A Response to David Bentley Hart's Machine & Spirit: A Few Humbly Apocalyptic Aphorisms
A Response to David Bentley Hart's Machine & Spirit: A Few Humbly Apocalyptic Aphorisms
A superb finale!
This is so refreshing.
I resonate with these observations, which I've long intuited but which could never express with such rhetorical virtuosity. The world needs to see these mechanistic caricatures of reality ridiculed & scorned --- revealed as nihilistic creeds pretending to be philosophical arbiters.
They accuse us of being mysterianists & metaphysical gap occupiers, but I've looked over my epistemic shoulders at my ontological leaps &, at least, can offer normative justifications. For their part, they've rushed to closure metaphysically & have handed out epistemic promissory notes for a nihilism that's creedal not empirical. What normative justifications can they offer to bolster views which otherwise have such weak epistemic warrant? Nothing existentially actionable.
They nurture no aporetic sensibilities & fail to see how, in their anxiety to annihilate metaphysics, they've unwittingly thrown away the best tools (e.g. analogy, apophasis) of their own highly speculative theoretic sciences, whether physical or neuro-.
I find plain a plain vanilla emergence heuristic to be a great bookmarking tool in our taxonomic cataloguing of reality's novel aboutnesses. What it bookmarks, in my view, are reality's aporia. Its not intended to be robustly explanatory - only heuristically exploratory. Some try to import notions of supervenince but that's nothing but ontological legerdemain, a way to sneak in one's prior ontological commitments.
So, distinctions like strong emergence with weak supervenience and weak emergence with strong supervenience are vacuous tautologies, which is to say, on one hand, question begging, while, on the other, trivial.
You know what works well with modern semiotic emergentism, to innoculate oneself from proving too much? It is an emergence paradigm with both ontological conceptions akin to participation & analogia as well as with hypostatic conceptions akin to perichoresis & haecceity. Far from saying more than we can about creation, such patristic & medieval conceptions have just enough kataphatic content to further refine various time-honored Greek & Stoic ideas & just enough apophatic qualification to block inferences that would otherwise tell untellable stories, whether of philosophical naturalism or Cartesian dualism.
In my younger years, my (monist) curiosity was aroused by Peirce, especially as he'd appropriated &/or modified the best of folks like Scotus, the German Idealists, etc I even resonated with a mereological panentheism, which was how I'd appropriated Aurobindo & even Bulgakov. I can only say, now, late have I loved thee, you Capps, Cyril, Eriugena, Neochalcedonians & Maximus, who did so much of this work centuries before. And great thanks to folks like you & Jordan Daniel Wood who've introduced them to me.
Even nontheistic neuroscientists & biologists of semiotic persuasion have warmed in recent years to notions of formal causation & the immaterial, albeit conceiving them in rather minimalistic ways vis a vis telic realities. Still, at least, they don't for a nanosecond make such semiotic category errors as the genetic (pun embedded here) & memetic fallacies of Dawkins & Dennet, who mistake, respectively, genes & memes for (pragmatic) replicators rather than the mere (semiotic) replicas that they are. Knuckleheads.