Here in Louisiana, Walker Percy's a real folk hero. He's buried in the cemetery at St Joseph's Abbey. My favorite semiotic distinction was crafted by Percy in his collection of essays, Message ina Bottle. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... The distinction he elucidated was that between knowledge and news. One takeaway from that distinction would seem to be that theology, far less than so many seem to suppose, is a speculative venture, and, far more than they seem to suppose, is a practical ad-venture. Hence the emphases by such as Whitehead and Peirce --- not so much on evidential description, but -~ on existential interpretation. Percy was a thorough-going Peircean! This is also to suggest that theology, properly considered, practically, is far less a challenge than one might otherwise suspect, when one narrowly construes it, speculatively.One salve for the cognitive dissonance that should afflict anyone who refuses to almost pathologically tush to closure regarding many of reality's paradoxes might be —- not a theoretic and systematic but --- a practical and provisional metaphysical agnosticism. So, while we don't a priori suggest that any given. paradox will necessarily resolve, dialectically, or dissolve, paradigmatically, or must be evaded (ignored), for all practical purposes, or exploited, maintained in creative tension, we remain open to the possibility of future understanding even while patiently abiding our present lack of understanding. In other words, hold on loosely but don't let go (my apologies to 38 Special). I think of Alan Watts, who wrote The Wisdom of Insecurity: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... Check out his influences and embrace that wisdom of his which you seem to emulate, at least, in my view. May peace come to you and remain with you always. EDIT: Fr Benedict Groeschel, great psychologist and wise spiritual director, liked to say that, early on the journey, one's faith is clear but tentative, but that, later on the journey, faith becomes obscure butcertain. | experienced that in my own life. While remaining a metaphysical agnostic regarding HOW reality exactly presents, I'm decidedly not a theological agnostic, believing THAT the News is Good. The hylomorphic account, in my view, properly understood, is not dualistic, which is why some would suggest that eschatological realities are grounded --- not by our metaphysical propositions, but —- theologically, so would necessarily involve an "outside assist" by God's love. These types of argument overuse excluded middle or either-or, so don't represent all of the available choices. We needn't choose between the random and the necessary, between the determinate and indeterminate. Indeed, we best not so choose, because so much of reality, at each emergent level of complexity, presents in a manner of degree, so, essays like this should include descriptors like strong and weak, adequate and inadequate, modest and robust, certain and uncertain, fallible and infallible, probable and improbable, plausible andimplausible, and good enough and not good enough. The theological anthropology of Phil Hefner best captures these realities, as he characterizes Homo sapiens as partly bounded, partly determined, mostly autopoietic, substantially free. Free will is an indispensable philosophical and anthropological presupposition for a theological stance, but it needn't a priori be considered nonphysical, only nonreductive. I've written extensively about nonreductive physicalist accounts and emergentist semiotics here, so mercifully won't repeat them here. I don't really have a definitive philosophy of mind and wouldn't lose much sleep even if cartesian dualism got proven. Hylomorphic accounts seem reasonable and can converge, once suitably nuanced, with such as Deacon's teleodynamic account of our symbolic species. We've discussed this intermediate state before, but it needn't necessarily rely on some intrinsic metaphysical principle, especially since each human soul, theologically, is specially created. Any immortality thus needn't be attributed to the natureof consciousness or associated with philosophy of mind positions but is gifted by God's loving re- member-ing. Again, these eschatological realities are grounded theologically, agnostic to philosophical and metaphysical stances, except that free will is an indispensable philosophical presupposition for the life of faith. This is my interpretation of both Hans Kung and then Cardinal Ratzinger's (Benedict) thoughts. The bulk of Nancey Murphy's work on emergent monism and nonreductive physicalism with which I am familiar was done under the auspices of and published by the Vatican Observatory, Vatican City, and by the University of Notre Dame. One of her primary collaborators was Fr William J. Stoeger, SJ, who died in March. Good luck! The descriptor, closed, refers to our formal symbol systems in Godel's theorems and not to physical or metaphysical reality. I otherwise have no position regarding the universe prior to the planck epoch, during the earliest moments after the Big Bang, but am fascinated by all the speculation!http://plato.stanford.edu/entr... Note, the type of emergentist stance I take does not employ notions of supervenience. re: it can carry on its existence <<< And there's the rub, That's incoherent. Apart from an instantiation forms don't form. T agree some apologists might conceive it dualistically as it's a powerful intuition for many. I've drawn much inspiration from Joe Bracken's divine matrix and Jack Haught's process thought. I enjoyed dinner with Jack several decades ago when he guest lectured at LSU and only a handful of us students showed up and we've corresponded sparingly over the years. My late friend, Jim Arraj, a Thomist and Maritain scholar, wrote of deep and dynamic formal fields and I saw that as emblematic of how otherwise diverse metaphysics can begin to conceptually converge, no matter which root metaphor they employ, whether substance, process, social, relational, experience or what have you. My theological imagination has always been directedtoward the pneumatological, as my formative spirituality was shaped by the charismatic renewal. One of the Jesuits whom I'd met at Loyola, active in renewal circa 1970, was the late Don Gelpi whose lifework culminated with his own pragmatic metaphysics of experience, which draws deeply on Peirce's pragmatic semiotic realism, the same school of thought that inspired Terry Deacon's account of The Symbolic Species (and teleodynamic emergence of consciousness). The reason for this back-story is to set the stage for my own approach, which I call panSEM]Oentheism, which, lacking a root metaphor, brackets metaphysics with a phenomenology (perhaps a meta-metaphysics). It's basically a heuristic that I use to interpret one metaphysic and/or cosmology vs another, whether a quantum interpretation, speculative cosmology, emergentist paradigm, philosophy of