I believe it is still correct to say that both Christianity, in general, and Roman Catholicism, in particular, remain in search of a metaphysic, that philosophy remains an autonomous method from both science and theology. While there are certain preambles to the faith, which are indeed indispensable metaphysical presuppositions without which the life of faith would make little sense, Christianity's coherence certainly wouldn't turn on which philosophy of mind or interpretation of soul one inclines toward, as long as one's metaphysic remains realist and one's anthropology affirms certain beliefs about human nature, e.g. that it's clearly differentiated by its rationality, that it's rationality includes a radically free will, and so on. This is to suggest, for example. that a nonreductive physicalist account of the human soul would not seem to me to be apriori incompatible with Christianity. I would be surprised to discover that it's necessarily incompatible with Roman Catholicism (I just don't know) given that a great deal of Nancey Murphy's work on emergentist accounts of human nature was accomplished during a decade or more of collaboration with the late Bill Stoeger and his fellow Jesuits under the auspices of the Vatican Observatory, as published by Notre Dame, the Vatican, Oxford Press and others. I affirm that Aristotelian notions of causation can help elucidate emergentist heuristics but I don't buy into the notion that one root metaphor or the next (substance, process, experience, etc) delivers the only metaphysic compatible with the Gospel, not for Christians in general or Catholics in particular. Now, it may well be that if one adopts a substance metaphysic and then proceeds to traffic in concepts like immaterial that onewill get inescapably driven to Feser's conclusions regarding theological anthropology vis a vis Aristotelian-Thomism. He generally seems rigorously consistent. That's fine and well. I have little reason, however, to employ his metaphysics, in the first place, or to think it necessarily successfully refers to primal realities much less describes them. A more vague phenomenological approach committed to metaphysical realism should work well enough for Christianity it seems, while the philosophers continue their toil on "hard" problems. Those preambles don't presuppose any given metaphysical system and aren't delivered by any metaphysical system. They aren't provable and don't function like propositions that one would argue. They are meta-metaphysical, an inventory of ontological givens, without which no argument could advance, no proof could be attempted, no metaphysics could behypothesized. Common sense notions of causation, the existence of other minds, principles of noncontradiction and excluded middle and sufficient reason are methodological stipulations, provisional beliefs that are indispensable to all human value-realizations, whether delivered by the methods of science and philosophy or the interpretations gifted by faith. We don't disprove solipsism; we just ignore solipsists! Those givens refer to proximate reality, in my view, and aren't terribly controversial in that sense. When one employs them to refer to ultimate and primal realities, that's much more controversial and they best be considered methodological stipulations, without which inquiry could not proceed, not metaphysical necessities. In what seems to be a pervasively emergent cosmos, our givens may be as local as the rules of one's neighborhood supper club, as some laws, themselves, seem to beemergent. We evolved in and adapted to a zone of sufficient regularity in a far from equilibrium environment, so | refer to the PSR as a principle of sufficient regularity. What Thomism has demonstrated by extrapolating the principle of sufficient reason to conceptions of causation that are eternal, atemporal — amounts not, as many seem to imagine, to the probabilistic proposition that reality's local intelligibility necessarily implicates its universal comprehensibility, but to a pragmatic observation coupled with an evaluative disposition, which is that, if such regularities and causal chains don't perdure, we're, unfortunately, epistemically screwed. While it makes no sense to presuppose that we'll ever be either methodologically thwarted, epistemically, or metaphysically occulted, ontologically, for that would a priori foreclose on inquiry, it doesn't mean we aren't thereby screwed? For all practical purposes, best | can understand, the closer we get to T=0 near the Big Bang, the lessmodeling power we enjoy. A suitable amount of epistemic humility would seem to be invited where T doesn't refer at all. We share enough from what can be inferred from human evolutionary epistemology, a pragmatic semiotic realism and an emergentist heuristic in order to explore our shared human values and strategies for realizing same. In Ursula Goodenough's specific case, for example, she and Terry Deacon affirm teleodynamics. This amounts to a minimalist telos that wouldn't necessarily violate physical causal closure or correspond to that much more robustly (theologically) conceived primal telos, but, at least, we encounter there a heuristic bridge for those of us with an analogical imagination. The semiotic realism of Charles Sanders Peirce provides a constructive postmodern approach that has been adapted by those of diverse approaches, whether a religious naturalist like Ursula or a Roman Catholic theologianlike the late Don Gelpi, S.J. ... | would encourage you to look up Gelpi's work via Google or Amazon. Also, | commend the work of Joe Bracken SJ (the Divine Matrix) and Jack Haught (a process theologian). Finally, Bernard Lonergan's anthropology lends itself to fruitful dialogue with people of all perspectives. Regarding Kant's interrogatories, what can we know, what can we hope for, what must we do --- we can hope to know what we must do, which is to love. We can be confidently assured, performatively, even though epistemically challenged, informatively. What we need to discern morally and practically to get along with one another in proper relationship, too, with our environment, doesn't depend on special divine revelations, just a good human heart and disciplined human reason. How people otherwise choose to relate to putative ultimate and primal realities --- | choose not to disturb their chosen reverie.>>> Which is why | don't think their is a God like the God of Catholicism. Reality is too absurd to be the creation of an all-good, all -powerful, and all-knowing God. ... ... I would think it better if one stance was more plausible than the others <<< That's the rub. Relative plausibility wouldn't deliver decisive answers because it's far too weakly inferential (not robustly probabilistic). Specifically, those who've advanced evidential atheological arguments typically have failed to distinguish between abductive (including retroductive) and inductive inference. As it turns out, the primary reason that atheological evidential arguments have been formulated is because the theological logical arguments have been deemed valid {in several modal logics). The divine attributes have always been sufficiently nuanced, variously predicated, whether asanalogical, univocal, equivocal, apophatic or kataphatic, whether in a substance, process or phenomenological metaphysic, whether by the early church fathers, ancient apophatic mystics, St. Augustine, medieval Thomists or Scotists, or by Alvin Plantinga, Jacques Maritain, Kurt Godel, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne, Ralph MclInerny, Peter Kreeft or Ed Feser. All that over against the facile atheological caricatures that get introduced knee-jerk like into almost every thread here. Here in New Orleans, Ignatius Reilly is celebrated. Walker Percy was instrumental in making him and our other dunces famous. Percy is another good example of a first class semiotician, following Peirce's legacy, which was also influenced by the great medieval Franciscan, Duns Scotus, whose name etymologically gifted us the word, dunce. There's no need to defend every element inGenesis as if it were an historical account of the past since, instead, it's a myth formulated to explain our present "human situation." THAT we are thus situated, anthropologically, and in need of an outside assist, soteriologically, are the take-aways, theologically. The imperatives of natural selection, survival and reproduction, suffice as an account of HOW we got thus situated in our pervasively selfish milieu, both personally and socially. The emergence of a radically free will in our "symbolic species" from the coevolution of language and brain accounts for the phylogenetic dawning of a moral agency, which only then colored selfish behaviors in terms of evil and made at least some of what were previously only apparent altruistic behaviors, indeed, authentically loving. There's no need to conceive the human situation, then, in terms of some ontologicalrupture that happened in the past, i.e. "the" Fall, because it might better be understood in terms of a teleological striving that's oriented toward the future. Static and essentialist accounts are less robust than dynamic and processive perspectives. It's difficult to solve problems using the same mindset that created them. The narrative of evolution explains the origin of evil but essentialism made it into a problem. This is more consistent with the minority report of the Scotists, those Franciscans who believed that the Incarnation was loaded into the cards from the cosmic get-go, not in response to some so-called happy fault (felix culpa). See this alternative: http://americamagazine.org/issue/350/articl e/evolution-evil-and-original-sin As [ understand the Catholic moral stance, it's not grounded speculatively butpractically. It doesn't state, indubitably, when ensoulment takes place, i.e. whether at conception or later. It seems to implicitly acknowledge that legitimate philosophical distinctions might be drawn between, for example, incipient and sentient human life, and a sapient human person, as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, embryonically. The teaching, instead, suggests that, for all practical purposes, human life, from the moment of conception, should be treated with the same dignity ascribed to all human persons. To oversimplify, it's basically an appeal to the safest route, practically, in order to ensure the optimal outcome, morally. That does seem to be the general thrust of the Roman Catholic stance? Take the safer practical path to achieve the optimal moral outcome, What makes it untenable for many, however, is that it invokes too much agnosticism regarding human personhood. See http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu...Who would rescue a cryotank of 200 frozen human embryos from a burning building rather than the screaming 2 year old in the next room? At the same time, who would, if able to rush back in, rescue personal belongings rather than the embryos? Well, yes. The moral principle is philosophical and not derived from special revelation. What's controversial is not the articulation of the principle but its application. If