What I Like about Roman Catholicism's Libertarian, Compatibilist, Annihilationist, Limboic & Subjunctive Infernalisms Is ... (see note, below) … that each contains one or more theo-anthropological

Fr JD wrote: “John and others – I do not have time to respond to all the other threads now developing around the topic.”

Fr JD, thanks for your generous engagement. I think we largely agree on the locations of our impasses and I also pretty much agree with you that my arguments, at least, are ineluctably informal.

Specifically, that is to say that, they have evaluative dispositions implicitly embedded in their premises, including both my aesthetic sensibilities & moral intuitions, and they also rely heavily on the fast & frugal heuristics of our common sense & sensibilities.

I also appreciate that many of your counter-arguments were simply exploratory forays into the precise form of various justifications which would underlie this or that premise. As such, they were neither representative of your nor caricatures of my own position.

Also, know that I don’t disvalue analytic theology in the least as it certainly can serve the purposes of clarifying competing stances & locating more precisely any impasses. You’ve thusly served us well, here.

I think you’d agree that our quests for both logical validity AND soundness, especially as they pertain to our ultimate concerns & primal realities, are all exposed to Hitchen’s Razor – quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur? That’s to say that our many competing metanarratives, at their best, are often merely equiplausible and not, finally & formally, adjudicable.

I might be taken for a godforsaken positivist, myself, insofar as I believe that epistemology is epistemology is epistemology, i.e. I don’t bifurcate religious & scientific epistemology per some scheme of non-overlapping magisteria. Still, I very much hold to the view that radical empiricism, logical positivism & metaphysical ignosticism are all both self-subverting and so early 20th Century.

As a pragmatist (Peircean not the vulgar brand), I’m not in the least offput by the charge that this or that stance of mine is ‘grounded’ by moral intuitions, aesthetic sensibilities or common sense. I am much less open to any charge that those may be ‘bare,’ but I will impute to your assessment a charitable disambiguation.

I hope I haven’t spoken inartfully regarding Stump’s nexus of analytic theology & Franciscan knowledge, which is indispensable. I only ever mean to say that I am incredulous regarding certain stances that, per my evaluative dispositions, strike me as morally unintelligible, aesthetically repugnant & anthropologically absurd.

That’s why I suggested that we all best supplement our theo-anthropological abstractions with suasive concrete appeals to our ubiquitous & quotidian interpersonal experiences, using such as our parent-child & spousal relationships as well as Scriptural references.

For example, I love how Stump employs Scripture as she navigates from the merely logical to the more robustly evidential. What we’ll inevitably encounter, especially in discussions regarding the problem of evil, are intractable difficulties in moving from mere logical defenses to robustly evidential theodicies. It is my contention that we should positively eschew (for reasons I’ve explicated elsewhere) the latter exercise and so employ an eminently defensible theological skepticism there (defended elsewhere). I say ‘there‘ to suggest that it should in no way be employed, elsewhere, in a defense of God’s character, as Jesus has sufficiently revealed Abba’s love & mercy.

So, all in all, I don’t make much of charges of circular reasoning & tautologies, or regarding many informal fallacies. They’re not necessarily vicious or untrue! And some are more plausibly taut than others. They’re often laden with truth & meaning. Taken alone, they may lack epistemic warrant, but, in a cumulative case-like appeal, taken together, they can often defensibly impart significant normative force. So many things in our lives of faith, as well as quotidian existence, will much more involve a practical reasoning under uncertainty and existential “living as if,” than any quod erat demonstrandum?

So, to whomever wields Hitchens Razor, I simply say, tu quoque, as it slices in both directions.

So, whether to the New Atheists or to those arguing against David Bentley Hart & advocating a moral defense of hell, I say – quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur – backatcha.

It’s the same thing I’d say to any mischievous sophist, who enters a forum arguing for solipsism, quite overenamored of mere logical validity, while, at the same time, cursorily dismissive of all reductiones ad absurdum, even those as are otherwise adequately grounded in our rather ubiquitous common sense, aesthetic sensibilities & moral intuitions.

So, how can such appeals as ours – to “Gaze into the eyes of your beloveds – children & lovers – and say THAT!” – be so fatally flawed, cursorily dismissed, casually syllogized & perfunctorily QEDed?

None of this, of course, touches on contentious interpretations of Scripture & patristic thought, competing theo-anthropologies regarding free will & postmortem mutability, ongoing controversy regarding de Auxiliis, confrontations regarding divine simplicity & the God – world relationship and other parts of the fabrics we’ve woven into our otherwise seamless  garment of universal salvation. But, as long as what’s clear to us on its front remains opaqe to those gazing from the rear, I shall endeavor to describe it to them.

You have helped me in that endeavor. Thank you.