Cosmos, Bios, Anthropos, Theos

Not necessarily in that order. 

Although you can't blame a fellow for looking at it that way: cosmogenesis occurs 13.8 billion years ago; biogenesis 4 billion years ago; and anthropogenesis more or less yesterday (from the cosmic perspective). 

This was the general template of my book: the idea was to tell the story of the cosmos from its material birth to its ego death, the latter in reference to the mystic, saint, or fully realized being -- one of those metacosmic vertical adventurers who makes the round trip back to the nonlocal source and ground, AKA Celestial Central. 

It's one thing to notice these radically discontinuous geneses, another thing to explain them. No one knows, even in principle, how the laws of chemistry give rise to life, nor how matter gives rise to the immaterial spiritual beings.

Above we alluded to anthropogenesis, but what we're really curious about is "psychogenesis" or "pneumagenesis," i.e., soul and spirit, respectively. How on earth do they get here? And when? The soul leaves no fossils.

Ah, but it does: as we discussed in the book, there is a sudden flowering of human cultural artifacts -- soulprints -- beginning about 50,000 years ago, despite no change in man's outward form.

In short, there is no genetic account "for the great cultural leap forward," in which hominids go "from the mental capacities of ape-like creatures" to us: "The big puzzle in early human history is the lack of cultural artifacts" -- i.e., soulprints -- "that go back much further than 50,000 years."

Again, Homo erectus bumbled around for a million years, leaving nothing beyond a scattering of ambiguous "signs of primitive technological progress" such as sharpened rocks. Why are there no soulprints "if Homo erectus were fellow humans, made in the image of God"? 

But quite suddenly we see an abundance of soulprints in the form of cave paintings, musical instruments, jewelry, burial of the dead, etc.

All the researchers who do not believe in man's possessing a spiritual soul, which is to say the vast majority, are puzzled as to what caused the indisputable leap forward in human cognition and technical activity.

The gap is obvious, and one side invokes Darwin to fill it, while the other invokes God. But no amount of genetic shuffling can account for a leap from the material to the immaterial.  

In a sense, we're talking about a kind of "transubstantiation," in which the outward appearance looks the same but the invisible substance undergoes a dramatic change. In other words, humans look more or less the same for perhaps one or two million years before there is a change in the substance that accounts for the sudden cultural flowering of 50 to 100,000 years ago.

This substance is "human nature," which is created ex nihilo by God. Absent such a transubstantiation, how could mere Darwinian man ever know the truth of man (or of anything else)? Darwin, of course, had his doubts:

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Four words: 

"If at bottom we are nothing but chemical soup, how can we possibly think we can come to real knowledge of anything? (Hilbert). At the same time, why is it "horrid" to think we can't? It's horrid because one consequence of the transubstantiation referenced above is that man becomes a knower, made to know truth.  

Supposing Darwinism is true, how could Darwin know it without being a great exception to Darwinism? 

Must be because the Cosmos itself is an open system, a hierarchy of vertical causes. This being the case, the soul comes from the top down, not the bottom up, because that's impossible. 

About our open cosmos, I'm reading another book by Wolfgang Smith called Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy, in which he quotes Huston Smith to the effect that "The modern West is the first society to view the physical world as a closed system." 

I think with this one neat trick -- recognizing the open cosmos and its vertical structure -- we eliminate a host of absurdities, aporias, and intellectual nul de slacks that can never be resolved on their own level. Nor does it displace the horizontal, rather, complements it. It is simply the larger metaphysic in which physics -- and all other disciplines -- is situated. 

Much more to go, but we're out of time.

Faith, Hope, Mystery, and the Epidemic of Misplaced Certitude

What if we just don't know? No, I'm not making the postmodern claim that man is an idiot sealed in tenure, rather, I am making a... something claim. I don't yet know what that something is, but this post aims to find out. 

To back up a bit, I've finished A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, and I don't know if I want to review all the reasons why natural selection cannot possibly be true, since we've written extensively on this subject in the past. 