the moral significance of the embryo advances with gestation, absolute inviolability needn't hold precisely because the embryo could be harmed when necessary when placed in competition with other significant human values? The substance of the point was that the analogy fails to the extent it suggests we know less about human personhood than we actually do, that there is more doubt than truly exists, for all practical purposes. The principle is not questioned here but itsapplication wouldn't hold. Fallacy of misuse. The abuse of something is no argument against its proper use. Besides, human morality --- how we are to interact with self, other and our natural world --- is transparent to human reason without the benefit of any special divine revelation (how one interacts with putative ultimate reality). People perpetrating crimes, even fighting wars, based on an apparent religious impetus are confused, often conflating theological stances with moral positions via category errors but that doesn't change the essence of their misdeeds from moral to religious. Rather, that means that they are not only misanthropes but incompetent philosophers. That is what | meant about Catholic mentality towards sexuality <<< The impoverished anthropology that many traditionalistic/fundamentalistic Catholicsemploy, including many in the magisterial teaching office, is not derived from religious dogma but from philosophic approaches. Certain approaches are too essentialistic, biologistic, physicalistic, a prioristic, rationalistic and a host of other methodological pejoratives and then pervasively affect their thinking regarding life, sex and gender issues as related to moral doctrines, church disciplines and such. The social justice methodologies employ a more personalist approach and a relationality-responsibility model which have produced some guidelines that are universally respected and applauded. Those very same modernized approaches, if applied in the arena of personal morality, in general, sexual morality and gender issues, in particular, would cure a lot of what ails those impoverished strains of thought, which not even the catholic faithful practice or find credible or compelling. There are minority positions and dissenting voices, which have been stifled, that are still verymuch "Catholic" even while holding to other philosophical and metaphysical positions. You'll get no serious argument from me about a prevailing Catholic mentality regarding sex, except to point out that its not essentially a religious but a philosophical problem. No doubt there are some problems but | still don't buy into the militantly atheological argument (grounded in the fallacy of misuse) that religion should be wholesale done away with. Neither do many agnostics and atheists who find much to celebrate and affirm in religious practice. The militants can't marshall enough facts in support of such stances to convince most people of large intelligence and profound goodwill that, for example, the lst Amendment should keep its nonestablishment clause but ditch the free exercise clause or, for another, that religious freedom should be deleted from the 1948 Universal Declaration of HumanRights. All they can do is rant and troll and employ the ad hominem tautology that everyone else is not so bright. Metaphysics, properly considered, won't conflict with physics, by definition, in principle. They're tautologies, which don't add new information (factual, probabilistic, descriptions) to our systems, to be sure, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily untrue. As heuristic devices they may be relatively helpful or useless. As far as the soul is concerned, that's a metaphysical concept, variously conceived by different metaphysical tautologies (philosophy of mind, etc), not in competition with neuroscience. As far as philosophy of mind stances, for example, whether nonreductive physicalism or cartesian dualism interprets the hard problem of consciousness, correctly, as a Christian, I couldn't care less, as long as human rationality and free will are affirmedPerhaps they are valid, but they certainly are not sound. Modern physics has a few things to say about their assumptions about the physical world. Atheological arguments are also valid, and I would argue that they are also sound, <<< That's the rub, there's no demonstrating the soundness (theological or other). You're interpreting natural theology wrong if you imagine its philosophic methods probe ultimate reality probabilistically. Not that some design inference folks don't mistakenly do the same. >>>The real problem with reconciling Catholicism with evolution is atheological in nature.<<< You misinterpret Catholicism if you imagine there's a problem. >>> When I was Catholic, | viewed theAristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics as false and their arguments for God as unsound. | had hoped that there was an ontological argument out there somewhere, yet undiscovered, but | was/am more of an existentialist.<<< Yes, natural theology and metaphysics can be a great way to probe reality but are not a reliable way to prove reality. The so- called "proofs" demonstrate the reasonableness of faith and not its logical soundness. That's why it's called faith. Many, who misconceived the substance of faith in their youth, perhaps raised with a fundamentalistic, rationalistic, evidentialistic naive realism, think they are jettisoning their faith when all they are doing is awakening to their philosophical category errors, Faith is an existential disjunction, a "living as if" --— just like any good existentialist. As for hell, I think it's ultimately a mythic expression of the truth that God wouldn't coerce anyone intorelationship. Otherwise, I'm a practical universalist, like many early church fathers, who affirmed apokatastasis, who believes we can hope, with good reason, that all will be "saved." Thomism isn't monolithic but has competing schools like aristotelian, analytic, transcendentalist, existential and so on, some even articulating a substance-process type metaphysic, for example. Concepts like formal and final causation have been revived as very useful heuristic devices in modern semiotic science, used by good neuroscientists like Terry Deacon, by believers and unbelievers, alike. Many who think they are abandoning religion are abandoning, rather, an impoverished pseudo-religion, perhaps as experienced during formative years. All for the better, often. Perhaps your own stance has been earnestly established, but some of your arguments have led me to wonder if you left for all the wrong reasons --~- notwrongfully rejecting what you were mistaught, but not realizing there were more healthy conceptions available. Maybe not. | celebrate and affirm my existentialist brothers and sisters who live lives of deep caring and profound goodwill. Be well. Physics employs inductive inference, probabilistic, experimental, evidential probes of reality, in conjunction with abductive hypothesizing and deductive clarifying. When it reaches the end of its epistemic advance, we cannot a priori determine whether we are temporarily thwarted, methodologically, or ontologically occulted, metaphysically. Metaphysics, including very highly speculative theoretic physics, for example, take the descriptive facts of probabilistic science and engage in further inferential cycling. That cycling produces heuristic concepts that don't robustly describe reality but can, if thought thru carefully and disambiguated dutifully, successfully reference reality and alsoproduce tautological interpretive paradigms. If and only if these abductive-deductive inferential cycles can get interrupted by inductive testing will knowledge advance, however. These metaphysical tautologies can be guaged for relative plausibility by inventorying various epistemic virtues like hypothetical fecundity and consonance, abductive facility, external congruence, internal coherence, logical consistency, ontological parsimony, interdisciplinary consilience and so on. But abductive- deductive cycling, no matter how epistemically virtuous, still needs inductive testing for new information to be confirmed. Our language games tend to reflect how much value any given community of inquirers has cashed out of its concepts by virtue of which concepts it's negotiated or not. Theoretic concepts have been negotiated. Heuristic concepts are still-in- negotiation. Semiotic concepts are nonnegotiable because reason itselfwouldn't be possible (first principles, etc). Dogmatic concepts are non-negotiated. In addition to other epistemic virtues, using as many negotiated concepts as possible, as few non-negotiated as necessary, should help inquiry. Ultimate reality references tend to traffic in more dogmatic concepts, unavoidably, due to the subject matter. Philosophy, in my view, is necessary (to demonstrate the reasonableness) but not sufficient (to conclude the soundness) for any given existential leap, which cannot be robustly warranted, epistemically, but should be earnestly justified, normatively. In William James' approach to faith as a forced, vital and live option, philosophy tells us which are live (no anything goes fideism). Faith is an existential disjunction, a "living as if" but must be constrained by descriptive science, pragmatic criteria and moral reasoning. I'm all for leaping with Kierkegaard but not just any old epistemic cliff will do for me.To the extent that faith deals with ultimate concerns, primal realities, the godelian-like axioms that would perdure even should the descriptive sciences unravel the initial, boundary and limit conditions of the cosmos, its objects, metaphysically, lie in the bottom drawer of the corner desk of the basement floor of our ontological library. God would not occupy the gaps of our proximate metaphysical milieu, but neither can Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre defend reality's perimeter, where probabilistic descriptive methods have no probative efficacy. As Hawking lately has come to acknowledge, Godelian-like incompleteness applies to speculative cosmology. Not to worry. The great religious traditions and even many indigenous religions, through various asceticisms, practices and disciplines, all seem to foster an essential authenticity (rigorously defined by Bernard Lonergan,expanded by Don Gelpi, but beyond the scope of this thread). In that regard, they all share an essential orthopraxic, orthodoxic and orthocommunal trajectory, soteriologically. This amounts, basically, to right behaving, right belonging and right relating to self, others and our shared world. To the extent ultimate reality is multifaceted, each tradition then tends to variously de/emphasize one or more aspects of same and celebrates through devotional modes and orthopathic dynamics different ways of being in love with transcendent reality via distinct sophiological trajectories. This being in love with God can augment the value-realizations of being in love with others, with the world, even oneself, leading to sustained authenticity. Humankind's understanding has advanced and philosophic rigor has helped us to recognize how