Professional Documents
Culture Documents
INTRODUCTION After they had both heard the Gospel preached by the missionary bishop Paulinus, an advisor of King Edwin of Northumberland said to him: The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.1 Like King Edwin and his council of elders, who among us has not been warmed by lifes goodness, fed by its truth, inspired by its beauty? Even then, who has not also poignantly experienced the wintry storms of lifes poverty in so many different forms, the hunger pangs of our ignorance regarding lifes ultimate concerns and the always swift flight of lifes beauty from our sight? Prompting all of us to ask whether there might be more? To the extent that human life has always been an ongoing quest in pursuit of such value-realizations as truth, beauty, goodness, unity and mercy, lifes unavoidable value-frustrations have given rise to many questions with clear existential imperatives. What is that? Describe it. What is that to us? Evaluate it. How might we best acquire (or avoid) that? Norm it. Might there be more? Interpret all of that! Thus it is that humanitys perennial value-pursuits have given rise to lifes many different methods --- descriptive sciences, evaluative cultures, normative philosophies and interpretive religions --- each autonomous, all necessary, none alone sufficient, for every value-realization. The value-pursuits of truth, beauty and goodness, in a context of freedom, comprise an essential axiology, or interpretive axis, presupposed even by an evolutionary epistemology.2 Beyond this essential axiology, humankind has embarked on many different religious quests. That is also to say, we have adopted many different interpretive stances toward
1
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, L.C. Jane's 1903 Temple Classics translation, introduction by Vida D. Scudder, (London: J.M. Dent; New York E.P. Dutton, 1910) 2 For a compelling example of such an account, see Goodenough, Ursula and Terrence W. Deacon. 2003. "From Biology to Consciousness to Morality." Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 38 (December): 801-819.
Cf. The Will to Believe by William James. An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities. Published in the New World, June, 1896.
See Yongs In the Days of Caesar Pentecostalism and Political Theology, Wm. B. Eeerdmans Piublishing Co. 2010. 5 Jacques Maritain, Raisons et raisons 1947
About Our Pathways In the East, a distinction is drawn between the way of the baby monkey and the way of the kitten, the first way describing that of the ascetics in pursuit of Enlightenment, Knowledge and Wisdom, the second that of Devotion. The metaphorical implications are that there is more effort on the part of the baby monkey, which must actively cling tightly to its parent in getting transported around, while, as we are all aware, the kitten is passively transported by the nape of its neck in its mothers teeth. I offer another distinction, which is the way of the baby goose, implying an imprinted following of the parent or an imitation of Action. Finally, we might consider the way of the baby martin, which is familiar to any whove observed the parents knocking a fledgling off of the Purple Martin House that it might thereby learn to fly, the implication here describing
An Ecumenical Pneumatological Ecclesiology A new generation of pentecostal scholars has entered into a credible dialogue with modern science, modern philosophy and modern theology. These approaches have profound implications for ecclesiology. What is emerging is nothing less than an ecumenical pneumatological ecclesiology.6 It criticizes our Western approach, which is largely discursive theology. It emphasizes that Life in the Spirit is also an experience.
6
The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh by Amos Yong (2005 Baker Academic).
Getting from Is to Ought Our descriptive sciences and normative philosophies, in many ways, respectively, grapple with the "is" and "ought" of reality. Beyond the most general of norms (that is also to say within the constraints of the initial, boundary and limit conditions of reality's givens), our evaluative cultures will then otherwise enjoy and employ (co-creatively) the freedom we've been given, which we celebrate through a wonderful diversity of ministry and beautiful plurality of expression, historically, socially, economically and politically. Historical tensions forever push and pull us between an uncertain future and unforgiving past. But we continuously manage to get oriented and reoriented nonetheless. Social tensions have human dignity always precariously perched between individual autonomy and institutional necessity. But subsidiarity principles, when in play, will often enlighten and empower such decisions. Cultural tensions result from choices we must make between competing values. But we usually imagine that we and our choices can, perhaps, be sanctioned, maybe even sanctified.
This Spirit, Who is holy, has broken open our philosophies with the novel questions posed (although not answered) by our natural theologies and enlivened our sciences with an evocative poetry inspired by our theologies of nature.
