I was Lost But Now I'm... Confident There's a Search Party

I was reading a book yesterday that compared the ascending and descending (or analytic and synthetic, respectively) approaches of the cosmic flowchart to the mouth and watershed of a river. Imagine two explorers;

The first went to the mouth of the river, where it spread out in all its power.... he pointed out the exact position of the springs and ridgelines, measured the flow, and carefully noted the orientation of the streams.

The second fellow starts way downstream, "and no one can describe the misfortunes that awaited him":

Sometimes he followed a promising stream only to find himself interminably lost in the sand or in various caves, and other times he found himself in the middle of a nearby basin surrounded by the inconsistent flow of his river. He went this way and that, sometimes retracing his steps, across trails and dead-end paths, and his explorations were filled with endless hopes and disappointments.

Sad! But it gets worse, because not only did he not find his way to the source, he never returned and is still missing. An unconfirmed rumor spread that he had left an account of his discoveries in a bottle, found after a flood "in the wheat field of a peasant from Cairo."

Extending the metaphors in this allegorical tale, the first approach is pure metaphysics, the second science. Science, of course, can never rise to its source, and only looks foolish when it tries:

Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know. 

To put it another way, everything science knows is embedded in a larger metaphysical scheme that provides context and coherence, even a vision (whether explicit or implicit) of the whole.   

Now, knowledge of the watershed is not knowledge of the mouth, but nor is knowledge of the mouth knowledge of the watershed. 

Although the account of the first explorer is (in our metaphor) "absolute," there is considerable contingency between it and all the ins & outs, what-have-yous, and random strands of the terminal moraine below.

At the other end, what can one say via induction about ultimate reality from the presence of a creek or swamp? Not a whole lot, except to say that these are not self-explanatory; they didn't didn't get here by magic.

Nor is a map -- no matter how detailed -- of all the streams and creeks an ultimate explanation, since these are only parts of a larger system. And

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are the appendices of a magician's rule book.

At the same time, a doctrine that explains the lower with sole recourse to the higher is the absolute determinism of Mohammad or Calvin. Not very helpful, and possibly as fatal as the other guy's approach. Either way, you're gonna get lost in between.

The great In Between is the hard part, isn't it? I mean, empiricism is easy, and so too is metaphysics, at least if you have the knack for it. But empiricism is a flat and boring road, such that no empiricist is content to stay in his lane. Empiricism itself cannot be proven empirically, and

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.     

It's like describing all the creeks below and then imagining reality as a giant creek. But how to explain the paddle and canoe? And canoeist? 

By the way, our little fable is taken from The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie: Concerning the Truth of Dogma and the Nature of Theology. It's a very "inside graceball" sort of book, so not a general recommendation. I've only just started it, but it looks to me like this dispute between strict Thomists and the more loosey-nousy nouvelle theologians is a bit like the up- and downstream approaches.

I don't think Thomas would ever do this, but it's not like you can deduce what you had for breakfast this morning from the metaphysical certitude of God, but nor can you ascend from the taste of breakfast to knowledge of the Absolute without a lot of vertical steps in between.

Which is why a watchword of our cosmic flowchart will be complementarity. We'll try to avoid getting lost in the clouds or stuck in the mud.