How one might Taste & See the Goodness, Whom we cannot deductively prove

The real tell in whether or not one is properly looking over their shoulders to take account of their leaps, when articulating their epistemology, to me, has always been an a/theological thing.

The litmus test for me comes in asking whether your epistemological assumptions affirm that both atheism & theism can be rationally held. They can both coherently articulate logically valid accounts of reality writ large. Not only that, beyond my own objective idealism, I see the validity in subjective idealism (Berkeley), objective materialism (pantheism) & subjective materialism (those other guys). Those stances are not just internally coherent & logically valid but all externally congruent. Our moves among & beyond are much weaker than many imagine.

To wit, if one’s epistemology is vague enough to be “root metaphor (or ontology) neutral” with its modal phenomenological implications, then it meets my basic criteria for “not too strong, not too weak” as a Goldilocks epistemology.

So, I’ve taken E-PSR models for imaginary test drives with the competing “necessary beings” of objective & subjective idealisms & materialisms. For none of those different entia necessaria conceptions did the E-PSR’s wheels come off by either proving too much or saying too little regarding how earnest human inquiry proceeds.

That’s to say that an adequate reason principle would not be so strong that material monists, existential atheists, pantheists or even subjective idealists could be a priori charged with irrationality, incoherence or unreasonableness, i.e. necessarily lacking in a sufficient modicum of normative justification & epistemic warrant for their worldview.

Any impasses would emerge, I’d suspect, in how one might couple that adequate reason heuristic to some nonarbitrary equiplausibility principle, which would norm our practical reasoning under uncertainty as regarding both our proximate & ultimate horizons of concern. I do have my own pragmatic tie-breakers to adjudicate between worldviews but that’s another discussion for another day. I’ve hinted at the nature of some of those criteria in Is Reality Brute, Fruit, Mute? Reenchanting Reality with a confident assurance in things hoped for & conviction of things unseen!

A block critique says the same thing as above in a different way. Contra both Copleston & Russell, we don’t know whether or not reality as a whole is brute or begs an explanation, i.e. whether one necessarily commits a fallacy of composition when so begging. There’s nothing logically invalid or rationally incoherent in believing that reality’s intelligibility is possibly delivered on via an infinitely regressing accidental causal series. Alternatively, it could possibly require an essentially ordered causal series.

While “for contingent beings, brute factness is unacceptable since contingencies are not self-sufficient,” it’s an entirely different inquiry that probes whether or not cosmic reality as a whole is contingent or brute. While any necessary being would be uncaused, “brute in the only proper sense,” not every valid, coherent & congruent conception of necessary being would of metaphysical necessity be thoroughgoingly intentional, personal, intelligible.

As John Knasas put it, so well, contra those who imagine that they can lift more with their realisms & retortive transcendental arguments than is truly defensible, epistemologically:

“Philosophically, the nagging suspicion remains that ineluctability is just what you would expect if the a priori are simply ways you have to think rather than ways reality has to be. The screeching of performative self-contradiction could quite well indicate a grinding of merely mental gears and not any manhandling of reality.”

That’s to suggest that performative contradictions aren’t necessarily in play for those whose priors presuppose that what “we” refer to as contingent being writ large is otherwise, itself, brute. It’s a classical JOTS failure to suggest that such alternative mereological accounts of being writ large would necessarily block all legitimate inquiry just because it regresses infinitely. [JOTS = jump outside the system].

Speaking of JOTS, even Gödel, like Hartshorne, ventured a modal ontological argument!

Eventually, even Stephen Hawking came around to seeing how a TOE may be intrinsically elusive (cf. his Gödel and the End of Physics).

I want to think that Gödel-like incompleteness applies analogously across different domains of interest & horizons of concern.

I like to imagine that Gödel’s incompleteness doesn’t necesarily mean that one couldn’t write down the axioms of a self-referencing system in a manner that’s both consistent & complete. It only means that we couldn’t deductively prove that we had.

In other words, while it is possible to write down the axioms of a self-referencing system, such a system cannot be both complete (able to prove all truths) and PROVABLY consistent. In other words, we might could “taste & see” the goodness of our system & its axioms, which in heaven we might find either trivial or uninteresting. We just don’t know enough about reality to say it’s unknowable.

To speak with tongue only partly in cheek:

To formalize THE system, as I aspire to do in heaven, we’d have to allow in self-evident, nonpropositional, evaluative & prescriptive posits, e.g. Like Hawking’s “mathematics is cool,” & couple them to descriptive premises before we attempt to reason our way to the normative conclusions as will be embodied in Christ.

Of course, while everlastingly finite & fallible, to Whom or what we’d remain in infinite potency might, itself, possibly be utterly sufficient & comprehensible as a TOE, hence utterly & epektatically intelligible to us.

