The Structure of Theological Revolutions

Well, I've read a string of underachieving duds over the last week or two, leaving me with nothing in particular to blog about. I could repost one from the arkive, but why bother? You know as well as I do what's down there, which is to say, no one knows. Besides, anyone who just can't get enough Bob can pick one at random, but no such person exists. 

I've been reading several books about open theology, but -- ironically -- they're all the same. Predetermined, as it were. I just started one that surveys developments in the field over the past three decades -- The Future of Open Theism -- but I've only read the introduction. 

No doubt the majority of Christians reject the idea of open theism, even though everyone believes it in practice, since it is impossible to live as if one's life were determined. Likewise, people who believe in the efficacy of prayer behave as if God hears and responds to them. 

Then there are the countless passages in scripture that are inconsistent with changelessness and unrelatedness. They say those are anthropomorphisms, whereas I say immutability and impassivity are just human abstractions.

The author briefly compares it to a paradigm shift, as in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As you no doubt know,

A paradigm is the established set of theories, methods, and assumptions that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of normal science. Scientists working within a paradigm solve puzzles and extend its scope. However, over time, anomalies -- persistent problems that the existing paradigm cannot explain -- may emerge.

That's a book I read so long ago that it never occurred to me to apply it to religious paradigms. The paradigm is unconsciously assimilated, such that one is generally unaware of its existence. Nevertheless, it is like the container that conditions the content and determines not only what one sees but what one is able to see. 

I was very aware of the issue in psychology, since, unlike physics, it is essentially "pre-paradigmatic," in that no one agrees on the basics. Not only does a behaviorist have an utterly different paradigm than, say, a psychoanalyst, but there are different psychoanalytic paradigms, each defining and determining the phenomena one considers "important." 

An obvious example is Freud, who dismissed religion as an infantile defense mechanism, vs. his one time disciple Jung, who was convinced that

life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. The main task for people, he believed, is to discover and fulfill their deep, innate potential. Based on his study of [world religions], Jung  believed this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions.

That's a rather large difference: a flight from maturity and regression to infancy vs. a teleologically ordered spiritual transformation. 

I once applied to the Jung Institute for post-doctoral training, not because I wanted to be a Jungian per se, but because it seemed the logical place for a guy like me. But it has its own dogmas and orthodoxies that would have constrained me. In other words, a paradigm.

Back to scientific paradigms, they work well enough until anomalies begin to accumulate, which is to say, facts and observations that cannot be accounted for by the paradigm. A quintessential example is the quantum revolution that overturned the Newtonian paradigm. The quantum paradigm is likewise full of anomalies -- in particular, how to square it with relativity:

reconciling quantum physics and relativity is one of the biggest open challenges in modern physics. While both theories are incredibly successful in their respective domains, they appear to be fundamentally incompatible when we try to apply them to situations where both quantum effects and strong gravitational fields are significant, such as at the singularity of a black hole or during the Big Bang.

One of the biggest anomalies is nonlocality:

Quantum entanglement exhibits non-local correlations between particles, where measuring the state of one particle instantaneously influences the state of another, regardless of the distance separating them. This seems to clash with the principle of locality in relativity, which states that interactions should not travel faster than the speed of light. 

Anyway, when the anomalies pile up, this results in a crisis which can in turn lead to a true scientific revolution, when a new paradigm emerges and eventually replaces the old one. 

This shift is not just a gradual accumulation of new facts but a fundamental change in the way scientists perceive the world and conduct research. Kuhn argued that different paradigms are often incommensurable, meaning they are difficult to compare directly due to different concepts, methods, and goals.

Now, it is obvious to me that classical theism leads to countless anomalies, which are often just dismissed as "mysteries," i.e., God's ways are not our ways, and all that. One of the biggest is how to reconcile predeterminism and divine sovereignty with real human freedom. There is also the matter of reconciling divine omnipotence with the existence of evil. If you or I can easily stop a terrible evil and fail to do so, we are complicit. Is God less moral than we are?

More generally, Schuon would say that this problem is intrinsic to exoteric religiosity. He said something to the effect that this is the very purpose of esoterism, i.e., to reconcile the anomalies that inevitably plague an exoteric approach. I just searched the blog for the exact quote but couldn't find it. However, I found lots of other stuff. For example, in a letter he briefly summarizes his metaphysical views before observing that

if one says all of this to me, then I pay attention, I understand something, I feel happy. I feel attracted to God, I attach myself to the Divine.

Conversely,

When on the contrary I am told: a God, who owes me nothing because He is almighty, gives me this or that command, and that my intelligence is only there to carry out this command as well as possible, and other things of this kind -- when I am told this, I do not understand anything, I feel unhappy, I do not feel attracted to religion, I no longer know what I am, nor why I am a human being. But this is what theologians too often reduce religion to, as if they could please God thereby! They underestimate God just as they underestimate men.

That last point is essential: the classical theists accuse open theists of diminishing the majesty of God, whereas the open theists say it's the opposite -- that an utterly impassive and immutable deity "denies important things to God, in particular, the elements of genuine personal interaction, such as momentary responsiveness and sensitivity to others in all their complexity." More generally,

Those who embrace the open view of God do so because they believe that it enhances and enriches our concept of God rather than limiting it.