The reality of the Incarnation, Jesus, then further reveals how we are being: 1) oriented, as the historical tension between past and future has been transcended by One Who broke into our now from eternity --- not to transfix our gaze on the utterly beyond, but --- to infinitely transvalue the significance of our fragile, temporal existence (cf. the Lukan gospel narrative); 2) empowered, as the social tension between individuals and institutions has been transcended by One Who promised to be present where two or more are gathered
7
Our essential axiology and basic cosmology already recognize a minimalist telos at play in reality, prior to the more robustly telic dimension suggested by our pneumatological imagination. Modern semiotic science has room for both the formal and final causations as analogs to those of a classical aristotelian metaphysics. Obviously, an emergentist perspective, which would admit such causations and telos, need not violate physical causal closure. But neither would a more robustly telic dimension that is operative at the level of primal reality in its initial, boundary and limit conditions. Scientific methods, which are empirical and probabilistic, relying on falsification, would not, in principle, measure such improbable proleptic realizations, which otherwise get recorded as inexplicable anomalies.
What does it mean to express faith, hope, and love in the 21st Century (or Post-postmodern world)? We should amplify the risks we took when we moved from our exclusivistic ecclesiocentrisms to a more inclusivistic Christocentricism by exploring a robust pneumatological inclusivism in our interreligious dialogue. Put simply, we should take more risks in our faith outlook by being more open regarding where we expect to find the Spirit at work in our world, for example, among other peoples, in both sacred and secular settings, thereby augmenting the value to be realized from a broader ecumenism. We should amplify the risks weve already taken liturgically being more open to how it is the Spirit can form our desires, recognizing that we can fruitfully adopt the spiritual technology of other religions, such as certain asceticisms, disciplines and practices, without necessarily adopting their conclusions, thus augmenting the value to be mined from desiring the Kingdom above all else and being sensitive to its less visible
cf Mike Morrell & Frank Spencers website need url cf. Jamie Smiths Desiring the Kingdom) need citation cf. Phil Hefner
The Relations of Science and Religion What are the implications of this theological anthropology for the interaction between science and religion, viewing reality pansemioentheistically, employing the epistemic categories of the normative, descriptive, interpretive and evaluative and characterizing our concepts as semiotic, theoretic, heuristic and dogmatic? To the extent that we map science as a descriptive enterprise and religion as an interpretive enterprise and affirm them as autonomous methodologies but still integrally-related in every human value-realization, there can be no talk of conflict, as reigns in the scientism of the Enlightenment fundamentalists and the literalism of the various religious fundamentalists. Our axiological perspectivalism with its explicit integralism speaks of a model of interaction that coincides with Ian Barbours Integration, John Polkinghornes Assimilation, John Haughts Confirmation and Ted Peters Hypothetical Consonance (and Ethical Overlap). In some sense, the very basis of a semiotic approach is grounded in the need for informational interpretation, a need that derives from the radical finitude of creatures, a need that plays out in our fallibilistic methodologies and heavy reliance on the weaker forms of inference, both abduction and induction, such as in the back-door philosophy of Popperian falsification and the informal argumentation that predominates, even mostly comprises, our common sense. The implication is, then, that absent this finitude and given a virtual omniscience, descriptively, and omnipotence, evaluatively, the normative sciences would consist of only aesthetics and ethics, logic would be obviated and the descriptive and interpretive would be a distinction without a difference, which might describe, in fact, an idealized eschatological epistemology whereby humankind as a community of inquiry has attained to the truth. At any rate, to be sure, that is manifestly not the case, presently. One practical upshot of this situation is that there need be no Two-Language Theory as discussed by Peters or Two-Language System as described by Peacocke, at least from our idealized theoretical perspective; however, from a practical perspective, science and religion will seemingly traffic in two languages because, if for no other reason, the latter is dominated by dogmatic and heuristic conceptions, the former by semiotic and theoretic conceptions. These need not be conceived as two languages, from a strictly linguistic perspective, but might better be conceived as two vocabularies that are slowly merging. There is another reason for religions expanded vocabulary, though, but that derives from the fact that it has additional concerns (e.g. interpersonal) that are of no special interest to a purely scientific quest or merely descriptive enterprise. It is in that vein that one might invoke what Barbour and Polkinghorne have called Independence and Haught has described as Contrast. Willem Drees has developed a schema that more explicitly