science, philosophy, culture and religion, while axiologically integral, are methodologically autonomous. There are sociologic metrics to help discern whenauthenticity is being sustained or frustrated. There's much less competition between these traditions when they gather in deep dialogue and engage in serious comparative theology, as opposed to facile blogospheric caricatures. Doug, is it the concept of OS, in and of itself, that troubles you? Even if, for example, it is reconceived as the cumulative effects of our collective personal sins? Or, instead, is it the notion of some so- called "Fall," which you find problematic? It's not a very compelling theodicy to many and does, in my view, tend to unnecessarily disvalue our phylogenetic heritage, which makes for a rather pessimistic theological anthropology (not very incarnational, n'est pas) and estranges us from our experience of being at home in the cosmos. Couple this Augustinian pessimism with a rather sterilescholasticism with its overly narrow (biologistic, physicalistic, rationalistic, etc) natural law approaches and our interpretations (celebrations) of human sexuality suffer. Ironically, Dawkins, Dennett and some cognitive scientists have, through their own genetic, mimetic and computational fallacies, similarly devalued human nature, not recognizing the degree of nonalgorithmic conscious we enjoy semiotically, however otherwise algorithmic much of our behavior may be. | doubt your primary thrust above had to do with advancing the concept of the meme but did want to clarify your usage. The executive summary of Terry Deacon's critique is simply that we mustn't confuse replicas and replicators. All that said, we remain in search of a Goldilocks anthropology, one that accurately interprets our "human situation,” not overly pessimistic (some scholasticismgone awry, some Augustine, who was importing too much personal baggage, at times, some misinterpretations of Dawkins, Dennett and their ilk) and not overly optimistic (e.g. some transcendental thomists, who imagined that all are rather spontaneously longing for beatitude and beatific vision). Not to be coy, I embrace an emergentist stance with no allegiance to a given philosophy of mind, although my sneaking suspicions incline me toward a physicalist account. Finally, | haven't addressed your contributions here but read most of them. You contribute much to every discussion, I find, and very dialogically. I'm glad to find you here. You are welcome. And you are astute. The very reason an emergentist perspective hasbeen elaborated in conjunction with a semiotic pragmatism is because none of the various philosophy of mind tautologies provide explanatory adequacy. Similarly, the origins of life, like the emergence of consciousness have long stumped and still do our different philosophical panels, notwithstanding that some have rather arrogantly described their stances as "consciousness explained." The primary takeaway from the article, then, is not an explanation of HOW consciousness emerged but an affirmation THAT something incredible happened when it did, reinforcing a type of semiotic exceptionalism for the symbolic species, which realizes values not only through signs like icons and indices but via symbols. No popular author addresses this in a more accessible way than Walker Percy in his novels and essays. No neuroscientist does a better job of translating this semiotic in technical terms than Terry Deacon. Articleshe's written with Ursula Goodenough are more generally accessible. Addendum: By the way, re: emergentist stances, I don't go further than an essential emergentist outlook, so don't find discussions of weak or strong emergence and/or supervenience very helpful, just, on one hand, trivial, or, on the other hand, question begging. The reason we employ the emergentist heuristic is because we are trying not to "prove too much" or say way more than we could possibly know, telling untellable stories. A Catholic stance doesn't include moral depravity and that's much more optimistic than many other accounts. The word sin, unfortunately, is a confusing misnomer since the concept doesn't entail culpability. Scotus and many Franciscans took a more optimistic view than Aquinas & Augustine, rejecting their interpretation ofconcupiscence, as those are merely natural traits, just like human fallibility and other aspects of our radical finitude. THAT we are finite and experience misery and a tragic human condition, badly in need of an outside assist, seems the theological takeaway, both anthropologically and soteriologically. HOW this came about seems rather adequately explained by our evolutionary heritage without the need for rather unsatisfying lapsarian and postlapsarian notions. Tell me, for example, was Adam, whether mono- or polygenically conceived, immune from earthquakes, disease and such? That wouldn't seem factual. As far as putative divine attributes, it seems we cannot without great deliberation and cautious nuance establish which merely successfully refer vs which might robustly describe, which lend themselves to apophatic vs kataphatic predication, which must be predicated univocally, equivocallyor analogically, especially given that different root metaphors are being employed, now by this metaphysic, then by that. This requires an inordinate amount of conceptual disambiguation and rigorous definition as a prerequisite to any analysis of the concepts for logical consistency, internal coherence or external congruence. Most of our traditional God-talk, preceding Meister Eckhart and early apophatic mystics, even, has been sufficiently nuanced, just too facilely interpreted and popularly caricatured by the philosophically naive and theologically underinformed. Good luck in your studies. Analytic theorists, like Richard Gale, serve the cause of truth in a hygienic fashion, clarifying what's at stake. His responses to McHugh were insufficient as he tended to critique the more popular misconceptions rather than the more esoteric, mystical nuances, which characterize the core of our approaches to both the ad intra and ad extra attributes ofboth the immanent and economic Trinity. The starting points, once one digs deeply enough, seem to be converging. Because each must address both continuities and discontinuities, order and chaos, patterns and paradox, the random and systematic, symmetry and asymmetry, avoiding causal disjunctions, circular references, infinite regressions, question begging and other epistemic vices and ontological conundrums, there's a tendency for the various metaphysics to converge, transcending the pseudo-problems of essentialism vs nominalism, substance vs process, static vs dynamic and so on. Thus we see Thomists speak of deep and dynamic formal fields. We see process thinkers embrace identity, even though nonstrict and with asymmetric temporal relations. I prefer to inhabit a more vague phenomenological stance rather than invest in a specific metaphysical hypothesis, but Ido see and affirm what these projects are about and their tendency to express similar intuitions with diverse concepts. Some of these metaphysical tautologies seem more Ptolemaic, others more Copernican, but one cannot use Ockham's razor where explanatory adequacy doesn't obtain. If our God-talk seems too heavily nuanced and rather evasive to its atheological critics, one can only hope they appreciate that any epistemic indeterminacy and ontological vagueness inher in the matter under consideration and aren't theological ad- hockery on our part, who, perhaps, should hesitate more often before effabling about the Ineffable! I like to imagine that, regarding how | choose to interact with my self, with others and our cosmic home, how | am willing to risk all in the pursuit of truth, beauty, goodness and love, those very pursuits, themselves, being their own rewards, would not change a whit should ultimate reality beproven personal or impersonal, friendly or unfriendly. Any informative advance regarding ultimate reality (I expect none from philosophy or metaphysics) would change neither jot nor tittle performatively regarding our proximate reality, for me. It's ALL seems supernatural to me! As Haldane said, reality is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. As Wittgenstein mused, it's not HOW things are but THAT things are, which is the mystical. There's nothing in particular that needs to be enchanted when the whole kit and kaboodle is enchanted. When we observe known effects proper to no known causes, we reasonably can fall back on analogical predications, whether completing the periodic table of the elements, probabilistically, or musing about the essence of a putative self—subsisting existence, plausibilistically. Because many people of profound goodwilldown through the ages have, best we can tell through authentic interreligious and interideological dialogue and hagiographic sources, realized life's highest goods, like truth, beauty, goodness and love, in abundance, this despite their otherwise diverse stances toward putative primal and ultimate realities, might what's at stake in our collective ongoing quests be the realization of superabundance and not, as too many imagine with either-or thinking and in all or nothing fashion, either absolute frustrations or exclusive enjoyments of our mutually shared values and aspirations? What's your case for or against this poly- doxic perspective? You have not engaged Jim's argument but have only used the topic to trumpet your own. He did affirm an essentialist analysis as necessary. But, in his view, it was not sufficient for understanding the teachingoffice's approach, as it evolved over time. For that, one would need to also engage the history of the Magisterium's and theologians! existentialist approaches. The force of your respective arguments does not, alone, turn on an analysis of the status of their premises or on the consistency of your logic. Prior to identifying fallacies in competing syllogisms, we have the task of comparing definitions and disambiguating concepts. There's the locus of your different conclusions, for Jim more narrowly construes what's 'natural' and more broadly construes what's procreative. Jim rigorously analyzed the church's existential tradition to illuminate it's history of compassionate pastoral accommodations, which provide just reasons for exceptions to essentialist stances. He also clearly and at length set forth how our conceptions of what is natural and what is procreativemight best be considered, so as to avoid what he called a semantic morass, what the philosophers would call a reductio ad absurdum, what the average layperson would call silly. There's no ground | need to defend for I do not inhabit even the definitions of your sylly syllogisms. They aren't even interesting or relevant to those who don't traffic in rationalistic, physicalistic, biologistic, essentialistic, a prioristic abstractions that are sadly divorced from the concrete lived experiences of the faithful. This reminds me of Charles Sanders Peirce's distinction between the formulation of an argument and argumentation, the latter which he considered a fetish where so-called