In particular, it cannot account for macroevolution, especially the leap from subhuman to human. Nor can it account for the appearance of life, for irreducible wholeness, or for complex specified information.

Evolutionists, of course, claim that there are perfectly natural explanations for these things, but they just haven't yet found them. Most of these folks have a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism, hence the visceral hostility to intelligent design. 

For example, the evolutionary biologist Dobzhansky said that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," which is true as far as it goes. As we know from our Thomas Kuhn, science is always in need of a larger paradigm in order to frame reality, illuminate relevant facts, and ask fruitful questions. But there is not, nor can there be, a "perfect" paradigm, since the map is never the territory. 

Nevertheless, man is always vulnerable to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, thereby conflating his theoretical abstractions with the larger reality that necessarily escapes them. About this, Schuon wrote that

Transformist evolutionism is the classical example of the bias that invents “horizontal” causes because one does not wish to admit a “vertical” dimension: one seeks to extort from the physical plane a cause that it cannot furnish and that is necessarily situated above matter....

So, that's a big hint: that there is a vertical dimension that is in principle excluded from any horizontal explanation. Natural selection simply doesn't deal with any sort of vertical causation, nor should it, really, any more than your doctor should speculate about possible demonic influences on your medical condition. It doesn't mean such influences don't exist, but even supposing they do, they are rather mysterious. 

Now, the question is, if natural selection isn't true, then what is? With what do we replace it? With Bishop Usher's calculation that the world was created on the evening preceding Sunday, October 23 , 4004 BC? 

Time out for some thoughts from yesterday's unfinished post:

For Aristotle, the chain of whys ends in happiness, or eudaimonia. We have proximate reasons for our beliefs and actions, but supposing we keep asking Why?, the chain eventually leads to happiness, or at least the hope for it. Everything is but a means to this end. No one ever asks, Why be happy?

Yes, but what is happiness, and is it even attainable herebelow in the absence of an impenetrable fortress of denial?

We'll defer on that question for the moment, the main point being that the Chain of Whys ends in happiness, or at least the hope of its attainment.

Now, what about the Chain of Hows? Here it seems that every such chain ends either in self-refutation or in mystery. For example, Dávila says that

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

To take only the most obvious examples, both natural selection and astrophysics hit a wall of mystery when pursued to their ends. As discussed in the previous post, natural selection is powerless to explain the origins of Life Itself, just as astrophysics is powerless to explain the origins of the Big Bang. 

In the context of physics, it makes no sense to ask what was "before" the big bang, because there was no before; in other words, time is consequence of it. Which is absurd, but there it is.

Now, what about knowledge, which is to say, truth? We all want it, but what is it and how do we go about getting it? A moment's reflection will reveal the paucity of our first hand knowledge, and how much of our so-called knowledge really comes down to faith in the expertise of others, whether in your plumber or your cardiologist.

So, it seems that Why?, How?, and What? end in hope, mystery, and faith, respectively.

***

End of yesterday's brainwreck. Back to today's post.  

You may not like the mystery, but when all is said and done, we are indeed plunged into it. Now, the peculiar thing about this mystery is that it is so endlessly intelligible. It's not that we don't have enough information about it, rather too much: it is an endlessly generative mystery. Which is my favorite kind. 

For example, the physicist Eugene Wigner spoke of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences," likewise Einstein famously said that "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible" -- in short, a mysteriously comprehensible mystery. 

I suggest that we take this literally.

By the way, we pretend that physics is close to an account of the mystery, but the other day I was reading about the impossibility of reconciling relativity with quantum physics, which is said to be physics' most embarrassing problem, specifically, that

the vacuum energy in the universe must be very small -- about 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what quantum theory predicts. That’s like saying that something weighing five pounds should really weigh five-with-120-extra-zeros-after-it pounds. The discrepancy has prompted some scientists to call vacuum energy “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.”