We can discuss the philosophic focus of human concern in terms of the normative sciences. These sciences, in their mediation of our interpretive and descriptive foci will, in the final analysis, always come up short in rationally demonstrating and empirically proving our competing worldviews and metaphysics. We do want to ensure, normatively, that any of our competing systems at least minimalistically gift us with sufficient modeling power of reality such that we can establish an epistemic parity with other systems. Once we have established a modicum of equiplausibility or equiprobability, we might then invoke a type of equiplausibility principle to guide us in our existential choices. And such a principle can (should) adhere to normative guidelines for informal
Ontology the metaphysical Is Metaphysics Moonshine? Look at some of the words and phrases associated with studies of consciousness: ... the explanatory gap, the hard and easy problems, functionalism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, interactionism, panpsychism, intrinsic monism, representationalism, nonreductive materialism, nonreductive physicalism, property dualism, substance dualism,dual aspect monism, cartesian dualism, eliminative materialism, mentalism, weak supervenience, strong supervenience, logical supervenience, ontological supervenience, higher order theory, multiple drafts theory, neutral monism, aristotelian hylomorphism, quantum theory of consciousness ... And think about some of the ideas associated with theoretical physics: ... indeterminacy, superluminality, nonlocality, superpositioning, complementarity ... It is enough to make anyone feel a little tipsy. Whether we are studying speculative cosmology or speculative cognitive science, from that end of the Great Chain of Being, where consciousness emerges, to that end near the earliest moments after the Big Bang, where we encounter the deepest structures of matter,
From Biology to Consciousness to Morality by Ursula Goodenough and Terrence Deacon, Zygon D 03; 38(4): 801-819
Merton the False Self (properly understood) The concept of False Self is unfortunate. Why unfortunate? Because the False Self is not bad. We might better to draw such distinctions as early on our journey versus later on
15
Philip St. Romain God, Self & Ego - Discerning Who's Who on the Spiritual Journey (self-published 2010) 16 Philip Romain Handbook for Spiritual Directees (self-published 2010)
http://nccam.nih.gov/
Immanent Trinity & Transcendent Ontological Frame Interobjective Indeterminacy & Ens Necessarium
18
http://www.usccb.org/dpp/Evaluation_Guidelines_finaltext_2009-03.pdf
http://www.counterbalance.org/ctns-vo/drees2-body.html
reintroducing enchantment or what G. K. Chesterton called the thrilling romance of orthodoxy Precis the normative mediates between the descriptive and interpretive to effect the evaluative Epistemological Posture a nonfoundational perspectivalism situated in a fallibilistic, triadic semiotic realism Epistemic Rubrics Semiotic Aspects normative descriptive
See Douglas Waltons Argument from Appearance: A New Argumentation Scheme in Logique et Analyse, 195, 2006, 319-340, which is available here:http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~walton/papers inpdf/06arg_from_appearance.pdf
Methods "there must be a renewal of communion between the traditional, contemplative disciplines and those of science, between the poet and the physicist, the priest and the depth psychologist, the monk and the politician." Merton Our overall thrust is geared toward the search for enhanced modeling power of reality, toward trying to better define and attain epistemic virtue, toward a reconsideration of the "best practices" to be employed in our normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics. It is a search for a Goldilocks epistemology, which is to say, one that has neither too much hubris nor an excessive humility. When it comes to humankind's descriptive enterprises, which are inherently normative, when we encounter paradox, we sort through different scenarios and try our best to determine its origins. To the extent we cannot determine whether any given knowledge advance is being thwarted by, on one hand, methodological constraints, or on the other, some type of in-principle occulting, the proper bias is to assume the former and eschew the latter. This is simply a pragmatic approach wherein methods will generally precede systems. Our methods will necessarily assume such things as common sense notions of causation, reality's intelligibility, certain first principles like identity, noncontradiction and excluded middle, such
21
Robert Cummings Neville in AMERICAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY Vol. 18 NO.3 September 1997
See Rorty, Putnam, and the Pragmatist View of Epistemology and Metaphysics by Teed Rockwell at http://users.sfo.com/~mcmf/rorty.html
The historical basis for this biographical excursus was drawn from an article by James Swindal of Duquesne University, which is entitled, Faith and Reason, as accessible in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/faith-re.htm
Confer Robert Cummings Neville in AMERICAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY Vol. 18 NO.3 September 1997 REPLY TO SERIOUS CRITICS 281: 16 See Soldier. Sage. Saint (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978), chapter 5.