proofs of God are concerned. Peirce formulated what he called the Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, very mindfully employing "reality" rather than some other root metaphor, like being.It has always seemed to me that the formulation of various God arguments are philosophically indispensable, precisely to establish the logical consistency and internal coherence of our God-concepts, themselves. They thus demonstrate how eminently reasonable a belief in God can be, that the reality of God is modally possible. Over against, for example, the problems posed by evil, it's no longer controversial, even among those who primarily traffic in atheological critiques, to hold that, sufficiently nuanced, certain God concepts are not incompatible with the reality of evil. The possibility of God has, indeed, been established in several modal logics. What we have accomplished in all of this, philosophically, is a great deal of dutiful disambiguation and rigorous definition of our God-concepts, precisely, clarifying what we mean by "God."What we cannot do, methodologically, is also demonstrate that such arguments are logically sound, because, lacking probabilistic access, we cannot establish whether or not our God-concepts successfully refer, much less describe, the Reality of God. It is precisely for this reason that atheological critiques have largely abandoned the so-called logical problem of evil and fallen back to a weaker position to argue an evidential problem of evil. While there are indeed evidential problems, atheologians cannot probe the Reality of God in a robustly inferential way, limited as they are to the weakest of inferential modes, abductive inference, which, when endlessly cycled with deductive clarifications without the benefit of inductive probes, traffics in im/plausibilities not im/probabilities. The same weaknesses afflict most theodicies, which, in addition to being consideredblasphemous by some are considered callous by many others in light of the enormity of human pain, the immensity of human suffering. Bravo, then, for Pope Francis who, asked why children suffer, said that the 12 year old, alone, had asked a question without an answer. It does seem to me that, whichever tautology one inhabits regarding primal and ultimate realities, when it comes to our proximate reality, wherein we interact with self, others and cosmos, because we are similarly situated and identically constituted, our diagnoses of what ails humanity and prescriptions for what might nurture and heal us will largely converge. We are able to, for example, articulate a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this despite our otherwise divergent worldviews. The very pursuits of life's highest goods and deepest values, like truth, beauty, goodness, love and freedom, are their ownrewards, Whether their intrinsic nature is grounded by the existential orientations gifted us by our phylogenetic legacy or delivered by transcendental imperatives issued by a divine fiat, it's not easily shaken off. Whichever tautology one habits, though, there are no compelling cases that have been made over against a certain human exceptionalism. While there are certainly many continuities between us and other links in the great chain of being, we nevertheless observe --—- from within the perspectives of complexity theories, emergentist paradigms and semiotic sciences -—— that there's a radical discontinuity between our symbolic species and all others. This distinct nature corresponds to what has been variously and vaguely conceived as the soul. Whether one subscribes to an old cartesian dualist or new nonreductive physicalist conception, the anthropological take-away is that thedifference between being merely sentient and robustly sapient is flat out astonishing. Getting this correct, ontologically, has huge implications, deontologically, when discerning our practical responses, when analyzing our acts and circumstances. Properly recognizing the marked degree of freedom enjoyed by our species has similar implications when analyzing our intentions. Only when taken together do acts, intentions and circumstances suitably describe truly moral realities. I find it curious that our great religious traditions have largely gotten this anthropology right over the millennia while the modern scientistic cohort so often gets this wrong. It raises my sneaking suspicions that they are truly onto something with their mythic accounts. What the teaching office needs to get beyond the humanae vitae impasse wouldalso allow it to better discern the sensus fidelium regarding other church disciplines and moral doctrines, all related to various gender, sex and life issues. It needs to realize that an essentialist, natural law approach is, at best, suggestive, not decisive, if necessary, still insufficient, to capture the richly textured, incredibly complex reality of the human person. It must be complemented by the more robustly personalist approaches of the existentialist approaches of its tradition. Additionally, it must abandon its creeping infallibilism and recognize the ineluctably fallibilist nature of its moral reasoning, which would open the door -- neither to relativism vs its absolutism nor laxism vs its rigorism -- to a more credible moral probabilism. Further, it needs to practice a more compassionate pastoral sensitivity even regarding those moral realities on which itremains firm, not withholding sacraments from those often most in need of healing. Get pass the HV Impasse, properly, with a more robust (accurate) anthropology, and other realities like women's ordination, celibacy, married priests, homoerotic behavior, stem cell research and so on would invite dialogue rather than a priori being off the table. l also found it curious that Kurt Godel authored both his Incompleteness Theorems, which Hawking recently came to realize and Stanley Jaki realized decades ago, suggest Theories of Everything cannot be proved within closed symbol systems (like math and formal syllogistic logic), and a Modal Ontological Argument for God. Of course, Godel, better than most, understood that one could, indeed, write down a sound argument, nevertheless. One just wouldn't know it was true via a formalproof. That always evokes for me the sentiment: "Taste and see ..." For example, one would have to travel with Russell and Whitehead halfway through the Principia to arrive at a proof of the axioms for 2+ 2=4, Or one could simply, as I do, SEE that it is true and TASTE whether or not apples and/or oranges are being counted. Hawking, for his part, at least asked where the "fire" might come from in his equations. So, the practical takeaway from Godel's Theorems is not that we might not one day SEE the truth of our syllogisms, only that we cannot formally prove their soundness. | like to imagine that one day we may indeed stumble over a Theory of Everything but that it's axioms will be as uninteresting to me as those which prove 2+ 2=4. I often wonder if I've similarly seen a sound God Argument and tasted its truth, beauty, goodness, love and freedom in Jesus of Nazareth.l appreciate Christopher McHugh’s modal ontological argument: http://infidels.org/library/modern/doug_krue ger/krueger-mchugh/mchugh1].html Rather than “greater than" one employs the concepts of deficiency and perfection. Rather than kataphatic and analogical predications, which are subject to parody and other inconsistencies, one uses apophatic predications, like nondeficient. Whether that establishes His existence is another matter. He seems, as Kant argued, to make “existence” a property, which seems dubious. It’s also unclear that one can go from definitions to actual reality as Anselm tries to do. <<< In all of these considerations, whether mathematical, set theory, modal logic and predicating existence of being, we arerepeatedly running into the same "problems of beginning,” which include such as circular referentialilty, infinite regressions, causal disjunctions and question begging. That's why, after first grasping Godel's meta-mathematical insights of his Incompleteness Theorems, | was initially puzzled as to why he, of all people, would bother with an ontological argument. | better realized, then, that one could write down an argument that's both complete and consistent, only one couldn't prove it formally. Similarly, one may indeed take existence as a predicate of being, as it may indeed be true, only one has not added any new information to one's system. The reason Godel and Hartshorne attempted modal ontological proofs is because they do conclude to actual reality, but only if one has successfully described - that is, dutifully disambiguated and rigorously defined - each concept. In otherwords, for all those who are in agreement that each term of an argument successfully describes reality, there will be agreement that, modally, the conclusion necessarily obtains in reality. There's the rub, though. Our apophatic predications of divine attributes are reasoning from effects to causes via weak abductive inference, specifically from effects proper to no known causes. Generally, the terms employed are making successful references to reality, so have great heuristic value. We reasoned like this in particle physics, looking for the Higgs Boson and such. What's controversial in ontological god- argumentation comes back precisely to whether or not existence really is a predicate of being, begging for a creatio ex nihilo. Or, might a neoplatonic emanation or even a Tohu Bohu origination beg for cosmological arguments and so on. So, basically, we are grappling with now this tautology or now that. And, whether ina godelian or kantian sense, just because they are tautological doesn't mean they aren't true, only that they aren't necessarily informative. They can still have great heuristic value, opening the way to new inquiry. Not all tautologies are equally taut because not all enjoy the same degree of epistemic virtue in terms of such criteria as external congruence, internal coherence, logical consistency, hypothetical consonance, abductive facility, speculative fecundity, interdisciplinary consilience and a use of concepts and terms that, at least, successfully refer, better yet, successfully describe various realities. Anselm got Peirce, Godel and Hartshorne, among others, thinking, for good reason. I think you are right and this gets back to Brett's original post: Anselm’s proof does not tells us positively about the nature ofGod, but it makes clear what God is not. K< That sounds right. Anselm did a good job of formalizing an intuition, anticipating, if only inchoately, modern modal logics. But "greater than which" remains a fraught conceptualization, implicitly and vaguely incorporating popularly understood divine attributes. It invites exploration toward the end of helping us demonstrate the logical validity of faith's philosophical preambles and the coherency of our god-talk, over against the facile atheological critiques of our time, which unnecessarily, but with great efficacy, scandalize so many young believers. We tend to extremes of all or nothing and either-or in formulating arguments. There