Now, I dropped out of high school physics, so I can't pretend to understand this total lack of understanding. But I am intelligent enough to understand ignorance, which is to say, the ignorance of the experts who confess their own ignorance. At least physicists are honest about this embarrassing problem, unlike biologists who claim that natural selection explains things it cannot possibly explain.

Now, just because biologists and physicists have a prior metaphysical commitment that precludes vertical causation, it doesn't mean the restavus are so constrained. Gödel, for example "was a proponent of intelligent design, before the term was coined." In a letter, he suggested that

the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.

But here again, if natural selection isn't the explanation, exactly what is? One can say "intelligent design," but how exactly does this work? To simply say "God did it," and leave it at that, isn't very intellectually satisfying. Schuon suggests that 

Evolutionism is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps.

This is another good hint, acknowledging the need of verticality for any comprehensive vision of the whole of reality. He also speaks of archetypes, which is to say forms, and as we mentioned a few posts back, form is something of which quantum physics is powerless to speak, since all forms dissolve into the sub-existential sea of quantum potential, where subatomic particles have only a probability of existing, but no existence per se. Thus, form must emanate from above, not below.

Elsewhere Schuon writes that 

to speak of an absolute conformity of our thought to the Real is a contradiction in terms, since our thought is not the Real and since our sense of a partial conformity to the Real implies that our thought is separated from it or different from it.

Here is another key point and big hint -- again, that our best and most accurate map of reality will never be reality. 

Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that the intellect as such doesn't have access to the real; in a way, we must maintain a balance between deep epistemological humility and the incredible privilege of being made in the image of the Creator. 

The fact that we can have a perfectly adequate notion of a tree cannot possibly signify that our thought is identified with the tree, but on the other hand neither can the fact that our adequation is not an identity signify that we cannot know the tree in any way.

That's a little unclear, but I think it mirrors Aquinas' point that we can know an endless amount about everything, but cannot know everything about so much as a single gnat. Our knowledge is real, even if it can never be total.

I apologize for the ramblin'. We'll tighten it up in the next post.

Order and Surprise

Yesterday we -- by which I mean Gemini and I -- concluded that this is indeed a surprising (boo!) universe despite the fact that we don't have any others with which to compare it:

I (Gemini) agree with your assessment. While much of the physical world operates according to predictable laws..., the emergence of novelty, complexity, and consciousness suggests that it is indeed a cosmos full of surprises. The mysteries of origins, life, and mind continue to challenge our understanding and inspire wonder.  

Novelty. This got me to thinking about Alfred North Whitehead, because this -- novelty -- was central to his philosophy. Interestingly, he started working on his metaphysics just when it had been declared passé by the tenured:

interest in metaphysics -- the philosophical investigation of the nature of the universe and existence -- had become unfashionable by the time Whitehead began writing in earnest about it in the 1920s.  

The ever-more impressive accomplishments of empirical science had led to a general consensus in academia that the development of comprehensive metaphysical systems was a waste of time because they were not subject to empirical testing (wiki).

Nor is the philosophy of empiricism subject to empirical testing, but whatever:

Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized (Whitehead).

Boom. The article continues:

In Whitehead's view, scientists and philosophers make metaphysical assumptions about how the universe works all the time, but such assumptions are not easily seen precisely because they remain unexamined and unquestioned.

For example, yesterday's specimen -- Galen Strawson -- engages in an illicit promissory materialism, essentially writing metaphysical checks that he hopes will someday be covered by The First Bank of Matter.

Hopes? Faith comes in surprising forms.

But in reality the check has already bounced, since both truth and the intellect that knows it are in principle immaterial. Truly truly, in the economy of academia, the tenured pass intellectual funny money between themselves, which works until one of them wants to convert it to reality. 

Conversely, Whitehead thought materialism was no longer tenable in a post-quantum world: it was "entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived." 