A Peircean pansemioentheism, relying on Peirces concept of thirdness (habits, regularities, axiological realities), would take a firm pneumatological stance in accord with a neoplatonic participatory schema. In the final analysis though, one cannot mend the causal disjunction problem onto-theologically, because, to the extent reality presents as an ongoing fugue between pattern and paradox, order and chaos, the random and systematic, we cannot a priori know and do not a posteriori yet know whether realitys regularities emerged from chaos and contingency or from order and consistency insofar as probabilities occupy something of a middle ground leaving us to wonder about their primal origin and whether or not we inhabit a glorious contingency or grand probability. In the end, our hermeneutical turn, metaphysically, is a theo-ontology, an account of primal reality that enjoys epistemic parity with competing accounts and which then invokes the equiplausibility principle, which leverages our minimalist realisms into more robust but still critical realisms going beyond mere satisficing and survival values to ultimate concerns and meanings. In addition to the semantical, univocal predication of being between Creator and creatures, also ontologically, in order for there to be any meaningful interactivity between the Uncreated and created, we can only suspect that there is some metaphysical reality that could, in principle, be univocally predicated of both Creator and creatures, even as we concede that, for all practical purposes, the epistemically determinate and ontologically precise nature of such a reality could be grasped only through special revelation. Our guess is that it would be described semiotically and would involve an otherwise ineluctably unobtrusive but still utterly efficacious tacit dimension, which invites us, kenotically, per ardu ad astra, ad veritatem per caritatem. For our God is a gentlemanly suitor, Who would not force His way; neither timid nor coy, She seductively and patiently pursues us. Abduction of the Reality of the Ens Necessarium & Its Modal Ontological Proof Peirce's rejection of the notion that firstness and secondness could robustly account for the world as we know it, in my view, marks his retreat into ontological and semantical vagueness. To describe reality in terms of alternating pattern and paradox, chance and necessity, order and chaos, random and systematic, does seem rather question begging. It is also true that, nowhere, do we observe necessity in reality; necessity everywhere eludes us. It is equally true that human kind cannot avoid the inference of the necessary; necessity everywhere suggests itself. Like Polanyi's tacit dimension, necessity may be closer to us than we are to ourselves. It is at this juncture that humankind's Abduction of the Reality of the Ens Necessarium
The same is true for human inferential heuristics. They are irreducibly triadic -abduction, induction and deduction, each presupposing the other in the overall context of the same dynamical semiotic and pragmatic realities. None of these considerations conclude anything ontological about the mind. However, the inference to the best explanation is probably naturalistic and wouldnt require the introduction of new primitives to space, time, matter and energy (like consciousness, for instance). But we could be wrong. And that is okay. We are fallibilists.
25
See: The trouble with memes (and what to do about it) by Deacon on Arisbe.