are no a priori grounds for privileging one root metaphor (metaphysic) or another, or for predicating one attribute or the next as analogical, univocal, equivocal, kataphaticor apophatic. Instead, I like to imagine that, not all the divine attributes would be 1) analogical, otherwise we'd introduce causal disjunctions 2) equivocal, or all god-talk would cease 3) univocal, or there'd be no halt to infinite regressions 4) apophatic, or what's already wholly incomprehensible would not also be partly intelligible 5) kataphatic, or we'd be telling untellable stories and proving too much. Thus, those who refer to unitary being and identify may be onto something, even while those who emphasize unitive strivings and intimacy may be onto something equally true. And so on. Same thing for our root metaphors, like substance, process, experience and such. I like to imagine that Anselm would have contributed much to discussions regarding the univocity vs analogy of being. Due to our radical finitude, wherein,descriptively, our fallibilist epistemology thereby models only a probabilistic ontology, then, normatively, how could our de- ontology reflect anything more than a moral probabilism? Also, beyond the issue of enjoying some leeway due to different defensible moral stances, this suggests a plurality of acceptable moral actions, each, "good enough" in a theory of moral satisficing. In the same way moral probabilism allows one to hold a minority stance or less probable opinion, moral satisficing allows one to take a less optimal course of action, all this prior to analyses of ex/culpability. In the specific case at hand, one cannot distinguish between the grenade-falling and organ donation without wading through a semantic morass, such as happens when one tries to differentiate between natural family planning and artificial contraception. All we can do is to triangulate, best we can, properly weighing our most deeply felt andwidely shared moral intuitions and our most deliberately constructed moral principles, neither which, necessarily, will clearly trump the other, either which might admit of error. A proper consideration of human morality will go beyond our descriptive ontologies, evaluative dispositions and normative deontologies to also consider our existential interpretations, i.e. what we actually do, how we actually behave. Sometimes, our facile de-ontological behaviors help us reason backwards to ontological implications in a way that is metaphysically suggestive even if not decisive. That most of us, upon rushing into a burning building, would likely first rescue a crying two year old rather than a cryotank of 200 frozen embryos reveals deeply felt moral sensibilities that might otherwise conflict with certain essentialist conceptions of the human person?While articulating that | might well jump on a grenade for a comrade while, at the same time, readily eschewing the thought of donating my heart, in both cases with otherwise laudable aims, I'm perhaps giving more weight to my moral intuitions than my moral philosophies, but guided by the principles of moral probabilism and satisficing, even given my speculative doubts, Ihave no practical doubt that my choices and actions are good enough. Juxtaposing building-jumping and sedative- hastening, while I wouldn't use the okayness of the former to justify the latter, I'd give those who might a serious listening without resorting to tortuous logic and semantic double-talk and that only after a hug. Yes, we must draw a distinction between the merely erogatory and the super- erogatory, between justice and mercy, between the moral and the charitable. Noone has the duty to optimize practical, much less charitable, outcomes. In our human situation, goodenoughness had better suffice. In a forum with mixed audiences, the charitable thing to do might be to provide both the technical version (which provides rigor) and a more accessible translation (for clarity). More accessibly, then, there are some moral realities that, in their complexity, mirror the wondrously contoured and richly textured fabric of our human experience. Some of our most deeply felt moral sensibilities can be very hard to put in words, like trying to effable about the Ineffable. This makes them even harder to put into moral arguments. We are faced with choices, sometimes clear when coming from the heart but not so clear when coming from the head. At othertimes, choices that look straightforward on paper leave us deeply conflicted emotionally. When we experience such moral conflicts, rather than drowning in scruples, we can be consoled by trusting in God’s mercy. Sometimes, we'll follow our head. At other times we can follow our heart, especially if its resonating with deeply felt and widely shared moral sensibilities, allowing the wisdom that accumulates in tradition to be our guide. This is not to say that, less often, we may have a prophetic calling to crash the walls of a stubborn tradition. That should be attempted only from a deeply rooted spirituality and with no expectation of escaping the falling stones in a genuine self -sacrifice for others who'll be walking behind. When conflicted, in doubt about a course of action, we can humbly accept ourimperfection, be willing to make a mistake and know that we're within our rights to do what is merely satisfactory (meet the demands of justice) and under no moral obligation to always do what might otherwise be optimal (meet the demands of charity). FWIW, I'm no academic but a autodidact with a long time interest in formative spirituality, interreligious dialogue and philosophical theology, the last interest only necessitated by the need to build conceptual bridges between religious cultures and traditions, which not only often process reality differently but SEE it differently. Without the benefit of classrooms, tutors and personal interpersonal feedback, my writing style can get overly jargonistic and idiosyncratic, especially as I try to figure out exactly who are this or that forum's contributors and participants. So, I apologize for that.On an even more personal note (and I'm not anonymous, realize), the topic of suicide caught my eye with more than a casual, academic interest. For the past decade, I've been in the throes of the onset and progression of what many call The Suicide Disease, This does not mean that I get suicidal such as when ridiculed or scolded by anonymous cyber-interlocutors. It means | have a disease that the French call the Tic Doloureaux and medical science calls Trigeminal Neuralgia, which is one of - if not the - most painful conditions known to medical science. It began on the left side of my face. A few years later, it presented bilaterally (both sides), which is inexplicable and rare. It's a neuropathic disorder of the trigeminal cranial nerve. In my case, when walking down the sidewalk, symptom free, a slight breeze at the wrong angle can send a pain through my skull as if a sword were piercing my ear, all which literally sends meto the ground on my knees doubled over in indescribable pain. I raise this in the context of having been told by the doctor who finally diagnosed me (via cat scans, mri, etc) that, years ago, this was the one malady that the Catholic Church made an exception for, declaring one suffering this disease was morally exculpable in the case of suicide. I once found an authoritative citation in church literature but cannot locate it. If any here have access to such professional journal searches, I'd be obliged. It may not shed light on the narrower question about the objective nature of the evil, because I suspect the church teaching was grounded elsewhere. But, who knows? Some ethicists suggest abandoning the morally fraught word, suicide, and replacing it with a morally neutral act, self-killing. Perhaps the solution may entail a distinction like ontic or pre-moral evils,or something like the difference between killing and murder? Above my paygrade. But, good God, I've been in this whale's belly and not in an ivory tower. When good formal arguments fail us and our moral intuitions resist syllogistic logic, forms of critical thinking that employ strong forms of inference and might be considered robustly truth-conducive, we then must necessarily fallback on informal arguments, weak forms of inference, what might be considered merely truth-indicative. It is the latter that constitutes common sense and most influences our intuitions. Most of the compelling arguments against euthanasia are informal and make appeals to such as slippery slope and reductio ad absurdum arguments, appeals one might ignore or even consider fallacious in formal logic but appeals we'd ignore, literally, in the case at hand, to our own peril.While the professional ethicists continue to tease out the conceptual distinctions and establish the principles which would articulate and bolster our moral intuitions in a more robustly truth-conducive manner, it seems we are behooved to rely on whatever truth-indicative arguments we can because each informal argument, while alone a mere strand, when bundled together with others (preponderance of the evidence -like) can gain the strength of a resilient epistemic cable, sturdy enough to anchor us (like tradition) until we get to shore (like a new moral theory). One critical distinction between building jumping and euthanasia, between grenade- shielding and vital organ-gifting, would lie in both the number and variety of slippery slope arguments that have rather persuasively been advanced against euthanasia, that simply could not be marshalled in the other cases. Those arguments may be imperfect but they're thebest available, so need to suffice, for now? Thanks, @Tausign. I suspect some of our moral theorizing suffers from age old debates that took place between different schools of thought, like 1) aretaic or virtue ethics 2) deontological 3) consequentialist 4) contractarian and such, each with its emphasis, respectively, on the character of the person and her intentions, on the objective nature of the act and its gravity/parvity, on the context and circumstances, etc In reality, whatever one's emphasis, inevitably we end up deliberating acts, intentions and circumstances. And we end up weighing competing values on a case by case basis, values that wouldn't be in competition in an ideal world scenario but very much will get at cross-purposes in our human situation.The “manuals” used in confessionals weren' t systematic moral theology, only pastoral guidance. They necessarily employed shortcuts, both logical and conceptual. When we discuss moral objects, carefully parsing our categories and framing our syllogisms, the one thing we most often overlook, | believe, beyond the consistency of our logic (fallacy free) or truth of our premises, is whether or not the concepts, terms and definitions successfully describe or refer to reality, Sometimes, the conclusions of our arguments are smuggled into our premises and, at other times, they are already embedded in our definitions! These terms might be too broadly or narrowly conceived, too vaguely or specifically defined, morally neutral or not, emotionally fraught or not. By employing these shortcuts, we can foreclose on the possibility of examining which objects are premoral or moral, intrinsically good or evil or not, equally serious or not and so on.So, sometimes we encounter paradox and dilemmas that we suspect are located in faulty logic or untrue premises when, all along, the solution lies in changing our terminology, coining new words, more broadly or narrowly conceiving a concept, more generally or specifically referring to realities. My suspicion is that we don't have a suitable vocabulary to deal with many emerging bioethical realities. For example, the word “suicide” doesn’t capture the nuances of our hypercomplex human realities. It's a failed attempt to lump too many acts, intentions and circumstances into a single moral object and our moral intuitions properly recoil when it gets employed in facile logic, even though we cannot quite put our finger on the problem. Like the old sorite paradox that results from conflating logical and efficient causation, the word suicide conflates toomany logical, formal, efficient, instrumental and final causes and thereby generates paradoxes. >>> Feser objects that quantum mechanics cannot undermine the metaphysical principle of causality, but fails to mention why counterexamples taken from quantum mechanics are not counterexamples. I'm curious about this point.