Not long after our new millennium dawned, I listened, with great interest, to a recording of Professor Hawking's speech, Godel & the End of Physics. He kindly makes that paper available here: http://www. hawking.org.uk/gode... While the physics were intriguing and presented fairly accessibly, the overall thrust of his speech was an eye-rolling yawner about incompleteness theorems and their implications for a TOE. You see, apparently, it had ony recently dawned on Professor Hawking that those Godel-like constraints on physics, which I'd learned from reading Fr. Stanley Jaki's books and lectures decades prior, would apply to final theories as mathematical models. Fr. Jaki traced the history of how long it took the physics community to awaken from its Godelian slumbers here:http://www.sljaki.com/JakiGode... Fr. Jaki, throughout his illustrious career, chronicled the birth of science, in which civilizations it was stillborn and in which it flourished and why, making some of the points expressed in the review of this "God ~haunted film." All that said, reality's intelligibility doesn't seem to me to be an all or nothing proposition that must necessarily be rationally derived from our justificatory attempts to establish firm epistemic foundations. Reality's intelligibility presents in degrees and evolutionary epistemology seems a sufficient explanation for why our intelligence is good enough to navigate our own cosmic neighborhood, even if it turns out to be ill-equipped to map reality as we approach t=0. One might stipulate, for argument's sake, that a belief in God has gifted science withsignificant heuristic value and, as such, might therefore be weakly truth—indicative regarding primal realities, but that doesn't make it robustly truth-conducive regarding our primal origins. As Hans Kung would put it, believers enjoy a justified fundamental trust in this uncertain reality while others have a nowhere anchored and paradoxical trust in it. That's a psychological observation, though, not an ontological demonstration. In either case, reality remains radically uncertain and all of us had better build our tolerance of ambiguity, appreciation of paradox and awe of mystery. A theory of everything (unified field theory), which would describe gravity using quantum mechanics, could have enormous practical significance for humanity. For example, some say we could extract inexhaustible clean energy (with a peace dividend, possibly?) and build unimaginably faster quantum computers. While we might not be able to prove the truth of such atheory in a formal symbol system, we might be able to taste and see (or enjoy a good sneaking suspicion of) the truth of its axioms in such pragmatic fruits as could come about from various technical advances, some which are likely difficult to foresee, presently. That would account for its scientific and practical meaning. It wouldn't otherwise change the categories of our other spheres of human concern, such as philosophy, culture or religion, which probe reality in search of other types of value-realizations. Aesthetically, it would be one of the most elegant, beautiful equations that the likes of Sheldon Cooper will have ever seen, so would likely generate spin-offs of The Big Bang, perhaps a series called The Big Toe! The successful abductive-deductive analyses of the logical compatibility between various God-concepts and theproblem of evil are morally exculpatory not theologically explanatory. They merely suggest that one has apprehended an innocent rather than the culprit. They don't respond to such a question as "For what good reason did you beat your wife?" by listing the manifold and multiform efficacies that might ensue in the wake of a wife- beating. They uncover the implicit presuppositions of the case of mistaken identity that render the question nonsensical as it fails to successfully reference reality. That's one reason the so- called evidential problem of evil doesn't get off the ground, inductively, as it fails to fly, logically, either. A good theodicy addresses the evidential not logical problems by inventorying - not the causes of human suffering, but — the God-provisioned remedies that would or would not be available, in principle. That God could bring good out of suffering does not implicate God as its cause anymore thana medic on a battlefield can be blamed for a sniper wound she's tending. The existential problem of evil gets addressed, practically, as we respond with compassion. All that said, in general, as it pertains to any given human suffering, in particular, to offer a theodicy is blasphemous toward God and callous toward our fellow wo/men (per many in Judaism and I| agree). Suffering remains an incomprehensible mystery, not subject to rationalizations. While many believers and nonbelievers both traffic in caricatures when it comes to articulating orthodox conceptions, formatively, orthocommunal, orthopathic and orthopraxic dynamics enjoy a certain primacy in the life of faith, so, one shouldn't judge them too harshly. I can't speak for any given cohort, but neither Christianity, generally, nor Catholicism, in particular, are monolithic -not metaphysically, not even theologically, save for essential creedal dogma. As for popular piety, that's all over the map and I'll concede it doesn't traffic in nuance, But why must so many fixate on and critique popularized conceptions when other more rigorous accounts are there to be engaged? While | appreciate that God will fully appear only when the halfgods have left the stage and that, therefore, some atheologians who engage the caricatures do great hygienic work for the same cause as me, they might better enjoy the challenge of investigating the reference provided above to N. Murphy, whose physicalist view of the person is acceptable theologically and biblically, as well as scientifically and philosophically, to no too few of us. Metaphysics does normative work, probing reality to discover the indispensable methodological stipulations and ontological presuppositions of our descriptive sciences.It generates concepts through various degrees of abstraction, variously predicating them (e.g. univocally, equivocally, analogically, apophatically, etc) of one reality vs another, often a putative (even primal or ultimate reality) vs an actual reality. As a heuristic device, its terms provide conceptual placeholders for those realities that might confront us with various degrees of epistemic indeterminacy and/or ontological vagueness. They're inescapably tautological, not descriptively untrue, necessarily, just uninformative. Instead, they provide epistemic virtue, helping us to think clearly, to disambiguate concepts, to distinguish categories, to integrate methodologies, philosophically, thus fostering (via norms) ongoing inquiry, but they don't provide empirical data, positivistically. They thus need not run into difficultly withempirical sciences and, as our descriptive sciences advance, may generate new concepts, abstractions and norms to pave the way forward for inquiry. With so many systems with various implicit and/or explicit epistemological and/or ontological presuppositions, I've little temptation to inhabit this one or that to discern its in/efficacies. I do offer this one litmus test for a preliminary sort of epistemic wheat and chaff: How much normative impetus does any given perspective accord to its hermeneutic in our diverse spheres of human concern, i.e. religiously, practically, morally, politically, etc? How stridently, polemically, ideologically, tendaciously, insistently, aggressively does this or that cohort urge its views on others and with how much self ~assurance (epistemic hubris vs humility)? I have observed no too few who, overenamored with principles of causationand sufficient reason, rather facilely extrapolate these methodological stipulations and their implicit ontological presuppositions into "self-evident" metaphysical necessities. That epistemic turnpike, travelled aware or unawares, forces a realist lane change, from moderate to naive, by moving past the metaphysical highway's double yellow lines of logical and onto-logical necessities, the latter category which may or may not successfully refer to reality. Put differently, moderate realists, including Thomists, Scotists and process~relational thinkers, all, one way or another, refer to three ontological modes. To keep it simple, the first two are possibility and actuality. A truly moderate realist will either implicitly or explicitly treat the third category, vaguely, employing, in place of necessities, probabilities, as 1) our metaphysics remain hypothetical, 2) our epistemologies - fallibilist and 3) from what physical realitydid we ever manage to abstract the concept of necessity in this pervasively emergent cosmos? Yet infallibilisms continue to creep. Stephen Hawking, Kurt Godel, Stanley Jaki, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, philosophical theology, natural theology, logical problem of evil, evidential problem of evil, existential problem of evil, god of metaphysics, theodicy, anti-theodicy, principle of causation, principle of sufficient reason, God and suffering, theory of everything