To go beyond that, see Christopher McHugh's modal ontological formulation, which we relied on, above, at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/doug_krueger/krueger-mchugh/mchugh1.shtml
Charles Sanders Peirce drew a helpful distinction between the theoretic and the practical, suggesting that we should speculate boldly in our theoretical endeavors but move more tentatively in our practical affairs. One way of interpreting his approach might be to say that we should employ a progressive bias in our academic, propositional disciplines and a conservative or traditionalist bias in our practical and pastoral approaches. This strikes us as right-headed in that, while in the first instance, we are dealing with relationships between ideas, in the latter case we are dealing with relationships between people. This aphorism seems easy enough to apply when we are drawing a distinction such as between our theoretic sciences and our practical politics. It gets more complicated, however, when we adopt the view that theology, itself, is very much more a practical science, not so much a theoretical endeavor. What are the implications? For starters, this means that theology advances as a science much more inductively via empirical observation than deductively via rational considerations (ahem, or at least it should). It also means that when theology gets descriptive and normative, what it describes and norms are interpretive and evaluative realities, like religions and cultures, and not physical, metaphysical, practical and moral realities, like sciences and philosophies. More concretely, then, theology does not gift us with cosmological insights, such as taking positions on the philosophies of mind, the origins of species or the putative reconciliations of gravity & quantum mechanics. Theology gifts us with axiological insights, observing and reporting how it is that humankind interprets cosmological realities and what it is about these realities that humans value most. One neednt be a distinctly Christian theologian to recognize that humankind, by and large, has interpreted reality pneumatologically, which is to say that it interprets reality with Spirit as a rather basic and universal category, and also participatively, which is to
To Place This Project in Context a Quote from Walker Percy: This chapter, as well as other parts of the book, owes a good deal to Carl Sagan's splendid picture book, Cosmos. I hope he will not take offense at some fanciful extrapolations therefrom. Sagan's book gave me much pleasure, a pleasure which was not diminished by Sagan's unmalicious, even innocent, scientism, the likes of which I have not encountered since the standard bull sessions of high school and collegeup to but not past the sophomore year. The argument could be resumed with Sagan, I suppose, but the issue would be as inconclusive as it was between sophomores. For me it was more diverting than otherwise to see someone sketch the history of Western scientific thought and leave out Judaism and Christianity. Everything is downhill after the Ionians and until the rise of modern science. There is a huge gap between the destruction of the library at Alexandria and the appearance of Copernicus and Galileo. So much for six thousand years of Judaism and fifteen hundred years of Christianity. So much for the likes of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Grosseteste. So much for the science historian A.C. Crombie, who wrote: "The natural philosophers of Latin Christendom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries created the experimental science characteristic of modern times." So much, indeed, for the relationship between Christianity and science and the fact that, as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from he Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. Yet one is not offended by Sagan. There is too little malice and too much ignorance. It is enough to take pleasure in the pleasant style, the knack for popularizing science, and the beautiful pictures of Saturn and the Ring nebula. Indeed, more often than not, I found myself on Sagan's side, especially in his admiration for science and the scientific method, which is what he says it isa noble, elegant, and self-correcting method of attaining a kind of truthand when he attacks the current superstitions, astrology, UFOs, parapsychology, and such, which seem to engage the Western mind now more than evermore perhaps than either science or Christianity. What is to be deplored is not Sagan's sophomoric scientismwhich I think I like better than its counterpart, a sophomoric theism which attributes the wonders of the Cosmos to a God who created it like a child with a cookie cutterno, what is deplorable is that these serious issues involving God and the nature of man should be co-opted by these particular disputants, a popularizer like Sagan and fundamentalists who believe God created the world six thousand years ago. It's enough to give both science and Christianity a bad name. Really, it is a case of an ancient and still honorable argument going to pot. Even arguments in a
Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 201-202.
Let's begin with how physical causation operates in the natural world. From an emergentist perspective, as we observe emergent properties, the pattern seems to be that they represent something more than their constituent parts but are clearly nothing but the combination of those parts. Hence, we have Ursula Goodenough's something more from nothing but, or some prefer something else from nothing but. Sometimes emergent realities present in a very straightforward manner and our reductionistic accounts are easy to come by. Sometimes they present in a very problematical manner and explanatory adequacy eludes us. We can acknowledge the centrality of emergence without claiming to have acquired full explanatory adequacy for the entire spectrum of emergentistic phenomena, including all that might be involved in human neurophysiology. Thusly, our emergentist account does
29