<<< Hey Ignatius, hope you've been well. Metaphysics and physics, at least the way I approach them, are methodologically distinct, asking categorically different questions of reality. Physics probes reality, what is real, as a descriptive science, evidentially, empirically, probabilistically, using falsifiable claims and highly specified terminology. It employs a great deal of inductive inference ina methodological triad with abductive hypothesizing and deductive clarifying.Metaphysics probes reality asking: What must a physicist (scientist) presuppose about reality in order to do physics (science) in the first place? Its concepts get abstracted from our descriptive sciences and are much more broadly conceived, are considerably vague (often analogical vis a vis scientific usage), often serving as conceptual placeholders, which incorporate what common sense and science have observed, while "bookmarking" where further probes are needed. Its inferential processes are not robustly inductive, merely abductive and deductive, and generate tautologies. which may or may not be true but add no new information to our systems. >>>With regard to the principle of causality, why is it thought to be true by Aristotelians? If the reasons are empirical, then we do not have reason to believe that the principle is true. What metaphysical demonstrations arethere that the principle of causality is true?<<< While metaphysics, in general, the principle of causation, in particular, are not immune to critique, they are not probabilistically falsifiable by descriptive sciences. Rather, they are critiqued by the normative sciences of philosophy, which might probe, for example, whether or not a given tautology is logically valid, whether or not its distinctions make for real differences, whether or not it is pragmatically significant, whether or not it is existentially actionable, hypothetically fecund, heuristically valuable and a host of other epistemic virtues, all which are necessary for descriptive sciences to flourish, even if not sufficient for complete explanatory adequacy (to which science makes no pretense unless conflated w/metaphysical presuppositions, whether by scientism or religious evidentialism).Clearly, you have engaged neither my epistemology nor my critique but are offering facile generalizations with no specifics to back your claims. Because --- As a matter of fact, | do NOT subscribe to a foundational epistemology but a pragmatic semiotic realism. Where did I make the suggestion that philosophy was "relationally prior" to scientific investigation? My own approach hangs together quite neatly with the overall thrust of that encyclopedia article. | even explicitly stated that metaphysics must be approached as a posteriori, hypothetical and fallible, also that its concepts must be abstracted from the descriptive sciences and finally that it examines descriptive accounts in order to make explicit what are their implicit metaphysical presuppositions. In my own nonfoundational epistemology, I am concerned with value-realizations (akin to evolutionary adaptive significance, among other things), Value-realizations are delivered by our hermeneutical spirals,each method necessary, none, alone, sufficient. Science is inherently normative. For every value-realization, we describe reality, asking "What's that?" and then evaluate it, asking "What's that to us?” and then norm reality, asking "How might we best acquire or avoid that?" and then interpret reality, existentially acting per the deliverances our descriptive sciences, evaluative cultures and normative philosophies. While we recognize such categories as methodologically autonomous, we also recognize that they are axiologically integral, again, each necessary, none sufficient, for all practical purposes. As for Dennett, | simply parodied your facile caricature of Ed Feser? It would have been as hyperbolic as your own oversimplification except that I followed up with a rather substantial critique, point by point, drawn from the literature. Of course he's worthy of engagement. | engaged him elsewhere in this forum not long ago, to wit: "Ironically, Dawkins, Dennett and somecognitive scientists have, through their own genetic, mimetic and computational fallacies, similarly devalued human nature, not recognizing the degree of nonalgorithmic conscious we enjoy semiotically, however otherwise algorithmic much of our behavior may be. The executive summary of Terry Deacon's critique is simply that we mustn't confuse replicas and replicators." Your prose, in response to me, consists of little more than flowery wordsmithing but traffics in facile overgeneralizations. It's not terribly interesting save for the effort I chose to expend correcting your mischaracterizations and tossing your red herrings off the trails where others of us are trying to advance an earnest discussion. BTW, while | am metaphysically agnostic on many fronts, including philosophy of mind, my sneaking suspicions incline toward a physicalist account, so those differences with Dennett are nuanced (e.g. memetic fallacy). | don't make the move frommethodological naturalism to philosophical naturalism as if it were metaphysically necessary, for that type of scientism commits category errors ;) Otherwise, Dennett, like some sterile scholasticisms with an almost naive realism, proves too much, says way more than we can possibly know. Finally, I am precisely suggesting that Feser gets these category distinctions right, even if he might often draw different inferences than I do. Are YOU suggesting that our logical, empirical, moral, practical or descriptive, normative, evaluative and interpretive methods or positivist and philosophic approaches are NOT methodologically autonomous? Dennett, obviously, follows that protocol to an extent vis a vis proximate realities, although derailing with his cursory dismissal of competing philosophies of mind. Regarding putative primal and ultimaterealities, unlike most others of large intelligence and profound goodwill, he seriously derails in not recognizing that other tautologies than his can be reasonable, existentially actionable and normatively justified. Rather than your continuing to put words in my mouth, wholly disregarding what I have actually said, I generally disdain those definitions of scientism included here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... I didn't say you parodied Feser. Rather, | said that | was parodying your facile caricature of Feser. I'm not interested in who Dennett and Feser's audiences are for purposes of this conversation. Rather, my purpose was too substantiate his delineation of categories, his methodological distinctions over against others' category errors. You haven't addressed the substance of his claims, which distinguish between the descriptive,evidential science of QM Theory and the normative science of metaphysical conceptions of causation, ie between positivist and philosophic methods. Establishing THAT certain time-honored categories of our various autonomous methods represent distinctions that make a difference is one thing. Establishing norms of epistemic virtue for HOW one employs such methods is quite another. For example, while I critique the notion that the move from methodological naturalism to philosophical naturalism is driven by metaphysical necessity, I am similarly unimpressed with the idea that such methodological stipulations as the principles of causation and sufficient reason necessarily lead us to indubitable metaphysical conclusions. What I have proposed is that we pay attention to the status of our concepts suchthat 1) those which have been negotiated among and/or between earnest communities of inquiry are considered theoretic, 2) those still in negotiation, heuristic 3) those non- negotiated, dogmatic and 4) those non- negotiable (like first principles), semiotic. To successfully bridge our intuitions with experience, leading to the next scientific advance, we should employ as many theoretic and semiotic concepts as possible, as few heuristic concepts as necessary, and avoid too many dogmatic concepts. Also, what happens too often is that some metaphysicians stray from these rubrics: 1) The normative mediates between the descriptive and interpretive to effect the evaluative. 