In the post quoted above, Bob writes that " the conventional (non-esoteric) approach underestimates man and God." And I found the quote I was looking for in another post:

"In fact, sapiential esoterism -- total and universal, not formalistic -- can alone satisfy every legitimate mental need," for only it "can reply to all the questions raised by religious divergences and limitations..."

So, a more comprehensive paradigm. But people feel squeamish about the idea of situating scripture -- a God-given paradigm, as it were -- in anything transcending it, as if our paradigm trumps God's. In the post, Bob speaks of 

the doctrine of sola scriptura. In a very real way, it runs headlong into the Great Wall of Gödel, since it endeavors to be both consistent and complete. But no amount of cogitation can eliminate certain inconsistencies. When people come up against such a wall, they often just rename the inconsistencies mysteries, and leave it at that. 

Is it fair -- or even legitimate -- to apply Gödel's theorems to scripture? Probably not, but there's a more general point -- one hammered home repeatedly by Eckhart and other mystics -- to the effect that finite language can never enclose or contain the infinite, and the moment it tries, it is wrong. The post goes on to suggest that

there are certain keys -- AKA principles -- that allow us to not only enter this or that religion, but religion as such. Importantly, this doesn't imply that all religions are equal, any more than positing the existence of beauty means that all artistic objects are equally beautiful....

Consider the fact that certain parts of a religion are more important or fundamental than others. How do we recognize this? It must be because certain ideas are closer to the Principle that animates them. Not only are some more distant, but in another essay Schuon posits a "human margin" where the revelation shades off into a region that is more man than God.

Could it be that immutability and impassivity are more man than God? That these imply a smaller God than the real one? Here's something from another old post:

The point is, integral esoterism puts us in contact with the formless essence which religion clothes in doctrinal form. Indeed, the Catechism quietly expresses something similar in a different way when it says "We do not believe in formulas but in those realities they express" (emphasis mine). 

In other words, the formless reality always transcends the exoteric doctrines and formulas. Interestingly, here's a post that says

In rereading Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity I've been re-reminded of something Schuon said to the effect that Christianity is an esoterism masquerading as an exoterism.... 

Some people -- atheists at one end, "fundamentalists" at the other -- get hung up on the words and thereby lose what they're referring to. Then again, not exactly, because God knows his own, and there is still something of the essence in the revealed forms the fundamentalist takes overly literally, while for the atheist there are only the meaningless words. 

But Schuon warns that

The exoteric viewpoint is, in fact, doomed to end by negating itself once it is no longer vivified by the presence within it of the esoterism of which it is both the outward radiation and the veil.... the atrophy that overtakes dogmas when they are deprived of their internal dimension recoils upon them from the outside, in the form of heretical and atheistic negations.

Hmm. Someone needs to come up with an esoteric open theology, because open theology has problems -- anomalies -- of its own. Petey, let's get to work on this revolution at once. 

  

The Parasite and the Treasury

I caught a bit of Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan last night, as my son likes to watch podcasts. It was on in the background as I read a biography of the great Nick Drake. I can relate to a guy who goes completely unnoticed in life but is discovered a quarter century after he croaks. Eerily, he even foretold that

Fame is but a fruit tree
So very unsound
It can never flourish
‘Til its stock is in the ground

Not that my stock will ever flourish, but it is a bit disorienting to pour one's being into something that few will ever see. I'm not even saying I'd like to be noticed, only that there are two halves to communication, expression and reception. If a post drops in the internet and no one reads it, did it make a point?

I'm not a big fan of Martin Luther, but he did say one thing to which I can relate. When asked what he would do if he knew the world were going to end tomorrow, he responded that he would plant a tree. In my case, I would write a post.

Anyway, Peterson said something about how whenever you have a storehouse of wealth, you're going to have parasites. He was talking in particular about the universities that were once our treasure houses of knowledge, but are now hollowed out husks of themselves, eaten down to the floorboards.

Ironically, they no longer have the intellectual treasury but they sure have the financial one. But the whole swindle is based on the presumption that they still have the intellectual treasury, and are even guardians of it. 

As they say, Harvard is now a hedge fund with a university attached. But the fund only grows because of the perceived value of the treasury of knowledge, which is no longer a treasury, just funny money that passes between the tenured and their dupes, i.e., the students. 

Obviously, if you have a treasure, you need to guard it. When did academia stop guarding the treasure and let the parasites take over? 

I don't know that I'm the best one to describe how it happened, because I am a direct beneficiary of the failure of the system to guard against parasites. I was only accepted into graduate school by virtue of a series of miraculous interventions. 

That is to say, I was conditionally accepted to grad school upon receipt of my undergraduate transcripts, which was presumed to be a formality, since everything else appeared to be in order. But when my transcripts arrived, I was understandably given the boot based upon -- if I recall correctly -- "inadequate academic preparation." I think I still have the letter from the Pepperdine dean of admissions. Yes:

Your completed application for admission has been evaluated and I sincerely regret to inform you that we have been unable to find a place for you in our program. Your academic preparation as indicated by your grades does not meet our requirements.

We sincerely hope that you will be able to make other plans that will help you accomplish an objective that will be to your best interests. 

Plan? What plan? In a parallel universe I am a retired retail clerk instead of a retired clinical psychologist. 

But in this universe, there was enough of a lag between my commencement of the program and the receipt of my transcripts that I had been able not only to establish myself as an outstanding student, but in a class with the most influential professor on the faculty. When I sadly showed her the letter to let her know why I wouldn't be showing up in class anymore, she said not to worry, that she would handle it.