These thoughts were also developed in dialogue with this publication: ROBINSON, Andrew J. (2004). Continuity, Naturalism and Contingency: A Theology of Evolution drawing on the Semiotics of C.S. Peirce and Trinitarian Thought. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 39 (1): 111-136 Visit: http://www.andrew-robinson.info/
Hermeneutics in Dialogue Our Dialogue Conceived as Prayer This dialogue doesnt really lend itself to categories used to describe systems, products, conclusions or movements; rather, it is more so about methods, processes, practices or conversations. This dialogue, then, is best conceived as prayer, as people interacting with God and one another. It is an ongoing exchange of Do You Hear What I Hear? as the Spirit moves among the People of God as always. Sometimes, the Spirit moves and we respond competently even if not wholly consciously. We respond implicitly even if not with an explicit awareness. At different times in church history, our response becomes a tad more self-reflective, explicitly-aware, self-critical and consciously competent. Thats what the postmodern conversation is to me not a novel move of the Spirit per se or a response of the church, but another moment in time where many are simply paying more attention and appropriating a new awareness of what our gracious God has always been about. Certainly, efficacies will always flow when implicit faith is made explicit, when unconscious competence is made conscious, when we pause, from time to time, to reflect and resource and retrieve and revive and renew. Because we view every theological conversation as dialogue and prayer, the fruits of which are quite unpredictable as they flow from the hand of a sovereign God, Who seems to have quite the sense of humor, we find it helpful to view the conversation through the lens of Lectio Divina, our prayer. If there is a movement, then it is really no more and no less than prayer, itself, which does not lend itself to specific programs and definite agenda but yields itself to transformation, solidarity and compassion. These are realities that come about quite spontaneously and outside of our preconceived channels. While in creation, novelty arises that transcends but does not violate the order from which it emerged, still we cannot really look behind to get a sense of where were headed. Rather, we can look back and realize that others have been in places like this before and have been superabundantly rewarded in unpredictable, novel ways when they have trustfully surrendered. Joy remains a surprise. What emerges from this conversation will inspire joy but will be no less a surprise. The Spirit is like that is all I can observe. Seldom do we know how Gods designs will be worked even as we look forward with a
Interreligious Dialogue About [Bracketing] as opposed to Jettisoning Our Ontologies We cannot have authentic dialogue if people arrive at the table and "jettison" some of their core positions. The [bracketing] of certain positions is only a dialogical tool (and not rather an epistemic maneuver) which challenges us to rearticulate our truth in a more universally compelling way that is more transparent to human reason. For example and concretely, then, we cannot urge others in a pluralistic political forum to join our side on the basis that the Bible or Koran "tells me so," even if, at bottom, that may be what formed our moral position. We must dig deeper and come to grips with WHY the "Bible told me so" and then offer that explanation with the logic and reasoning tools all humans share. And this logic must be tested against reality, too, because, without this inductive, positivistic or scientific grounding, logic can take us further from the truth, and more
30
Robert Sharf Sanbokyodan: Zen and the Way of the New Religions p. 427-428
This triadic perspective resolves the tension between the classical neoplatonic henosis, which refers to the dance between intersubjectivity and identity with ultimate reality, and dinonysian theosis, which refers to the growth in intimacy with ultimate reality, by affirming both an intraobjective identity between creature and Creator, in a panentheistic divine matrix of interrelated causes and effects, as well as an intersubjective intimacy between creature and Creator, the creature thus being quasi-autonomous. (auto = self) The practical upshot, then, which might be quite the essence (pun intended), of such a nondual perspective is that all may be well and that all are radically interrelated and this is true whether one is indeed an absolute monist, qualified monist, panentheist or classical theist. The theoretical rub would be ontological but all traditions, in fidelity to right speech, had better remain in search of a metaphysic at this stage on humankinds journey? For Rohr, Id say the nondual refers mostly to an epistemic process, such as in Zens dethroning of the conceptualizing ego in order to otherwise relate to some seeming contradictions, instead, as paradoxes, which might perdure as mystery, resolve dialectically, or even dissolve from a stepping out of an inadequate framework of logic or any other dispositions (or lack thereof) known to this paradox or another. This maps well with the broad conceptions of nonduality such as at Nonduality Salon and Wikipedia. Predominantly, though, Rohr affirms nondual thinking in an over against fashion as related to either-or thinking, i.e. false dichotomies, and as related to a failure to self-critique ones own systems and logical frameworks, as a failure, too, to affirm the rays of truth in other perspectives and traditions. It is a failure to move beyond the Law thru the Prophets to the Wisdom tradition, not to do away with them but to properly fulfill them. We can draw a distinction between Rohrs philosophical treatment or method of nonduality or nondual consciousness and the practice of contemplative prayer forms. The former is at the service of the latter, to be sure, but it is also at the service of all other value-realizations, as one should expect from a whole brain approach. Here we come full circle back to our consideration of the devotional elements that can be fruitfully employed in conjunction with any nondual approach, whether conceived from an epistemic and/or ontological stance.