mind or theology of nature. I suppose that being enamored in part by so many good thinkers and truly catholic in both the pluralistic and theological sense, I never felt compelled to choose one ontology over another so have remained metaphysically agnostic, although decidedly realist and committed to a robustanthropological conception of free will. The only caveat regarding emergentist stances is to avoid distinctions like strong emergence-weak supervenience and weak emergence-strong supervenience, because the latter remains question begging, the former is trivial. The one caveat regarding Whiteheadian approaches is to avoid the old essentialism vs nominalism tug of war, for Gelpi found Whitehead a tad nominalistic and sought to evade it with Peirce's triadic approach to interpretation. I first referenced panSEMI[Oentheism in a paper co- authored with Amos Yong, a pentecostal scholar whose been greatly influenced by Peirce and Gelpi. I commend these approaches as a way forward that might resonate with your own intuitions. I'd enjoy reading your thesis. To exploit the legal ambiguity of an unattenuated substantial burden seems to be a self-subverting strategy for any whose moral calculus recognizes such distinctions as between material and formal,remote and proximate, causes, It's scandalous, in fact, how these cynical legal ploys have, in practice, trivialized these distinctions. I would draw a distinction between agnosticism and doubts within the faith. We might consider Mother Teresa and Therese of Lisieux's experiences as an example. Only the narrowest constructions, hence caricatures, of faith, would characterize her doubts, even earlier in her ministry, as a loss of faith or even a systematic agnosticism. Indeed, Mother Teresa's experiences of doubt were, as some say, within the faith, and her experience of darkness both illuminates the nature of faith (neither a speculative rationalism nor an affective pietism) and serves as a beacon of hope to all who experience doubt and/or desolation. I suggest this because, within the life of faith, sometimes beliefs are explicit, sometimes implicit, and sometimes feelings yield consolation, sometimes desolation.Implicit beliefs would include both moments of doubt (of whatever duration or intensity), even in the form of a fides implicita, which would be a virtual assent that logically entails what would otherwise be explicitly believed. Such an entailment would be discernible -— not in terms of credulity, informatively, but —- via one's emulation of a way of living, performatively. Desolations could originate from what is conventionally known as backsliding or, for those more proficient in the life of charity, from the dark nights described in formative spirituality. As long as a loving person freely acts in a way that one imagines will best realize what one most values, whether with explicit or implicit beliefs, whether in consolation or desolation —- not only hope and love, but —- faith will thus abide? RE: How, given the gap between our knowledge and God's, can we be assured that God might not need to allow our loss of ultimate happiness for the sake ofsome higher good (say the soul-making of a vastly superior alien race)? <<< First, let me say that there have been numerous defenses put forth that, per my view, are quite consistent, logically. And, further, they aren't mutually exclusive and can be sufficiently nuanced, and work together: 1) a tehomic panentheism, which introduces a co-eternal dualism of a sort between the formless void and Eternal Form (Catherine Keller) ; 2) the classical Augustinian denial of an ontological status to what we refer to as evil; 3) Plantinga's free will defense w/some qualifications; 4) David Ray Griffin's process approach that interprets omnipotence as that power greater than which might otherwise, precisely, be inconsistent with other divine attributes and aims or or various types of nomicity (e.g. making rocks so big ...). Taken together with other approaches, these defenses succeed, even for some atheological thinkers, which is precisely why, as a fallback, they've focused on evidential objections. The evidential objections, however, are answered bytheodicies, which, rather than simply affirming THAT divine interactivity could possibly be consistent with other divine attributes, presume to suggest, for specific examples, WHY divine interactivity was evident here but not there, then but not now. The problems with theodicies are manifold, considered blasphemous by those who adopt a methodical theological skepticism regarding interventions, in the particular, while affirming the notion of divine interactivity, in general (for who knows the mind of God?), and considered callous and insensitive to the enormity of human suffering and immensity of human pain, which one could trivialize with facile explanations (that would still violate most moral sensibilities and not be in the least satisfying, existentially). So, logical defenses make sense, while evidential theodicies, some suggest (and I'm deeply sympathetic to their view), should be avoided? As to the higher good, soul-making of superior life forms, need we be that agnostic in our theological anthropology? I would propose that moral agentswith free will meet all necessary and sufficient conditions to be intrinsically and absolutely valued. Believers (Nancey Murphy & Walker Percy) and nonbelievers (Terry Deacon & Ursula Goodenough), alike, drawing on the semiotic realism of Charles Sanders Peirce, affirm, from an emergentist paradigm, that the "symbolic species," Homo sapiens, is --- not just quantitatively, but --- qualitatively different from our phylogenetic neighbors. That's quite the axiological Rubicon? For all the bluster between the militantly atheistic cohort and naively fundamentalistic believers, Michael Ruse's approach makes for an exemplar of inter-ideological dialogue. And he's not alone. There are many thoughtful and diverse atheological critiques, for example, represented by Religious Naturalists, by members of IRAS, Institute of Religion in an Age of Science, publisher of Zygon and in dialogue with Sir John Templeton's Metanexus Institute. Basically, they establish that they are within their epistemic rights vis a vis their various worldviews without, at the same time, insisting that competing stances are not. Apologeticsthat "facilely" trade charges of irrationalism (some stances are) are philosophically vacuous. Christian apologists would do well to return the courtesies and nuanced arguments of Ruse and others, Thanks, Gary, for a great piece and insightful commentary. faith and doubt, faith and materialism, religious epistemology, mother teresa's doubt, materialism and reductionism, nonreductive materialism, emergentism, consciousness, theodicy, logical problem of evil, evidential problem of evil, theodicy vs defense, michael ruse, walker percy, charles sanders peirce, semiotics, implict faith, consolation and desolation