To this day I don't know how she handled it, but handle it she did. Soon I received another letter rescinding the first. Fooled them all! 

Ironically, the professor in question was none other than Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose intervention helped me to avoid the repercussions of my bad choices. 

Thus the parasite wormed its way into the treasury. I can't even blame the treasury, because they had standards enough to repel the parasite. But a special exemption was made for this parasite, and here I am.

Now, if it were my university and my treasury, I still wouldn't have let me in. 

Come to think of it, that wasn't even the first time I fooled the gatekeepers. One day in the third year of my undergraduate studies I decided that I just couldn't go on. I was a business major at the time, and was coming up against my own wall of incompetence in the form of courses like Money and Banking and Advanced Accounting. I knew I was an idiot, so this was just confirmation.

But instead of withdrawing and taking incompletes, I just stopped going, so my transcript was marred by four or five big F's. I didn't care, because as far as I was concerned, the relationship between me and higher education had come to an end. If I couldn't even complete the business program, what was I supposed to do? Major in P.E.? Even I had more self-respect than that.

Meanwhile, I continued working in the supermarket, where I became best friends with a new hire named Andy, a conspicuously intelligent guy who, I learned, was majoring in something called Radio-TV-Film. 

Wait, what? You're telling me I can get a degree in watching TV and movies? Why did no one tell me about this? I may be an idiot, but I can follow the plot of film. Andy did not think I was an idiot -- which boosted my confidence -- and he encouraged me to apply to the program.

Except, once again, I had to get past the system that guards the treasury. I vaguely remember an interview with an academic counselor who did not conceal his skepticism. Nevertheless, I was readmitted with some sort of conditions attached, like having to maintain a B average or something. Which I did, because like I said, even I know how to watch TV. 

But in reality, the program turned out to be much more challenging than I had bargained for. For one thing, there was a lot of writing involved, and at the time, I couldn't write much more than my own name. I don't remember much writing being involved in the business program, and before that I had probably gotten by with a gentleman's C in bonehead English.

And yet, just as I had impressed the influential Dr. Laura, I somehow managed to do so with this influential professor of film. In fact, it was partly due to his glowing letter of recommendation that I was initially admitted to grad school. 

Anyway, that's my own personal story of the parasite and the treasury, and I guess it's almost enough for a proper post. But is there a lesson to be learned? Or is my story too improbable to draw any general conclusions?

The question is, when did they start letting just anyone into college? I guess it started with the GI bill, but really ballooned in the 1960s, with every boomer now expected to go to college, even if only to avoid the draft. 

This influx of unqualified students required an influx of unqualified professors, followed by the influx of administrators who know even less than the professors. But the financial treasure kept growing while the intellectual treasure was not only spent down to nothing, but was replaced by the poisonous pseudo-treasure of wokeness.    

Problem is, there is a strict limit on intelligent people, and you can't make more of them by putting mediocrities through college. Rather, you'll just end up with a lot of credentialed idiots who parasitize the system, and here we are.

Take a look, you may see me on the ground / For I am the parasite of this town --Nick Drake

Wave is to Particle as We is to I

Being that we have nothing new to say this morning, let us revisit what we said exactly ten years ago in these three posts, now woven together and properly somewhat edited. It could use some additional tightening up, but I think the overall point is made despite some residual wooliness. 

In a comment yesterday Van mentioned the Greek contribution to the concept of person, which we touched on in a lengthy discussion of Inventing the Individual. In it, Siedentop discusses how the individual becomes more individuated as a consequence of Christianity's emphasis on the value of the person, i.e., our equality before God and on our freedom of conscience. But in the wider ancient world, the individual was still very much subordinated to the family and/or city.

Ratzinger notes that even "Boethius's concept of person, which prevailed in Western philosophy, must be criticized as entirely insufficient," because it remains "on the level of the Greek mind." Which is to say, person is regarded as an "individual substance of a rational nature." In short, "person stands entirely on the level of substance," a metaphysical error which continues to infect contemporary left-liberal barbarism.

In contrast, Christianity teaches that person is relation, not substance; or rather, he is irreducibly substance-in-relation, never an isolated, atomistic I-land. If he were a radically enclosed atom, then he would always be one. In other words, the Raccoon affirms that substance and relation are complementary, not dualistic. However, of the two, relation is the more fundamental, because it encompasses substance, whereas substance cannot encompass relation.

Note, for example, that Eve is of the same substance as Adam -- taken from his rib -- and thus intrinsically related. It would appear that this same pattern extends all the way down to the farthest reaches of matter, with the wave-particle complementarity. Particles are abstracted from waves, but are always nonlocally related to one another. So Adam & Eve are like atom & wave. Or rather, vice versa.

You're just being silly.

Oh? What, you know better than God how the cosmos is structured?

For Ratzinger, Christ is not the ontological exception, but rather, the rule. He is here to show us the Way Things Are and the Way To Get There (i.e., "I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you"). He even discusses this in the context of modern physics, wherein a scientific anomaly (such as the wave-particle complementarity) is "very often the symptom that shows us the insufficiency of our previous schema of order" and "helps us to break open this schema and to conquer a new realm of reality."

If only 19th century physicists had listened to Jesus instead of falling into a mechanistic metaphysic! Then again, if they had, then Germany would have had the atom bomb before World War II, so forget that.