31
Richard Rohr, Simplicity revised from 1991, Crossroad Publishing 2003 Jeryy Katz, One Readings in Nonduality, 2009 need citation, see my review at his site online
James & Tyra Arraj, Christianity in the Crucible of East-West Dialogue, innerexplorations.com
Toshihiko Izutsu , Sufism and Taoism, p. 368-369 This was eventually published as Seeing as the Mystics See. Need citation. This was compiled from an audio recording regarding Third Eye Seeing.
Nonduality must be approached with great circumspection, which is to say, with both appropriate epistemic imprecision and ontological vagueness, as necessarily inheres in the matter at hand. There is a real tendency for Western minds, in general, Christian minds, in particular, to engage the thought of the East from an ontological or metaphysical perspective. Now, we are not going to deny that there might even be some heavy metaphysical lifting going on in much of Eastern thought, for that denial, in and of itself, would entail falling into the trap that we are trying to help you avoid. So, just imagine, if you will, as we discuss nonduality that we are not so much trying to gift you with another way of interpreting or processing reality as we are trying to invite you to another way of seeing or experiencing reality. Put another way, a proper engagement of nonduality is not so much an exercise in discursive analysis as it is a cultivation of a more authentic awareness. It does not promote cognitive insight as much as it promotes conceptual clarity with a concommitant affective cleansing, which will result from ensuing detachments (broadly conceived). When engaging the literature on nonduality, in general, it might be helpful to receive what seem to be metaphysical assertions as epistemic stances or what seem to be ontological descriptions as more so a relating of phenomenal experiences. After all, there is no room to presume that folks who, self-described, would kill the Buddha are returning from ineffable experiences only to clearly effable about reality, or that they are telling us tales about, what they claim to hold in-principle as, untellable stories. Something else is going on, which is an invitation into an experience and not an initiation into a philosophical system. Many people with profound existential longings (comparing favorably to your own) enjoy authentic phenomenal experiences that point to a deep interconnectedness of all Reality. This interrelatedness is ineluctably unobstrusive, which is why so few see it, but utterly efficacious, which is why all experience it, even unawares. Because we are dealing with phenomenal experiences and existential realizations and
We think he is right on in what he is saying here. At the same time, we must take great care, semiotically and semantically, to make sure that the terms, categories and logic employed by any vocabulary of choice in our dialogue are referencing and describing the same realities, hence our ongoing emphasis on the need for deliberate disambiguation, careful parsing, high nuance, rigorous definition and suitable logic or grammar. From THE PARADOX OF NON-DUALITY by Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO The state of non-duality is addressed in most of the advanced spiritual traditions of the world religions. It is sometimes referred to as No Self or Emptiness, as in Buddhism. It refers to the death of the false self or ego and the diminishment or extinction of the separate self sense, along with the abiding sense of unity with Ultimate Reality. One reading of Keating might suggest that he is facilely mapping one set of experiences over another without much rigor, disambiguation or parsing. Looking more closely, we feel safe in attributing an epistemic stance to him rather than an ontological perspective because we can glean that from within the context of other things he wrote in that same article and other things he's written over the years. It is not just a distinction between an epistemic stance and an ontological perspective, which is crucial, it is also a matter of distinguishing between states, structures and stages that, on one hand, ordinarily correlate (which we think it is fair to say) or, on the other hand, necessarily indicate (which would be patently absurd) one transformative or unitive level or another.