I imagine myself on a heavenly helicopter with Jesus, like John Lennon traveling to New Delhi with the Maharishi. Like Paul McCartney, Tom Belt would ask: “Why were you so keen? You really wanted to get in that helicopter.’” Like Lennon, I’d reply: “Yeah, I thought he might slip me the answer!”

I’m no analytic, but invocations of Gödel & Polanyi don’t lead me to come down on the side of the Orthodox a la Hans Boersma, Milbank & DBH regarding Nyssen’s mediated, theophanic vision. I do accept that it – per Christ’s humanity – constitutes, in part, what we’ll experience. But I insist, with Aquinas, that we’ll also experience an immediate supratheophanic vision, which – per noetic identity – sublates the theophanic.

So, I don’t a priori rule out divine immediacy. In fact, I believe that what the divine persons enjoy ad intra, Trinitologically, as an Absolute immediacy & utter comprehensibility, we ALREADY enjoy in terms of a relative immediacy in infinite potency with an eternally inexhaustible intelligibility.

Those knowledges that are already relatively immediate would include – not only Polanyi’s tacit dimension, but – such as the upper blade of Lonergan’s epistemic scissors & his accounts of meaning, understanding & unrestricted desire; Maritain’s connaturality & intuition of being; Newman’s illative sense; Hegel’s self -positing & intellectual intuition; Fries’ nonintuitive immediate knowledge; Peirce’s abduction & such.

So, valid modal distinctions regarding our experience & knowledge of reality can include such descriptors as mediated & immediate, gnoseological & operative, and effable & ineffable, and can involve dynamics such as emergent probabilities, transformations of consciousness (conversions) & sublations, etc

We already constitutively participate, to some degree, however inchoate, in all of these modes & dynamics.

Now, I still have a qualifiedly open theist stance regarding the future. And, honestly, I employ both epistemic & ontic modal distinctions – not mostly temporally, but – vis a vis freedom. I don’t at all suspect that God knows the future of nature, only that He exhaustively knows the nature of the future.

I don’t disagree with Nyssen & the Orthodox, I just can’t a priori rule out a more transcendent sublative dynamic. I have a nuanced stance regarding what Aquinas means by comprehending the divine essence. It doesn’t ignore that we are finite & so will remain forever nescient & in all manner of infinite potencies, so growing via epektasis. Nor does it ignore that it is precisely because we are forever nescient that our acts will always be essentially non necessitated. But it will be a nescience that, like Jesus, will then have more to do with theophanic & missiological hows, less with any kenotic emptying via visions beatific, which are totally harmonious with same. There will be some forms of faith and trust even in heaven in my view!

I rely on a distinctly perichoretic take of beatific comprehension, which is interpersonal & unitive, rather than a quidditative take, which is natural, all consistent with Aquinas. When Aquinas uses “comprehension” to refer to our eternal beatitude, he uses it in the sense that we will comprehensively behold THAT we remain interminably united with the Trinity, but not in the sense that we could ever fully comprehend the essence quidditatively.

If, as Scotus notes per Richard Cross — “God is no more ineffable than anything else, as literally everything’s ineffable!“ — then, epektasis no less refers to our interpersonal communions with our loved ones than it does to our eternal communing with God.

When Aquinas uses “comprehension” to refer to our eternal beatitude, he uses it in the sense that we will comprehensively behold THAT, interminably, we remain formally united with the Trinity, Who, themselves, are that otherwise separate substance, Who is united to our intellect as their form.

Thus united to us, the indwelling Presence is both God, our End, Whom we’ll forever increasingly understand, as well as God, the Means, whereby we’re made to thus finitely understand.

Initially, epistemically open, we only partly apprehend or inchoately behold that we’re formally united with the True, Beautiful & Good as the very ground of our value-pursuits of truth, beauty & goodness. Again, I think here of our tacit dimensions, illative sense, connaturality & unrestricted desire. God is radically knowable precisely because He is, like our lovers, supremely unknowable, but only because Epektasis is about being united to & communing with God in a concrete social Absolute!

God is — in theophanically, urging a concrete social Absolute, a unitive Oneness as regarding acts of understanding & love, both monergic & synergic, now & forever, as Bracken says — “ever on the move.” And our epistemic openness remains – theophanically & epektatically – regarding the future of nature even as we asymptotically close, epistemically, on the nature of the future, eschatologically; the past, protologically; and the present, historically.

I employ my own E-PAR to suggest a possible sublation of Orthodox applications of Gödel, Polyani & Nyssen by considering a putative noetic identity that acts both as our means, albeit initially tacit & inchoate, and our End.

Rather than employing Gödel, Polyani & Nyssen solely in terms of apophatic inference blockers, let’s say ontologically & participatorily, I consider possible kataphatic constructions in terms of nonformal positivity, the freedom that’s precisely fostered by constraints (including analogia, nescience, epistemic distance) and that emerges with our epistemic closures via synergistic acts of freely loving individuals, perichoretically & personally.