibility, in general, as a defense, says nothing about HOW that might be the case regarding any given event, as an evidential matter, in particular, as a theodicy. Some hold to an anti-theodicy Jewish origins?), which considers theodicies, toward God, blasphemous, toward human suffering, callous. I'm sympathetic to that view. Does evil nonetheless strike at the abductive plausibility of god-concepts as gathered in a cumulative case like evidential matter? Sure it does. More than almost any other objection. I'm not sure how all employ the term scientism. In many cases, it seems to me to commit a category error, conflating normative anddescriptive methods, treating provisional methodological stipulations as decisive ontological demonstrations (e.g. methodological naturalism necessarily implicates metaphysical naturalism). In other cases, scientism disvalues the dialectic between abductive and deductive inference, imagining that nothing of epistemic virtue can emerge from a cycle of abductive hypothesizing and deductive clarifying, as if it yields only a priori, rationalistic notions. At the same time, then, it overvalues inductive inference, suggesting that no epistemic value derives unless inference cycles triadically. While abductive inference does conjecture, still, it proceeds a posteriori, from known effects/properties, reasoning about unknown causes/objects. This makes it much weaker than inductive inference and very much weaker than deductive inference. So, we properly DEvalue but don't entirelyDiSvalue it. The abductive-deductive dialectic yields tremendous heuristic value, greatly enhancing our modeling power, providing our indispensable methodological stipulations and metaphysical presuppositions. To be sure, host of other normative criteria determine which heuristics ordinarily work the best, but any who wholly disvalue metaphysics will, in the process, necessarily eviscerate science, as philosophy buries its undertakers. Of course, many OVERvalue abductive inference, but that's another story about naive realism. I followed your link to the Peanut Gallery and dipped my toes into the water. The substance of what's going on there is thatmany folks, who are properly suspicious of common sense, are trying to subvert the intuitive with the counterintuitive, but don't see the irony in their own over-reliance on mere plausibility. This suggests to me that, much deeper, they are not primarily engaging the pro-positions of our descriptive sciences and normative philosophies (trust me, they want you to do all of their remedial homework, so unfamiliar are they with anything but caricatures) but are displaying the evaluative dis-positions of our disenchanted cultures. Folks like that need prayers and hugs more than arguments. | shall leave them alone. johnboy