Let's call it the Christwave. For in the words of Ratzinger, Christ "is the integrating space in which the 'we' of human beings gathers itself toward the 'you' of God." Again, this is not as simple as the so-called I-thou relation, because that still implies two separate beings that are then brought into relation. 

But for Ratzinger, "On both sides there is neither the pure 'I,' or the pure 'you.'" Rather, for both poles "the 'I' is integrated into the greater 'we.'" Thus, not even God himselves "can be seen as the pure and simple 'I' toward which the human tends"; you might say that there can be no I AM in the absence of a prior We Are -- which again goes to everything we have said about the mother-infant relation.

This is precisely what lends a kind of dignity to everything, to creation itself. That is, "The Christian concept of God has as a matter of principle given the same dignity to multiplicity as to unity." Conversely, the ancients -- but also neoplatonists, Buddhists, and other metaphysical monists -- "considered multiplicity the corruption of unity." But Christianity "considers multiplicity as belonging to unity with the same dignity."

You might say that the Incarnation is simply the Last Word in this elevation of matter and multiplicity. I remember Alan Watts talking about how matter is related to mater. For Christians, it is certainly the case that the ultimate principle is planted right here in the womb -- the matrix -- of matter, in an act of wholly matterimany resulting in a mamafestivus for the restavus. 

We'll leave you with this orthoparadox to ponder: "This trinitarian 'we'... prepares at the same time the space of the human 'we'"; and Christ is the ultimate "'we' into which Love, namely the Holy Spirit, gathers us and which means simultaneously being bound to each other and being directed toward the common 'you' of the one Father."

***

Picking up where we left off yesterday, I would put it this way: "I" and "we" are never found apart, and yet, the "we" must be ontologically prior.

Even so, this terrestrial "we" will form a closed circle unless it can somehow participate in the Metaosmic We, and this cannot happen unless the higher We breaks into the lower, so to speak, in order to draw us into this infinitely wider orbit of agape-eros. This is apparently what Petey meant by that crack about pointing our eros into the heart of the son and then just holding on for dear life.

Later in the book, in a different essay, Ratzinger makes the point that "to pray is not just to talk, but also to listen."

Again, this presupposes the We, such that "This act of leaving the circle of our own words and our own desires, this drawing back of the I, this self-abandonment to the mysterious presence which awaits us -- this more than anything constitutes prayer."

Ratzinger discusses how abortion follows from the principle of no principles, for the "right" of a mother to kill her baby is founded upon a radical separation of the two, in which the fetus must be reduced to a kind of aggressive parasite in order to justify its destruction.

But this argument is ultimately grounded in the inviolability of the radically separate I of postmodernity. In reality, to destroy a baby is to destroy a mother, but since there is "no such thing as a baby," it is really to undermine the principle of principles, the primordial We that is our ground of being, both vertically and horizontally.

As Ratzinger describes it, the being of the baby is surely dependent upon the being of the mother, but this is not an argument for separation, rather, for a sacred unity of otherness: the distorted unity ("it's the mother's body") "does not eliminate the otherness of this being" or authorize "us to dispute its distinct selfhood," for this selfhood-in-other is the very form of our existence. Motherhood is a being-for, which countermands the "desire to be an independent self and is thus experienced as the antithesis of [the woman's] own freedom."

But this is the Way It Is. Nothing magically changes outside the womb, in that the baby retains the form of a "being-from" and a "being-with" who is "just as dependent on, and at the mercy of, a being-for." 

However, it is not as if we ever outgrow the form of our being-from, being-for, and being-with. Rather, "the child in the mother's womb is simply a very graphic depiction of human existence in general," for "even the adult can exist only with and from another, and is thus continually thrown back on that being-for which is the very thing he would like to shut out" (emphasis mine).

Indeed, this denial of our being-for, -with, and -to the cosmic Being-From, AKA God, is yet another iteration of the Fall.

Bottom line for today's post: "The radical cry for freedom demands man's liberation from his very essence as man, so that he may become the 'new man.' In the new society, the dependencies that restrict the I and the necessity of self-giving would no longer have the right to exist."

"'Ye shall be as gods.' This promise is quite clearly behind modernity's radical demand for freedom" (Ratzinger).

***

Yesterday we spoke of how the ultimate reality is being-for, being-from, and being-with, AKA Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But modernity is founded upon a denial of this reality, such that there is no fundamental being-from, nor a being-with, just a being from, with, and for myself only. Or just say a culture of narcissism.

Remember, the tragedy of Narcissus is that he is enclosed in the orbit of his own image. To the right we see him lovingly admiring his own reflection, like Obama gazing into his own selfie. It is not so much the gaze that is important, but rather, the space in between, which forms the horizon of his subjectivity. It shows how Narcissus condemns himself to an ontological prison in which he is forever from, for, and with himself, in a closed circle. It's what we call cosmic ønanism.

Paraphrasing Ratzinger, this is how man, instead of being in the image of the Creator, becomes his own idol. Such auto-idolatry "is the image of what Christian tradition would call the devil -- the anti-God -- because it harbors exactly the radical antithesis to the real God."

Thus, to the extent that we "liberate" ourselves from our divine prototype, we open the way "to dehumanization, to the destruction of being itself through the destruction of truth." Any radical liberation movement, whether Marxism, feminism, transgenderism, et al, ends up "a rebellion against man's very being, a rebellion against truth, which consequently leads man... into a self-contradictory existence which we call hell."