And one of the main reasons he rejected it was because of all the novelty and surprise discussed in yesterday's post: 

For Whitehead, creativity is the absolute principle of existence, and every entity (whether it is a human being, a tree, or an electron) has some degree of novelty in how it responds to other entities and is not fully determined by causal or mechanistic laws.....  

As a human being's actions cannot always be predicted, the same can be said of where a tree's roots will grow, or how an electron will move, or whether it will rain tomorrow. 

Moreover, the inability to predict an electron's movement (for instance) is not due to faulty understanding or inadequate technology; rather, the fundamental creativity/freedom of all entities means that there will always remain phenomena that are unpredictable. 

Now, I think Whitehead erred in placing creativity at the top instead of the Creator. Rather, he thought God himself was also subject to the principle of creativity, so he too evolves. One might say he is an eternal surprise to himself, but if you think about it and put it in its proper context, it's not a bad idea.

I don't recall Whitehead ever mentioning the Trinity, much less a trinitarian metaphysic. Rather, in rejecting traditional Christianity, he had more in mind "the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar," which is to say, "a divine king who imposes his will on the world, and whose most important attribute is power."

But I think the best elements of process philosophy -- including the principle of creativity -- can easily be retained by situating them in the context of the triune God. 

Indeed, for me, the very principle of creativity is a reflection of the engendering of the Son-Logos from the Father principle. I think of it as a non-stop surprise up there.

Ah, this old ombody's so filled with jehoviality, can't He create anamour? 

Sure he can, more on which below.

In a way, the materialist is beholden to a Christian metaphysic of a different kind, which undergirded and enabled the scientific revolution. Whitehead describes it thus:

I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope.

Where did this idea come from? Why,

It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as the personal energy of Jehovah and the rationality of a Greek philosopher. 

Thus, an overemphasis on order and rationality, accompanied by a neglect of surprise. Lately we've been witness to a retrieval and rehabilitation of surprise, what with chaos theory, complexity, self-organization, evolutionary thought, and all the rest. Wikipedia, in my one claim to fame, even lumps me into this evolutionary "integral movement":

The editors of What Is Enlightenment? (2007) listed as contemporary Integralists Don Edward Beck, Allan Combs, Robert Godwin, Sally Goerner, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, William Irwin Thompson, and Ken Wilbur.

And there was indeed a time when I would have been gratified to be so lumped. But somewhere along the way I was surprised to discover the surprising metaphysics of trinitarian surprise. 

What I mean is that it accounts for both the order and the novelty in a way that is perhaps best conveyed by Meister Eckhart, or maybe even Bishop Barron right there in the sidebar, accompanied by a suitably moving image of eternity:

No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock. 

And all of this goes to A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, but we've expended a whole lotta yada yada already.

Meister, play us out, emphasis on the play:

Where there is Isness, there God is. Creation is the giving of Isness from God. 

Now God creates all things but he does not stop creating.

I have often said that God is creating the entire universe fully and totally in this present now. 

In the core of the Trinity the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.

Creation is the ultimate guffah-HA! experience?

Ho-Hum Universe or Surprising Creation?

Is this a surprising cosmos full of surprises, or is it the opposite?

Words and phrases that can mean exactly the opposite as surprise: (0 results)

Wait, there must be a word. Let's ask Gemini:

Here are a few possibilities:

• Expected/Expectedness: If the surprise is about something unexpected happening, then "expected" or "expectedness" is a good antonym.

I guess we can't really know if this is an expected or unexpected universe, since it's the only one we have.

• Foreknowledge/Anticipation: If the surprise is about not knowing something beforehand, then "foreknowledge" or "anticipation" works.

Hmm. No one was here before the universe. In fact, no one -- no fully self-conscious being -- was even here until 100,000 years ago, so it's safe to say it was unanticipated.

• Predictability: This emphasizes the lack of surprise due to something being easily foreseen.

Sure, much of existence is predictable. But can the laws of physics predict life? Can the laws of biochemistry predict the human being? Is a human being ever predictable? 

