Now Batting, Number Two, Jesus Christ

Continuing with Bishop Barron's mind-expanding take on The Epistemic Priority of Christ, note that the claim in the title has to do with knowledge of reality; not just any knowledge, but ultimate knowledge of ultimate reality.

Put it this way: no matter your metaphysic -- even something as stupid and primitive as atheism -- you have to start somewhere, and this somewhere is not given by mere reason or math (both or which are tautological), nor by empiricism (since no sensation can tell you what it is sensing; that requires a rational soul that knows essences).

Therefore, all we ask is an honest and transparent statement of how you got to first base. If you faithfully execute this demand, you will quickly realize that you've simply assumed your way to first, thus undercutting your metaphysic before you can get to second, let alone score. Or, assuming you do reach home, you have cheated, because every baseball fan knows you can't steal first base. The instant replay negates the run. Start over.

So, when our team -- the Tonga Raccoons -- steps into the box with a bat labeled the epistemic priority of Christ, we are first of all simply being honest. Nor is this bat "stupid," or "unsophisticated," or "superstitious." Or, at the very least, it is no more or less superstitious than the bat with which you swing, be it scientism, Darwinism, deconstruction, whatever. Rather, it all comes down to how far the ball travels when we hit it.

Indeed, there is a bat and there is a ball. The bat is our mind (AKA intelligence), and the ball is reality (intelligibility).

However, it is no exaggeration to say that modern philosophy begins with the Kantian anti-principle that our bats cannot make contact with the ball. Swing as we might, all we can ever hit is our own a priori categories, thus smashing our own balls. Even if our phenomenal bats could strike the noumenal ball, we could never know it.

In the argot of baseball, if you are unfortunate enough to strike out three times in a single game, it's called a golden sombrero; four times is a platinum sombrero. Now imagine a whole life spent striking out: this is called a tenured sombrero.

Back to our leadoff hitter, the Bishop. Here comes the pitch:

to acknowledge the epistemic priority of Jesus Christ is, first, to assume the intelligibility of all that is.

In other words, it assumes that we can actually see and hit the ball. This is called "common sense," but you don't have to have spent too much time in academia to realize that common sense is against the rules of their league -- much as how the designated hitter runs contrary to any sense of aesthetics or propriety. It's frankly disgusting.

More on the dimensions and properties of our epistemic ballpark:

Since all has been made through, and will be ordered by, a divine rationality, there must be a form in all finite being as a whole and in each particular thing that exists; what comes to be through Logos is, necessarily, logical.... there is an unavoidable correspondence between the activity of the mind [bat] and the structure of being [ball]: intelligence will find its fulfillment [reach home] in this universal and inescapable intelligibility [common sense].

Now, in reality, the conduct of science is just COMMON SENSE writ large. Why then is it so uncommon, historically and culturally speaking? Well,

it is no accident that the physical sciences -- astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology -- developed and flourished in the Christian West.

For in these parts, we stride into to batter's box with "the biblical conviction that finite reality is intelligible, made through the divine Logos," such that our scientific heavy hitters "rather naturally move out to meet the physical world with confident rationality."

Thus, our "investigations will proceed without hesitation to the farthest reaches of the macrocosmic and the microcosmic realms." In other words, we can hit any ball out of any park. If you build it, we will transcend it. For these are the implicit rules of science:

One could argue that the universality of objective intelligibility (assumed by any honest scientist) can be explained only through recourse to a transcendent subjective intelligence that has thought the world into being, so that every act of knowing a worldly object or event is, literally, a re-cognition, a thinking again of what has already been thought by a primordial divine knower.

Bottom line for today: "every scientific act is, ipso facto, an affirmation of God's existence." Or in other words, all along, science has been borrowing God's bat without acknowledging it. Which is why "natural reason is a participation in the pure intelligibility of the Logos and thus is necessarily congruent with the deepest perceptions of theology" (Barron).

I had also wanted to say something about how and why, in our *finest* universities, the common sense of STEM has become utterly detached from the coarse and common nonsense of the humanities. Who took the uni out of the university? Well, yes, diabolos -- i.e., scatterer and divider -- but we'll say more about this as we proceed.