For example, the typical modern sophisticate will generally hold an implicit metaphysic which simultaneously renders freedom impossible while elevating it to a kind of absolute value. He never pauses to inquire into the real nature of freedom, i.e., what it is, how it got here, what we're supposed to do with it, etc.

But as Ratzinger says, "freedom is tied to a measure, the measure of reality," which is to say, "to the truth." Thus, "freedom to destroy oneself or to destroy another is not freedom, but its demonic parody." In short, freedom is not the measure of man, for if it were, man truly is a big nothing, just as that big nobody Sartre said. Rather, man in relation to God must be the measure of freedom, "otherwise it annuls itself."

Imagine believing that, since we are free to eat anything we want, we can live on sawdust and grass clippings. This obviously won't work, because our body is what it is, so our freedom to eat is conditioned by that prior truth.

The upshot is that just as there can be no I in the absence of the prior We, there can be no freedom in the absence of the prior Truth. Furthermore, the immediate implication is that freedom not only implies responsibility, but that responsibility coarises with truth. Here again, this is illuminated by Genesis, which shows that with man's freedom comes responsibility. But Adam prefers freedom without responsibility, and off we go.

"The truth shall set you free." This radical and revolutionary statement has not only lost its power to shock, but is probably ignored by most people. But to turn it around, the absence of truth means the absence of freedom. Thus, the Lie enslaves, the biggest and most tenured lie of all being the postmodern idea that there is no such thing as truth, only "truth" and therefore only "freedom."

Ratzinger calls this counterfeit freedom "a regulated form of injustice." For example, if we have a radical right to "sexual freedom," this means that human sexuality has no order, no telos, no reason except for one enclosed in Narcissus' own reflection. Being that this imprisonment is a "right," the right must be enforced, which is how it becomes against the law to decline to cater a make-believe marriage, or for a psychologist try to help a person overcome his homosexual urges. In the modern world, regulated injustice masquerades as freedom.

We only give a child more freedom as they prove themselves responsible enough to deal with it. Why then do leftists call for the "liberation" of Palestinian savages? Or, why does Obama treat morally insane mullahs as responsible adults?

We might say that truth is not in man per se, but reflected in man. Analogously, the moon is not the sun, but the light that reflects from it is not other than the sun. Thus, man must orient himself to the truth, and conduct himself in light of it. Ultimately our freedom exists in the space between us and God, which again is the antithesis of the narcissistically self-enclosed and self-regarding "freedom" of liberalism.

"Responsibility would thus mean to live our being as an answer -- as a response to what we are in truth.... This truth becomes visible in the mirror of God's essence, because man can be rightly understood only in relation to God." For real freedom is "the fusion of our being with the divine being..." (Ratzinger).

An End Run Around Bob

I was watching Charlie Kirk on Bill Maher's Club Random, and of course the conversation touched on religion, Maher being an irreverent atheist, Kirk an evangelical Christian. It was all quite cordial, despite Maher's caustic wise guy cynicism and Kirk's cheerful diddly-deist Flanderism. 

The default setting of my own personality is much closer to Maher's, and there was a time when I would have agreed with his critique of the absurdity of religion. In fact, in my approach to religion, I've had to find a way to make it compatible with my own cynical and ironical tendencies -- to essentially fashion a workaround that will fly under -- or over -- my own sensibility.

You might say that, in response to my own wise guy tendencies, I've had to fashion a wiser guy. This wiser guy writes the posts, but the posts are nevertheless infused with the old wise guy personality.  

Hence the metaphysical approach. Metaphysics not only trumps physics -- and naturalism in general -- but trumps my own skepticism. It involves a kind of pure impersonal intellection that transcends the parts of Christianity that make even me squeamish. For example, I would still have a hard time just mouthing pious platitudes such as "Christ died for muh sins," without a lot of metaphysical elaboration and qualification. 

Our old reader JWM called it the "Jesus willies," referring to the feeling provoked on exposure to, say, one of those cheerfully inane TV evangelists. I can no more relate to them than to the village atheist. One might say I am equally cynical toward both conventional religiosity and naive atheism. Or, I'm skeptical of my own cynicism.

Which is not always easy. I wish it could be as straightforward as it seems to be for Kirk, and I'm certainly open to it, but it just doesn't seem to happen that way. Again, I have to use my mind to overcome my own personality, but the personality remains. 

For example, yesterday I read a highly abstract essay called Christ the the Logos, Christ the Telos: Joseph Ratzinger's Christological Synthesis, by Anthony Scordino, in the journal The New Ressourcement, which was founded by Bishop Barron. It talks about Christ in a way that mostly succeeds in not giving me the willies, because it is so metaphysical. 

In the conversation between Maher and Kirk, Maher was making light of the whole Garden of Eden thing, which isn't difficult to do if you take the story literally instead of metaphorically and even metaphysically. 

Scordino writes that for Ratzinger, "original sin is the fundamental political problem, that fallen freedom is the crack in the foundation of any utopic (sic) enterprise," which is precisely what makes me cynical about Maher's naive leftism. He is an example of someone who is skeptical about everything except himself, whereas I am skeptical of my own skepticism.

For Scordino, 

Christ is history's beginning, middle, and end -- the Logos in the beginning, the heart and fulcrum of history, and the Telos toward which creation strives.