2) These categories, while methodologically autonomous, are axiologically integral. Some, for example, claiming to be integralists, assert that values can be realized from each method, that interpretivereligious experience or mysticism, alone, has some epistemic deliverance, apart from descriptive science or normative philosophy. In fact, those experiences are methodologically constrained during post- experiential reflection by both positivist (descriptive sciences) and philosophic (normative sciences) spheres of concern. Others make the same claims for science and/or philosophy, alone and apart, vis a vis human value-realizations. That's NOT integral. Those maneuvers lead, instead, to arational gnosticisms, fideisms, sterile rationalisms and a host of other epistemic pejoratives. In effect, they are claiming - not only methodological, but - axiological autonomy for their illicit approaches. Done improperly, a metaphysic can result in a nonvirtuous cycle of abductive hypothesizing and deductive clarifying, where the rubber of inductive testing never hits the inferential road. This is to suggest that some get overenamored of merelogical consistency and evidential plausibility, which goes with the territory when probing primal and/or ultimate reality, but, regarding proximate realities requires instead some probabilistic testing to gain any significant normative impetus. Metaphysicians too often naively employ concepts without stopping to ask whether or not those concepts successfully refer to, much less describe, a given reality --- — concepts like "nothing" and categories like "necessary". Sometimes its concepts are either too broadly or narrowly conceived vs conventional usage and require a great deal of disambiguation, otherwise one's conclusions are not only embedded in one's premises but are pre-loaded into one's definitions. When it comes to ultimate reality, metaphysics offers no successful proofs, only tautologies, not all equally taut per my criteria above as well as a host of otherepistemic virtues I won't inventory here and now. Metaphysics does help us establish the reasonableness of our questions, the existential actionability of our beliefs (existential disjunctions, a living as if), provided they have been normatively justified as "live options." Metaphysical tautologies regarding ultimate and/or primal realities, which vary in degree of epistemic virtue and pragmatic utility, are suggestive in their ontological implications but not decisive. We can safely live and let live to the extent people practice different evaluative dispositions toward ultimate reality, where they may derive consolation and comfort for the journey. When it comes to normative implications for interactions in this proximate reality of self, others and cosmos, we must much more rigorously insist that human morality is transparent to human reason without thebenefit of any so-called special divine revelations. We cannot have people being martyred in the hope of gaining six dozen or more virgins. For another example, those who imagine that natural law deliverances are unproblematic, especially when divorced from more personalist approaches and relationality-responsibility models, can, for example, get overly physicalistic, biologistic, rationalistic, a prioristic, legalistic and ritualistic regarding the deeply contoured and richly textured complexities related to sex, gender and life issues, leading to a seriously impoverished anthropology and moral theology. This does happen in the Roman tradition among many in the teaching office, not so much among the incredulous laity, who ignore them. Thanks for the conversation and your challenges. | apologize if my tone and tenor got a tad testy. These exchanges are easier in person with nonverbal cues and not taking oneself so seriously.If youread my latest prior post, you might discern that, while | do not feel that moves from methodological naturalism to philosophical naturalism are robustly warranted, epistemically, neither do I believe that our methodological stipulations to principles of causation and sufficient reason, albeit indispensable to inquiry, deliver indubitable metaphysical conclusions. Both of the above metaphysical maneuvers vis a vis primal and/or ultimate reality are unavoidably tautological, which doesn't mean they are unreasonable, only that they add no new information to our systems, neither positivist or philosophic. Both can be articulated in a logically consistent manner and both are plausible in the weakest inferential way. Both lack explanatory adequacy because their abductive hypotheses and deductive clarifications are not testable by inductive testing in a robustly probabilistic way. My own pragmatic semiotic realism doesrecognize the phenomenological reality of regularities via a vague modal ontology, which doesn't specify via any particular root metaphor the precise nature of those regularities, whether, for example, they are emergent and might be as local as our neighborhood fantasy football rules or more universal, transcending our spatiotemporal milieu. As | explain elsewhere throughout this thread, I draw categorical distinctions that don't consider metaphysical accounts of causation as evidential, probabilistic or falsifiable. In other threads, I do note that formal-final causation conceptions have recently had great heuristic value in our semiotic sciences when combined with emergentist paradigms, but those notions of downward causation and teleodynamics wouldn't necessarily implicate violations of physical causal closure, so are only weak analogues, perhaps, to many of the morerobust Aristotelian and Thomist conceptions. I remain mostly agnostic metaphysically but defend the category, philosophically, and have articulated some norms for making such tautologies more taut, more epistemically virtuous. My concern has been to chastize those accounts that seem to be proving too much, telling untellable stories, saying way more than one could possibly know, giving way too much normative impetus to de-ontological accounts derived --- not from metaphysical verities and ontological necessities, but — from fallible, often merely plausibilist, rarely robustly probabilist phenomenologies, which would seem to prescribe a moral probabilism, for example, a not indubitable natural law deliverances, which smack of an incredibly naive realism. I come to this forum to be challenged because so few places on the web arepopulated by antagonists (e.g. nominalists and essentialists), few on either side with whom | always dis/agree. I'm not on any particular side, only injecting my own stances which often see folks arguing past each other. LOL! because, my good interlocutor, as | just explained to Ignatius, few places on the web are populated by so many with whom | disagree on either side of almost every issue. Thus raising the chance that I'll be challenged and can learn more from everybody, as opposed to inhabiting ideological bubbles, where all my biases would merely get reinforced. You haven't been engaging me seriously because you have jumped to too many conclusions and imputed too many stances to me making too many fallacious authoritarian and ad hominem appeals. It's almost as if you are cutting and pastingscreeds over against prior antagonists that have zilch to do with me, in general, what I've shared here, in particular. I've dialogued with many nontheists and atheists, few who are as militant as Dennett and Dawkins, fewer still who appreciate their vitriol even when recognizing their substantive contributions. In that regard, they belong to a mere fringe, thankfully. Ler me make this more concrete for you. Neither the free exercise clause of the lst Amendment nor the religious freedom clause of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are in any jeopardy of being amended, addended or deleted, as so few people of large intelligence and profound goodwill, whatever their worldview, find merit in the prescriptions of the militantly atheistic cabal. Militantly atheistic is not an apt description for this (see link below)? I suspect Dennett, himself, would own up to that,unapologetically. Why do you consider it a pejorative? Exhibit A http://atheism.about.com/libra... q.e.d. BTW, my critique is equal opportunity in that it rejects purely evidentialistic approaches to our accounts of putative ultimate realities, whether by believers or nonbelievers. They're all naive realists in their own peculiar ways. Those who thereafter claim a monopoly on epistemic virtue and normative justification of their stance, alone, claiming all others are deluded, are further misguided, philosophically. It's not that | think their essential stance is misguided. More precisely, I object to a stance that suggests there are no reasonable alternative stances.The existential disjunction or "living as if" in my usage is an interpretive stance. It's what one actually does after describing, evaluating and norming a reality. The descriptive moment might be robustly scientific or merely derive from one's participatory imagination (nondiscursive yet informative). The evaluative moment assesses the adaptive significance of the reality or the value to be realized (or threat to be avoided). The normative moment includes both moral and practical assessments of different ways to realize the value. The interpretive moment is robustly pragmatic. All of this is guided, regulatively yes, by an implicit equiprobability principle, which seeks an answer to the question --- All things being otherwise equal, informatively, what performative strategy should oneemploy? The answer is that one should do whatever is the most life-giving and relationship-enhancing. From a sociobiological perspective, this meets one's survival imperative and fosters transkin altruism. From a religious perspective, our existential orientations are also interpreted as transcendental imperatives. Considering our inescapably tautological stances toward primal and or ultimate realities, we encounter quite the existential disjunction. The equiprobability principle guides people in different directions that can be equally reasonable. The reason our worldviews are equiprobable is precisely because their tautologies are, at best, merely valid, logically, and merely plausible, evidentially. Plausibility is probabilistic but way tooweakly so, based, as it is, on abductive rather than inductive inference. (All this over against new forms of logical positivism and radical empiricism that subvert from within.) Metaphysical propositions vary in their degree of epistemic virtue, some fostering, others frustrating, human value-realizations, like scientific inquiry, for example. (1 discussed some of the criteria of epistemic virtue vis a vis metaphysics in response to comments re: the previous Feser installment.) Certain propositions serve as indispensable methodological stipulations. These include various first principles like noncontradiction and excluded middle. principles of causation and sufficient reason and such. Common sense notions of causation are hard to abandon because they pretty much map over our various scientific laws, which describe nature's dispositional tendencies.What Thomism calls potentiality does not seem wholly unrelated to what Peirce's pragmatism called Thirdness, what Scotus called the Formal Distinction, what Polanyi called the Tacit Dimension, what we experience most often as probabilities, sometimes as necessities. The precise nature of these regularities has been debated between different philosophic schools and, for example, is not unrelated to Hume's problem of induction. It seems to me that we cannot avoid being metaphysical realists regarding reality's regularities but that we may be metaphysically agnostic regarding their precise nature, affirming them as a category in a vague, phenomenological modal ontology, while remaining undecided regarding any particular regularity, whether or not it's emergent or transcendent, local or universal, static or dynamic, random or systematic.While our methodological stipulations may be metaphysically suggestive, they are not ontologically decisive. Methodological naturalism doesn't necessarily implicate philosophical naturalism. The principles of causality and sufficient reason don't necessarily implicate a thoroughgoing Aristotelian approach to causation beyond our space-time-matter-energy plenum to the initial, boundary and limit conditions of our cosmos, much less to some putative atemporal realm, where our concepts may or may not successfully refer. Nothing in empirical science necessarily rules these Aristotelian accounts out, either. Different category in play as these methodological