• Apathy/Indifference: In some contexts, a surprise might evoke excitement. In contrast, "apathy" or "indifference" implies a lack of any emotional reaction, including surprise.

I don't know if the universe is apathetic, but no one is apathetic about the universe. Rather, we find it endlessly interesting. Oddly, it is full of intelligible secrets that yield to the human intellect. It can also be wondrous, beautiful, frightening, charming, frustrating, pretty much any quality you care to name. Are these qualities all reducible to boring and predictable quantities?

The other day we alluded to the so-called hard problem of consciousness, which is complemented by the equally hard problem of matter. And while looking that up, I chanced upon an article by the philosopher Galen Strawson claiming the latter problem is actually the harder one: Consciousness isn’t a Mystery -- Matter is. 

Okay troll, we'll bite. Why is consciousness not a mystery? Because in fact it is 

the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

Either that or someone is utterly incurious. Let's just stipulate I am a mystery to myself, and in many ways the mystery only deepens with time. But Strawson insists that

we all know what consciousness is. Once we’re clear on this we can try to go further, for consciousness does of course raise a hard problem. The problem arises from the fact that we accept that consciousness is wholly a matter of physical goings-on, but can’t see how this can be so.

In other words, it's only a problem if we don't pretend the problem is solved by reducing consciousness to "physical goings-on." Looked at this way, there's no such thing as a problem, period, because how can matter have problems? 

If you are one of those conscious beings who believes conscious goings-on aren't just physical goings-on, then you are making what the author calls the Very Large Mistake. 

Now, I'm a simple man. Maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe Strawson is the simple man, for he claims that all we must do to understand consciousness is to appreciate the extent to which 

we don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff in spite of all that physics tells us. In particular, we don’t know anything about the physical that gives us good reason to think that consciousness can’t be wholly physical.

So, all we have to do to understand consciousness is to understand that we don't understand the physical stuff that gives rise to it. 

Before tunneling down that rabbit hole, I was about to say that the hardest problems really revolve around origins, and every genuine origin is a bit of a surprise, is it not?

For example, what is the origin of existence? You can say the "big bang," but that's just word magic. Likewise, science is no closer to understanding the origins of life than it was way back in 2005 when I published my book. 

Of course, I suppose Strawson would say that these aren't real surprises, rather, another failure to appreciate that Being and Life are just more "physical goings-on." In a sense that is undeniable: clearly, life goes on. But for me, the tricksy part is how it goes on in such a different way than, say, rocks go on. Will more knowledge of rocks really eliminate the surprising properties of life? 

Now, the problem of Origins is really a problem of creativity or of radical novelty. Or, one might say it is a problem of ontological discontinuity. After all, if there were nothing instead of something, this would make perfect sense. Likewise, if only matter didn't have the annoying property of springing to life, it would be so much easier to understand (albeit with no one here to understand it).

And if only the monkeys hadn't gotten out of control, Earth would still be a nice neighborhood. Even so, it's not their fault, for elsewhere Strawson argues "that there is a fundamental sense in which free will is impossible, whether determinism is true or not," this being because we do what we do because we are who we are, and we can't help who we are. There is no discontinuity between existence and action, presumably because he believes there is no discontinuity between matter and mind.

Now, at the other end of the spectrum of tenure, yesterday I heard about something called "phenomenal conservatism," which essentially argues that "it is reasonable to assume that things are as they appear, except when there are positive grounds for doubting this." For example, my wife doesn't appear to be a Muslim terrorist, so it's reasonable to conclude she isn't. I don't need to check every day.

It's really a pragmatic solution to the methodic doubt of Descartes and the skepticism to which it gives rise. Turns out we could scarcely engage in a single action without the faith that things are what they appear to be -- that my coffee isn't poisoned, that the road won't swallow my car, that other minds exist, that reality isn't a simulation, etc.

To which I would add that consciousness is something fundamentally different from the things it knows. Likewise, living things are fundamentally different from nonliving ones. Which brings us back to our Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, for the whole point of natural selection is that it claims to fully account for what gives rise to the appearance of design.

