Explaining the Goldilocks Aspects of My Cosmotheandric Cosmology, Theoanthropology & Eschatology
A recurring theme in philosophical theology and theological anthropology is that of transcendental determinism. Its nature & scope differs in competing accounts.
Classical substance metaphysics drew distinctions between horizontal & vertical causations and accidentally & essentially ordered causal series. Modern emergentist accounts coupled with semiotic science are able to retreat to a more vague phenomenological heuristic, which is hypothetically fecund & better able to bridge competing interpretations.
Questions surrounding transcendental determination are integral to God arguments (e.g. classical "proofs"), in general, and comparative theology (e.g. East vs West), in general. Those questions also presuppose philosophical stances regarding philosophy of mind.
It is my contention that only a naïve realism, which is overenamored of its own intuitive & abductive faculties, could imagine that it has the only plausible account of any given type of transcendental determination in terms of its exact nature & definitive scope. Neither can any given account be established analytically & rationally to be a priori demonstrated.
To make this contention more concrete, I am saying that this applies to reality's most intractable puzzles, like
1) why is there not rather nothing?
2) why is there not rather something else?
3) does reality as a whole beg explanation or is it brute?
4) does reality consist of an infinite regress in a series of accidental causes? 5) does the whole of reality beg explanation beyond what can be understood from a consideration of its parts?
6) does reality's primal transcendental determination derive from mere accidental extensions or personal intentions?
7) if from personal intentions, does creation ensue from a personal divine multiplicative refracting or divisive fracturing, i.e. what's the nature of creaturely selfhood?
8) even if from a divisive fracturing, do personal self-hoods everlastingly perdure (kenotically gifted) or culminate in self-dissolutions?
9) how much can one's essential freedom be enriched by expansive notions of autonomy?
10) is personal autonomy gifted only in minimalist terms of howness?
11) might personal autonomy also be gifted in terms of howmuchness, where gradations of intimacy could derive both from dynamical modal sublations as well as intensities?
At the same time, I do not want to suggest that a critical realism could not informally argue for one answer contra another using an eminently defensible cumulative case-like approach. That is what I aspired to do when writing these recent posts, which I hope the reader now sees were systematically intertwined. That's to recognize that these analogical considerations of various types of transcendental determinism reiterate how all manner of ones & manys are related in reality.
To wit, all three of these posts were integrally & systematically related in variously addressing the eleven puzzles identified, above:
Dear Believers – Be Not Anxious about philosophies of mind
Getting Monism Right – If you’ve climbed one spiritual mountain, have you climbed them all?
All SHALL Be Saved & Who Knows? Maybe All Will Be Glorified, Too
In the simplest of terms they suggest that, yes, reality as a whole is transcendentally determined. Yes, that determination is personally intended not accidentally extended. Because that determination is personally intended, the autonomy gifted (divinely circumscribed) finite rational beings might vary in ways we can't a priori know or rationally prove. We can know from double-effect like reasoning that cosmotheandric restoration is assured.
And that's a rare peak behind the curtain of how I developed my systematics.