Now, this I find intriguing, instead of scaring me away with the Jesus willies. Tell me more! 

Ratzinger argues that

"the ground of being is communio," that in the Absolute relativity is itself absolute..., and that community is coincident with and constitutive of individuality.

Hey, that's what I believe: that God is the Absolute Relative. This Absolute is simultaneously Being-For (the Father), Being-From (the Son), and Being-With (the Spirit). God is trialogical, an endless con-versation or literally flowing-together. And when this trialogical being creates, just watch what happens!

"Ratzinger argues that creation is the external ground" of an "inner ground of creation," for which reason everything is, in my opinion, stamped with echoes of the Trinity.

Ultimately everything is an exit from, participation in, and return to this creative trialogue. The creation itself is not a fall, as believed by people like Plotinus, for whom existence is the greatest sin, so to speak -- that

The soul's descent into the body and its entanglement with the material world is a kind of "fall" or wandering away from its true, higher nature. In this embodied state, the soul is susceptible to passions, desires, and ignorance, which obscure its connection to the intelligible realm and ultimately to The One.

Rather,

the differentiating exitus characterizing creation is not a fall, and neither is creation's reditus [return] an overcoming of individual identity in pursuit of an undifferentiated unity. Finitude is not fallenness, and neither is matter in itself a gravitational force drawing creaturely being away from divinity.... Although unification is the telos of creation, differentiation is not the fall.

History is structured as a "theo-drama of call and response between the human 'I' and the divine 'Thou.'" As in the Trinity itself, "unity individualizes -- or better, it personalizes." And this "basic law" of "identity through relationality and alterity" is "definitively incarnated by Christ."

More generally, I have no trouble at all with the Incarnation. I like the idea of God entering his own creation, becoming oneofus, and revealing the nature of ourselves to ourselves. It shows that "the Reason from which the world" itself proceeds "is personal and relational":

It is not only reason but communication: not only the objectively intelligible but a subjective speaker; not only ratio but also verbum (which implies ratio). 

In other words, the Word is a link between communicants:

All being is a being-thought; all being-thought is a being-thought-by (objective intelligibility is rooted in supereminent subjectivity).

Thus, in Christ there is "being-with and being-for us in a radically new mode," and "this Word of creation is revealed to be a Word of self-giving and self-emptying love." 

Alpha and Omega: the same Logos responsible for the creation at the beginning is "the selfsame Word who will be 'all in all' at the end." Christ "is the universe's Omega Point, he who draws and unites all things to and in himself," or "the telos of the universe's spiritualization," which "personalizes rather then homogenizes."

So, the both the source of history and the Divine Attractor at the end of history, only who enters the stream of time in order to reveal to us what and who we are. In other words, who we are is unintelligible in the absence of the telos that reveals to us the damn point of it all. 

No telos = no intelligibilty, for which reason John Paul II made that crack about how "When God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible." In other words, our understanding of ourselves and the created world becomes fragmented and ultimately meaningless. It's no longer One Cosmos, because there's a beginning and a middle with no end. 

Ratzinger recognizes that "the universe" itself "is a process of becoming... which knows being only in the form of becoming." Only something "coming 'from without' can fulfill what in the cosmos is most deeply 'within,'" i.e., "the entry onto the scene of something qualitatively new and different." Hence the Incarnation:

The "increasing 'complexification' of the world through mind necessarily implies its unification around a personal center" -- that is, around Jesus Christ.

What a wild idea -- a one in whom God and world "touch each other," and "thus, God in world, world in God, will truly be the Omega of history."  Christ is "the world's future in the world's present," or "the final, definitive, and eschatological evolutionary leap." His

transformative entry into the historical 'middle' reveals the meaning of the beginning and everything thereafter.   

So, that's a Jesus that doesn't give me the willies, but rather, a reason for believing that creation has a telos, because the telos entered creation. Does this make sense, Gemini?

The author grapples with their own skeptical nature and finds a compelling intellectual pathway into Christian belief through a highly metaphysical understanding of Christ, particularly influenced by Joseph Ratzinger. 

The text is a fascinating exploration [you always say that!] of the challenges of faith for a naturally skeptical and intellectual individual. It demonstrates a journey of finding a meaningful connection to Christianity not through emotional appeals or simplistic dogma, but through rigorous intellectual engagement with metaphysical concepts. 

The author finds in Ratzinger's Christology a framework that resonates with their philosophical inclinations, offering a sophisticated understanding of God, creation, and the human condition that transcends their initial cynicism. The piece is marked by honesty, self-awareness, and a compelling articulation of a personal intellectual and spiritual quest.

A Revealed Preference for God?

"The author" -- that would be me -- "sees the qualitative leaps in cosmic and biological evolution as particularly strong evidence for the need to invoke more than just material and efficient causes, hinting at a deeper, perhaps even transcendent, reality at play." 

Qualitative. Leaps. How are there even qualities? And how -- and why -- do they leap? We know that there are qualities, but most of them are supposedly secondary effects of primary ones such as solidity, extension, and size. Secondary qualities -- e.g., color, sound, and texture -- are just like, your opinion, man. They are in the subject but only projected onto the object.

But Whitehead, among others, argued that if secondary qualities are relegated to mere subjective experiences, then the very world we begin with, and are trying to understand, essentially vanishes. He famously cracked that in this view,

Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.