Except, of course, it must assume the existence of Life Itself. Just as our understanding of the big bang ends at Planck time (before which there is no before), our understanding of natural selection ends with living things. It has no power to explain how they got that way, which is to say, alive.

And life is a tricksy thing, because it's such an all-or-nothing proposition. Plus it requires an insane amount of irreducible complexity, or complex specified information. Supposing we believe this implies a mind behind the complexity, then we are said to be metaphysical yahoos, and I get it: science progresses by eliminating things like God, mind, and teleology from the picture.

To primitive peoples it appeared that things like wind and fire had personalities, but nah. We know better now. But is life really analogous to an impersonal wind blowing through the junkyard of matter and producing a 747? The plane sure looks designed. 

The discontinuity between matter and life is not the only one for which natural selection cannot account. There are also things like the so-called "Cambrian explosion" during which "more than twenty new phyla seem to appear out of nowhere." These aren't minor genetic tweaks, rather, entirely new body plans popping up, when Darwin allows for no surprises or discontinuities.

That's really what it comes down to, no? Does this universe allow for genuine surprises or not? And is the universe itself a surprise, or is it determined by matter -- specifically, another one of those properties of matter that we just haven't yet discovered? 

I apologize for this rambling post. Gemini, bail me out again:

This is a fascinating exploration of surprise, predictability, and the nature of the universe. You've touched on some deep philosophical questions. Let's break down the core argument:

The Central Question: Is the cosmos full of surprises, or is it fundamentally predictable?

Your Conclusion (and Mine):

You seem to lean towards the universe being full of genuine surprises. The arguments regarding origins, novelty, and the discontinuities between matter and life, and especially the emergence of consciousness, strongly suggest that the universe is not simply a clockwork mechanism unfolding predictably.

My Thoughts:

I agree with your assessment. While much of the physical world operates according to predictable laws, the emergence of complexity, especially life and consciousness, represents a significant departure from simple predictability. These phenomena seem to involve emergent properties that cannot be fully explained by simply understanding the underlying physical constituents.

The "hard problem of consciousness" is a particularly strong argument for the existence of genuine surprise. How can subjective experience arise from objective matter? Even if we understand all the physical processes in the brain, it doesn't explain what it's like to have those experiences.

Furthermore, the very act of scientific inquiry, with its constant discoveries and revisions of our understanding, suggests that the universe is full of surprises waiting to be uncovered. If everything were perfectly predictable, there would be no need for scientific exploration.

In conclusion, while predictability plays a role in the universe, the emergence of novelty, complexity, and consciousness suggests that it is indeed a cosmos full of surprises. The mysteries of origins, life, and mind continue to challenge our understanding and inspire wonder.

It surprises me that a computer program agrees with me that this is a surprising cosmos. 

Take Me To the River

After all these years -- two decades now -- it has never occurred to me to conduct one of those breezy year end reviews. For starters, there's just too much information, in this case, 320 posts, each consisting of at least 1,000 words, so, let's say a total of 350,000. 

Gemini informs me that the average 300 page book has about 82,500 words, so 350,000 translates to a book of at least 1,200 pages, probably more like 1,500 pages. Now, how am I supposed to reduce a 1,500 page book to a 1,000 word post? 

900 words. You've already wasted 100.

It's frankly too much for my poor brain to think about, even though it would be nice to know how I spent 2024. I mean, back when the blog started, the idea was to complement the "news" with the "eternals." But if I don't somehow memorialize what I've written, it's as transitory and frivolous as yesterday's -- or worse, today's -- journalism.  

Sand paintings.

Good point... er, excuse me, the preferred nomenclature is sand mandalas... but they are destroyed and forgotten upon completion in order "to symbolize Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life." The sand particles are actually taken to a river, where they are "released back into nature to disperse the healing energies of the mandala to sentient beings in water and throughout the world."