stipulations are normative while evidential sciences are descriptive. These norms may or may not have heuristic value, pragmatically. I am in the camp that finds Aristotelian notions of causation useful at the interface of semiotic sciencewith an emergentist paradigm, specifically re: teleodynamics and formal/final causation (a downward causation that wouldn't necessarily violate physical causal closure, such as in a nonreductive physicalism, so not as robust as the classic telos). That one would not deny the principles of sufficient reason and causality to avoid blocking inquiry (Why a priori imagine we'll be methodologically thwarted, epistemically, or ontologically occulted, metaphysically?) amounts to an indispensable methodological stipulation, perhaps, but it's not ontologically decisive (merely suggestive). For all practical purposes, the closer we get to T=0, the chances seem to be that our inquiries will probably stall (not to mention the practical upshots of godelian incompleteness re: theories of everything). At any rate, just because one asserts that methodological stipulations like PSR and PC cannot be coherently denied, that doesn'tmake them metaphysically necessary or philosophically true. One has only demonstrated --- not that they cannot be UNTRUE, but --- that if they are not true, we will be UNFORTUNATE? All that said, I choose to live as if they are true. It's eminently reasonable to do so, performatively, while awaiting a final adjudication, informatively. I know there are different categories of dialethea, but most seem to be generated by circular referentiality, static conceptions of the principle of identity and overuse of the principle of excluded middle. In my modal ontology of possibilities, actualities and necessities, | prescind from from necessities to probabilities. I'm not even sure that necessity successfully refers to physical reality. So, in this approach, noncontradiction holds but excluded middlefolds in that category representing regularities. Both continue to hold for actualities. For possibilities, excluded middle holds but noncontradiction folds. Possibilities are only found instantiated in actualities, irreducibly so. As for the principle of identity, Hartshorne recognizes asymmetric temporal relations, where an identity's past but not its potential future is included in its identity, as objects inhere in states, not vice versa. This recognizes the dynamical (not static), processive (not substantial) nature of physical realities and helps avoid paradoxes that arise when we conflate logical and efficient causes (like the sorite paradox of when, exactly, the next addition of a grain of sand will result ina heap of sand). Circular referentiality seems to be an inescapable artefact of our language systems, where our concepts refer one to another, dictionary style. When plugged into a formalsymbol system, like syllogistic logic, we cannot avoid, then, necessarily running into a godelian choice between completeness and consistency because we cannot prove the axioms (establish the definitions of our terms) within their own systems (our dictionaries, our language games). The first two examples are ontological and the last linguistic. Even with such approaches, other dialethea will present, but only rarely. Even more rarely would we encounter one that had practical significance. When confronted with the choice between an inconsistent account and a incomplete account, we best settle for incompleteness. I think we should abide with the notion that some dialethea deserve to be taken seriously and not cursorily dismissed but included in our informal deliberations as evidentially significant, just not decisive. They wouldn't be the sole determinant but would weigh in - for or against —alongsideall other evidence toward the establishment of a preponderance. If we give them their due, perhaps we could make unpredictable strides in artificial intelligence. As Haldane suggests, reality is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. Perhaps reality is just more complex than our symbolic logic and human language can reflect. A Catholic priest, Protestant priest and Graham Priest walk into a bar. The Catholic priest asks for a whiskey. The Protestant Priest says "I shall not have any." Graham Priest says: "I'll have what they're having." BTW, because metaphysics, as methodological stipulations, are tautological and normative, abductive and deductive but not descriptive and inductive, any challenge wouldn't come, evidentially, from empirical verification or probabilistic falsification, per my reading. The challenge would present in pragmatic terms as gains or losses inheuristic value, e.g. no longer paving the way for novel hypotheses, loss of interdisciplinary consilience (speaking to a narrower spectrum of disciplines), providing fewer conceptual placeholders and bridging concepts for advancing sciences, loss of explanatory significance in common sense and evolving folk psychologies and other indirect guages of truth-making, model-constructing power. Those are just my conceptions and categories of how metaphysics intersects physical reality. The dialethea discussion has got me musing further. I mentioned elsewhere how formal/final causation conceptions (analogous to the more robustly causal Aristotelian notions) have been valuable heuristics at the interface of modern semiotic science with emergentist paradigms. Terry Deacon also employs teleodynamic conceptions in hisaccount of the emergence of human consciousness. Deacon derived 10 sign classes from the 9 signs types (this is semiotic jargon from Peirce's sign theory). Interestingly, Dr. Sungchil Ji was then able to use Deacon's derivation to formulate a quark model of signs. These modeling attempts are playing out within complexity theory, which admits of ontological hierarchies, out of which emerge -—— not only novel properties, but --- novel laws, dispositional tendencies, regularities. One upshot of hierarchical languages and axioms would be that formal proofs could then be argued without circular references (godelian implications), at least at that given juncture in the chain of being. Another type of dialethic phenomenon can result from hierarchical ontologies which each would require a hierarchically specific language, or partially overlapping languages.Beyond the need to disambiguate terms, semantically, beyond the fuzzy logic required to handle our epistemic in/determinacies re: possibilities and vagueness re: probabilities, this hierarchy of language systems would require something more akin to set theory than linear logic. For example, looking at reality per complexity, in quantum superpositioning, for example, in the ontological mode of possibilities, the principle of noncontradiction wouldn't be determined as valid or invalid. Instead, it would simply be inapplicable. Hey, Papalinton, I've been preoccupied with musing about dialethism but, beyond the style-substance distinction, wanted to comment on the substance (yet again, from a different perspective). >>>This is intensely interesting,Johnboy.<<< Thanks >>>In which particular point of the seven in your Exhibit A, or collectively, does this militancy manifest? I am curious, because any commonsensical reading of the points identifies all of them as pretty much stock- in-trade standard, serving as they do unambiguously differentiating religious from the non-religious position.<<< Non/Religious position is too ambiguous and I thus parse it into matters of faith (vis a vis ultimate reality) and matters of morality (vis a vis proximate reality). The former refers to mythic stances, whether mythic, nonmythie or amythic, all which describe interpretive existential disjunctions and evaluative dispositions, which translated from the abstract to the concrete, oversimplified, means living as if reality writ large is im/personal and/orun/friendly or indifferent or not or even that one has no reason or even right to bother with such a stance. Such stances, I submit, are not within the ambit of descriptive science, are tautological, neither empirically verifiable nor probabilistically falsifiable, not robustly warranted epistemically and informatively but normatively justifiable performatively. Faith refers, then, to one's interpretive existential orientations toward primal and or ultimate realities. >>>Or does Dennett's militancy manifest itself by having the audacity, nay, the gall to insist on an evidentialiste approach, you know, demand proofs, evidence, facts, verification and some smidgeon of authentication from those that claim a reality immune from substantiation. [Methinks a case of special pleading here. ] <<< There's no special pleading. The lack ofsubstantiation doesn't orignate in some imagined methodological autonomy but goes with the territory that science would to explore but finds itself, sometimes, methodologically thwarted, epistemologically, possibly even ontologically occulted, metaphysically. We just cannot a priori know why the path of inquiry gets blocked but we methodologically stipulate that the problem must be epistemic not ontological, for obvious reasons. >>>Or is it that Dennett's militancy is reflected in his expectation that these alternative stances, other ways of knowing, must first establish their epistemic credentials from which a standard of reasonableness can be determined? <<< There are no alternative stances epistemologically, in my view. Epistemology is epistemology is epistemology. When we are confronted with paradox or even equiprobabilities,informatively in an epistemic stall mode, existentially, we may still be called upon performatively by forced and vital decisions, which then often choose between several "live" (not unreasonable) options. These live options are deemed reasonable by as many criteria of epistemic virtue as might be available, like logical validity, evidential plausibility and existential actionability (guided by both practical and moral norms). >>>Clearly the centuries-old hiatus in theo -philosophical scholarship has contributed little to consolidating the bona fides of a theologically-based metaphysical stance let alone as an explanatory paradigm worthy of the name.<<< Category error. Metaphysics are philosophic not theological, which is why, for example, Christianity has been described as still in search of a metaphysic. Now, regarding moral reasoning, that mustbe accomplished in a robustly evidential manner as we navigate --— not mythic, but --- cosmic realities in our relationship -- not to putative primal and/or ultimate realities, but — to proximate realities, to self, others, our planet. Any who suggest that morality must otherwise be grounded theologically in order to exert normative impetus are perhaps saying more about their own stage of moral development (Kohlberg) than they are about how many other humans actually are reasoning, in a manner wholly transparent to human reason without the benefit of so-called special revelations. Any normative impetus from faith might exceed the demands of justice and employ means sufficient to the ends of justice but wouldn't negate but transcend justice. Another topic for another day.