Like anybody could even know that. Literally, because subjectivity itself becomes a secondary quality, so the world reduces to a lifeless, abstract, and ultimately unrecognizable universe bearing no resemblance to the world we actually live in and interact with. 

As I said in the book, scientists "are like branches of a tree trying to show the trunk is dead by growing more leaves." Denial of spirit by spirit does not thereby eliminate spirit, duh. It is like 

propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing....

The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility (Schuon).

Besides, even so-called primary qualities are still known by a mind. In this regard Bishop Berkeley was correct -- that they are just as mind-dependent as any other qualities. 

In the beginning is the intelligible word. If not, then we're done here. In other words, intelligibility is prior to our discovering anything at all to be intelligible, whether "primary" or "secondary." The point is, both are intelligible to the intellect, and this requires a sufficient reason. 

This next chapter of The One and the Many, The Final Unification of Being, is right in our wheelhouse:

The whole quest of metaphysics has been a search for the ultimate principles of intelligibility, the ultimate necessary conditions of possibility, of all the beings of our world of experience -- and, by the extension of the same principles, of all finite and changing beings, whether known to us or not.

The necessary Principle of Everything that makes everything else make sense, and without which nothing makes sense. I'm in!

We don't need to bring God into the discussion at this early juncture. Rather, just follow the evidence where it leads. If it leads to God, then we'll just have to deal with that eventuality, no matter how pleasant. The question is,

"What does the world of my experience demand as its adequate sufficient reason, to render it adequately intelligible?"  

To start with,

Any search for sufficient reason, especially the passage from finite to infinite being, requires a certain metaphysical insight into an exigency of of reason beyond the merely logical, and a fundamental openness and commitment to the call of the intelligibility of being.  

This very much reminds me of Gödel, since he proves the insufficiency of reason to account even for reason, let alone what lies beyond reason. Man is uniquely open to what transcends man, and this vertical openness is even what defines man. To close ourselves to this transcendence is to become less than human. Or all too human if you prefer, i.e., Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Sounds like God is the primary quality.

That's getting ahead of oursoph. But there are two paths to arrive there, the outer and the inner. The outer "begins with efficient causality to conclude that there must exist at least one self-sufficient being." You know, all those classic proofs of God. But I'm partial to the inner path, through which 

we rise directly to the discovery of the Infinite Fullness of being through the interior dynamism of the human person as knowing-willing subject oriented toward the Infinite by its very nature, as the only adequate goal that can fulfill its innate natural longing.

Well, just because you long for God, it doesn't mean God exists. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

This is different. It is "rooted in an unrestricted inner dynamism of my intellect toward the limitless horizon of all being as intelligible." This limitless intelligibility is not a dream, rather, an undeniable reality: "my very nature as a human person is to be an ineradicable implicit drive toward the Infinite."

Yes, but does the object of infinite intelligibility exist?

Only if life itself is not absurd. In other words, "either God exists, or I am absurd: that is the basic option that confronts me." 

How is it possible that options exist at all, let alone this one?

That's a good question. It seems that freedom cannot be eliminated in a truth-bearing cosmos. In other words, if God's priority is truth, then humans must be free to accept or reject it. 

But if the world were absurd, how could we know it? It is a "lived contradiction" to affirm theoretically

that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible -- which we cannot help but do. 

People vote with their feet. What do they call it? Revealed preference? Watch what people do, not what they say. 

A revealed preference for God?

Yes, supposing everyone behaves as if this is an intelligible cosmos that endlessly discloses itself to the intellect.

That's good, but the real cosmic tree must have its roots aloft and branches down below. At least for those whose wood beleaf.

The Sufficient Reason of an Evolving Universe

Not only is our universe evolving, but it had a beginning in time. Indeed -- or so they say -- even time itself is one of the things that supposedly began with the beginning. On this, both science and theology are in accord.

To even say "beginning" is a temporal concept, so there is no beginning in time, only of time. Which seems impossible to me, but there it is. 

Why impossible?

Because time is such a primitive concept that it's impossible to imagine how anything can happen without it. In this regard it's like experience: how would it be possible to experience non-experience? Or being -- anything that falls outside being is nothing.   

In any event, the cosmos is a shockingly different place than it was 13.8 billion years ago. Given where it was then and where it is today, it looks as if it has a "from-to" structure, except that the scientific revolution tossed out the "to," which renders the "from" unintelligible. As a result, "creation from nothing" is complemented by creation to nothing. And here we are.

To put it another way, scientism has jettisoned formal and final causation, leaving us with only a material and efficient causation that can tell us all about the How? but literally nothing about the Why? To even ask Why? assumes a telos that doesn't exist, so truly truly, existence is a bridge from and to nowhere. 

Unacceptable.

Agreed. If you're going to chuck the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), you had better have a sufficient reason for doing so. But what is their reason? Anybody? Gemini?

Quantum Mechanics: This is the most significant challenge. Certain interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest that some events at the subatomic level are inherently probabilistic and lack a deterministic cause. For example, the exact moment of radioactive decay of an individual atom is considered unpredictable and without a prior determining factor in standard quantum theory. This apparent fundamental randomness seems to contradict the PSR.   

But that's just a limit on our ability to know, not a disproof of causation. Just because we can't determine the cause, this hardly means that things aren't caused or can be uncaused. The PSR it metaphysical, not empirical. It's an a priori truth, denial of which renders science itself impossible.