Groundhog Day, only played out in eternity.

Vexed. That's what I am. Perhaps I should gather the 320 posts and toss them in the nearest body of moving water?

Christ didn't write anything.

True, but he didn't say "take everything I've said and toss it in the river," rather, to go out and spread the word. 

Now, if I were a professor, I could simply command some lowly grad student to go back into 2024 and tell me what I wrote. Sure, much of it -- perhaps even most of it -- may be trivial nonsense, self-important bloviating, repetitive circumnavelgazing, or a good idea at the time, but that's the point. I don't want to summarize it, I want someone else to do it. 

My son likes philosophy. I've actually dropped little hints here and there, but of course, I didn't have much interest in my dad's thoughts when I was his age. Frankly, I had no interest in thoughts, period. Rather, I preferred to make them go away by merging them into a river of Rocky Mountain sparkling water, AKA, Coors.

At this point it is safe to say I am addicted to blogging. What does the addict do to forget about his addiction? Engage in more of it. 

Don't look back.

That's good for Bob Dylan, but he's got plenty of other people singing his songs. He also has a handy website with the lyrics to every song he's written in alphabetical order. But of course, he has some low-level flunky doing that for him. I suspect he's only interested in the next song, not the previous 600.

In an interview twenty years ago he was asked how he wrote those early songs, and he said he didn't know: “It just came, uh, it came from, like um, right out of that wellspring, uh, of creativity, uh, I would think, you know.” 

So, ironically, I can't say how we spent 2024, only how we'll be spending 2025: trying to, um, pull stuff out of that same, uh, vertical wellspring. 

The only cure for time is timelessness.

Something like that. At the moment I'm reading a book called A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. Why a Catholic case? Because it seems most Catholic thinkers don't have much use for it. Rather, it's more of a Protestant thing, since they can't simply bat away the puny metaphysics of scientism with the superior metaphysics of Aquinas. Ed Feser, for example, writes that 

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, one of the main problems with “Intelligent Design” theory is that it presupposes the same mechanistic conception of nature that underlies naturalism. 

Yada yada, for me it's sufficient to say irreducible Intelligence and Intelligibility, and be done with it. But this author feels we "should see ID scholars as allies, not enemies." Which is why I'm giving this book a whirl. A reviewer says Hilbert 

does not follow the easy and greatly wanting path of mixing Christianity with naturalism in the form of theistic evolution. Instead, he looks at evidence with an open mind and incorporates anything good and true he finds in modern science and traditional theology. This book will be an eye-opener for those who never thought that a Catholic can support intelligent design and be scientifically informed.

Some of the intelligent design proponents are young Earth creationists, which is obviously a nonstarter. Rather, I go back to the two questions we asked a couple of posts ago, What must the world be like in order that man may know it?, and What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all?  

In other words, start with what we know and what we do. And clearly, we do science that we may know reality. But how is this even possible? By virtue of what principle(s) do we have knowledge of reality, including the reality of organisms, DNA, natural selection, etc? 

Obviously information is everywhere, from physics to chemistry to the genome to the laws governing the big bang, and everything in between. And all of this information is intelligible to us, at every level, which I find... odd. Can the mind that comprehends it really be reducible to one of the things comprehended? 

That's what we're asked to believe -- at least in principle -- that ultimately the humanities 

will be eliminated because man is just an animal, and an animal is just fancy biology, and biology is just complex chemistry, and chemistry is physics.

This may be a reductio absurdum, but absurdity in, absurdity out. What's the alternative? 

Well, lately we've been discussing some of its features, which include the primacy of vertical causation, irreducible wholeness, nonlocality, and the miracle of subjectivity that abides between immanence and transcendence. 

But the latter is really only a miracle if it were to inexplicably emerge from below, rather than being the reflection of something above. So, grant a metaphysical Darwinian just this One Free Miracle -- of intelligence -- and he can explain (away) the rest.

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will have not explained anything.

Or rather, everything but One.