Cosmic Baseball

I like this old post, but it's hard to imagine aiming it at a general audience, rather, only the weird audience you and I have co-created over the years. 

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

Therefore, all we ask is a baseballically 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. Rather, you must earn your way there.

So, when our team -- the Tonga Raccoons -- steps into the box with a bat labeled the epistemic priority of the Logos, we are first of all simply being honest and consistent. Nor is the use of this venerable bat "mythic," or "unsophisticated," or "superstitious." 

Or, at the very least, it is no more or less stitious than the bat with which the materialist swings, whether in the form of scientism, Darwinism, naturalism, whatever. Rather, it all comes down to making solid contact with the ball, and how far it travels when struck.

Indeed, there is always a bat and there is a ball. The bat is our intellect, and the ball is intelligible reality.

However, it is no exaggeration to say that the Modern Aberration begins with the Kantian anti-principle that our bats cannot make contact with the ball. Swing as we might, all we can ever hit are 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, this is 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, Bishop Barron. Here comes the pitch: "to acknowledge the epistemic priority of Jesus Christ is, first, to assume the intelligibility of all that is."

Base hit!

This batting stance assumes that we can actually see and hit a real ball. This is called "common sense," but you needn't have spent much time in academia to realize that common sense is against the rules of their league, which again equates an epistemological strike out with an ontological home run. 

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.... 

[T]here 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 actual conduct of science is predicated on 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.

Which means that we stride into to the 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.

Thus, "every scientific act is, ipso facto, an affirmation of God's existence." Or in other words, all along, science has been borrowing God's big 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 continues:

to know anything at all is, implicitly, to know that God exists, for it is to accept the reign of the Logos or transcendental intelligibility.

This is one of those Yes/No questions: either you are arguing toward this logoistic principle or from it. In other words, you can begin, as we do, with transcendental intelligibility as an axiomatic truth; or you can track contingent truths up the epistemological mountain to the invigorating air of the logosphere, where all truths converge upon the One Truth from which they have descended. You might say that

Christianity does not deny the splendor of the world but encourages us to seek its origin, to ascend to its pure snow.

No one is obligated to live here, just as no one is obligated to dwell among the babbling rabble of tenured apes, the media mob, the credentialed barbarians. But

The most dispiriting solitude is not lacking neighbors, but being deserted by God

Turns out -- SURPRISE! -- that the reality we seek is founded upon

a being-with-the-other, or better, a being-in-the-other, a coinherence.... Therefore relationality, being-for-the-other, must be the form that, at the deepest level, conditions whatever is and the truth that satisfies the hunger of the mind (Barron).

Or, to put to put it aphoristically,

To be a Christian is to not be alone despite the solitude that surrounds us.

As they say, you can be allone in a crowd but twogather in threedom. For

Any shared experience ends in a simulacrum of religion.

Indeed, if you closely examine the meaning of this mysterious word -- experience -- you may find the key to the whole existentialada, because "unshared experience" is a contradiction in terms. To put it conversely, at the deepest level of our being, experience is always experience-with; experience is with and with is experience.

Let's think through the principle of Incarnation. What does it imply? What does it presuppose, and what does it bring about? It isn't just the most radical idea ever, but literally the most radical idea conceivable, because it is the con-ception of infinitude in the womb of finitude. Barron puts it more plainly (in reference to the prologue of John):

The primordial divine conversation partner becomes a creature in order to draw creation into the embrace of the divine life.... Through the incarnation, the coinherence of the Father and the Logos seeks to provoke a coinherence of creation with God and of creatures with one another.

Reality is a coinherence, and coinherence is an unending con-versation; or better, a trialogue at the edge of the subjective horizon where Self and Other meet in a mutually indwelling I AMbrace.

This being the case, a philosophy such as atheistic materialism is still going to be a conversation -- for it cannot not be one and still commune-icate -- but the person engaging in it is simply talking to himself. Truly, it is a glorified cognitive ønanism, which is precisely why they're such infertile eggheads even if master debaters.

Let's wrap up this game:

any philosophy, science, or worldview that does not see relationality, being-for-the-other, as ontologically fundamental must be false.... what the mind correctly seeks as it goes out to meet the intelligibility of the real is always a form of coinherence (Barron).

Put it this way: when intelligence goes out to meet the world, the world meets it more than halfway, and is pleased to engage us in nonstop conversation via its own intelligibility.

Indeed, the world never stops blabbering, not just truths about itself, but how about all the beauty? Sometimes we are tempted to say: okay, we get it. Awesome. Luminous. Numinous. A cosmic wombinus without the doom & gloominus.