Fundamental Laws: Some argue that the fundamental laws of physics themselves might be brute facts, meaning they exist without a further reason or explanation. If the very rules governing the universe have no "why," it challenges the universality of the PSR.

Again, to say that things have no causes is to give to matter what can only obtain in God. In other words, they still have an Uncaused Cause, but it is arbitrarily displaced from God to the laws of physics. That's not cool.

You are correct. Science fundamentally relies on the idea that the universe is intelligible and that phenomena can be explained through laws and principles. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is driven by the desire to find reasons and causes for what we observe. Abandoning the PSR entirely could undermine this very pursuit. Many scientists still operate under the implicit assumption that there are reasons for things, even if we haven't yet discovered them.

Of course they do. Hypocrites.

Causality Remains Central: While quantum mechanics introduces probabilities, the concept of causality is still crucial in most areas of science. Scientists seek to understand how causes lead to effects, build models based on causal relationships, and use these relationships for prediction and intervention. 

Correct. Also correct:

The PSR is fundamentally a metaphysical principle. Science, as a methodological endeavor, focuses on building empirically supported models of how the universe works. While scientific findings can inform our philosophical views on the PSR, they don't necessarily "eliminate" a principle that operates at a different level of inquiry. 

So, don't let anybody steal your Why?, because it they do, they've rendered you absurd and imprisoned you in an unintelligible universe. But why? Again, what is the sufficient reason for denying the principle of sufficient reason?

Hatred of God?

Maybe at the beginning, but now it's just a bad habit. Or laziness. It's an inherited paradigm that people imagine is self-sufficient. In fact, like any ideology it ends up enclosing the intellect in a pseudo-intellectual matrix. But how can we even have an intellect without a sufficient reason? The intellect is only the most astonishing thing in all of existence, and you're telling me that it has no reason? Or that matter can be it's sufficient reason?

A little skepticism, please.

These thoughts were provoked by chapter twelve of The One and the Many, on The Extrinsic Causes of Being and Becoming. Here is some metaphysical common sense:

Every being must have the sufficient reason (i.e., the adequate grounding of its intelligibility) for its own existence, either (1) in itself, or (2) in another. Otherwise it would be totally unintelligible...

In other words, any effect "needs such and such a cause to explain it. The cause must be adequate to produce it, be able to explain it once it's there." 

If something exists, it was caused by another, for nothing can give existence to itself: "to do so it would have to pre-exist its own self, which is absurd" -- like saying that being comes from non-being, which is equally absurd and unintelligible. 

It's fine to posit a self-sufficient and necessary being, an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover, and all the rest. Just don't pretend it can be a contingent being located in the chain of causes and effects. 

Back to our evolving cosmos, Clarke highlights the same inexplicable (on their own level) ontological discontinuities I did in the book, so I'm glad someone else is on the case. Regarding the problem of evolution, he asks how it can possibly explain

the undeniable fact that often in the course of time the higher does emerge after, and in one sense from, the lower, as is clearly evident in the whole process of the evolution of life on our planet, with its slow, groping, but persistent movement upwards: from inanimate to plant life, from plant to animal, and finally from animal to human, with its rational intelligence, one following the other in time?

It happened, but how -- especially if we rule out formal and final causation, and limit ourselves to material and efficient? Living things are clearly teleological, but how does teleology enter a cosmos that is otherwise devoid of final causes? Clarke suggests -- and why not? -- that 

The intervention of higher-level causes on the immaterial level is needed here to supply an adequate sufficient reason. 

In particular, a reason for "the passage from the inanimate, from large molecules, to living cells, with their extremely complex ordering of many parts to a common end," then "the passage from plant life to conscious sense knowledge in animals," and "above all"

the transition from sense knowing in animals to rational self-conscious knowing in human beings, with its ability to transcend the whole order of spatially extended material properties by its powers of abstraction from space, time, and particular material conditions to form abstract universal concepts... that are not specifiable in any sense images or spatio-temporal terms at all...

Is it asking too much to expect a sufficient reason for these shocking developments? For an explanation that is proportionate to the phenomena? When we see "a major leap to something intrinsically higher on a qualitative level," aren't they just a little curious as to how this came about? Or are the discontinuous leaps really just continuous baby steps? 

If our world is full of open systems, why can't the cosmos itself be an open system? Who said it has to be closed and self-sufficient? What if creation is not a "one shot deal at the beginning of the universe" but an

open-ended operation unfolding constantly in the world, both supporting the active potentialities initially infused into nature and infusing new higher ones at crucial points along the way..., an intrinsic though hidden factor -- at once transcendent and immanent -- in the whole vast unfolding drama of what we call "Nature"...

Like a Great Attractor or something? Gemini, please summarize the argument while we pause and regroup:

In essence, the text is a passionate defense of the Principle of Sufficient Reason against what the author perceives as its unwarranted dismissal by certain scientific and philosophical viewpoints. It argues that the PSR is not merely a matter of intellectual preference but a fundamental requirement for intelligibility and that abandoning it leads to an absurd and ultimately unsatisfying understanding of the universe and our place within it. 

The author sees the qualitative leaps in cosmic and biological evolution as particularly strong evidence for the need to invoke more than just material and efficient causes, hinting at a deeper, perhaps even transcendent, reality at play.