Heinrich Dumoulins Understanding Buddhism (Weatherhill, NY & Tokoyo, 1994) as translated and adapted from the German by Joseph S. OLeary
38
James and Tyra Arraj, Christianity in the Crucible of East-West Dialogue at innerexplorations.com
Drees. Willem B. A Case Against Temporal Critical Realism? Consequences of Quantum Cosmology for Theology at counterbalance.com
The reformed approach cannot truly aspire to an epistemology per se because philosophy is an autonomous methodology and it is a category error to call it Christian. Frames reformed epistemology, however, might be well situated in our own epistemological architectonic, resonating, as it explicitly does, with our own robustly integral approach, only departing from our essentially philosophical treatment by uncritically substituting presuppositional scriptural norms in place of our own Peircean normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics. Frames move is thus theological and, ergo, philosophically illicit, although our Peircean hermeneutic precisely takes one to the threshold of the abduction of the Ens Necessarium, thus leading into our pansemioentheist theology of nature, which values the reformed epistemology as a theology. Sure, there are those who fideistically conflate existential outlooks with evidential methodologies, who are rightfully charged with placing God in gaps, but there is no discernable increase in philosophical rigor by those who commit the inverse category error, scientistically suggesting that we must all necessarily conflate our descriptive and normative methods with our interpretive systems and then rush with them to metaphysical closure as philosophical naturalists. With Emerson, we believe that God arrives when the half-gods depart, and thus offer a re-enchanted (through and through) worldview over against any notion that either modernisms incessant chant of secularistic God of the gaps pejoratives, or postmodernisms nihilistic sensibilities, have ushered in either a philosophical naturalism, or an insidious relativism, as the default paradigm for primal reality, where our God of the ... gasp! still reigns. We question the classical patterns of dichotomous thinking, or at least suggest an overworking of same, as they necessarily divide reality into such categories as natural or supernatural, chance or necessity, existential or propositional, subjective or objective, reason or revelation, material or spiritual, nature or grace, acquired or infused, rationalist or empiricist or existentialist, evidentialist or fideist, secular or sacred, fact or value, and so on. We must discern which of these dyads are mere phenomenal distinctions and which are indeed ontological dichotomies without a default bias to either dualistic or nondualistic accounts. Instead, we affirm a holistic and integrative approach that, over against any sterile metaphysical compartmentalizations or epistemic absolutisms, and engaged by a robustly pneumatological imagination, sees creation thoroughly permeated by and wholly shot-through with the glory and splendor of our indwelling God-with-us. Our world is thus wholly, wholly holy (yes, theodicies notwithstanding).
41
For an explication of these philosophical correlations with these theological categories, see Faith Has Its Reasons by Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman, Jr. http://www.bible.org/series.php?series_id=190 wherein John Frames presuppositional perspectivalism inchoately articulates our own nonfoundational perspectivalism).
Bias for Methodological Naturalism? We do well to look for our lost keys underneath the lamp post, for there is little hope of finding them in the dark. For some of us, that does not, at the same time, suggest that we have a priori decided where those keys may or may not be.
Theism, Nontheism & Atheism and Agnosticism We can frame up this question regarding belief systems, or interpretive stances, in essentially pragmatic terms, such as with the thought of the American pragmatists, i.e. Peirce and James, and also of Pascal. Peirce would distinguish between belief and knowledge. Sometimes a/gnosticism and a/theism refer, respectively, to totally different questions, on one hand, knowledge and description, on the other hand, belief and interpretation. The belief-knowledge distinction is not a dichotomy, however, as they are in a dynamical relationship insofar as humankind's knowledge advances fallibly but inexorably, insofar as our different types of beliefs can, in fact, have a role in advancing knowledge (or thwarting it, for that matter). Peirce relates these approaches by saying that the normative sciences mediate between phenomenology and metaphysics. We employ a derived formula which suggests that our evaluative & normative stances mediate between our descriptive and interpretive stances to effect our prescriptive stances. Restated, our philosophic (spiritual) stance mediates between the positivistic (like science) and paradigmatic (like a/theology or a/gnosticism) stances to effect the prudential (moral and practical) stances. Implicit in this approach, human knowledge enterprises are inextricably intertwined with
42
Ursula likes to quote Jerry Fodor: Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious.
In Dialogue With Walker Percy 1 ) We suppose all weve really done in saying that the descriptive, interpretive and normative are methodologically autonomous but axiologically integral is that we have affirmed, with Peirce, that a descriptive, inductive science and an interpretive, abductive metaphysic and a normative, deductive philosophy are irreducibly triadic (Walker Percys Delta Factor). This is not unrelated to Walker Percys consideration of the various antinomies of science and philosophy vis a vis culture in that the source of antinomy lies in the limitations of the methods, themselves. Thus the need for mutual critique and meta-critique. Thus our recognition of manifold and multiform dynamics: teleological, perspectival, methodological, developmental, paradoxical and integral. Think here, too, of Percys treatment of the irreducible character of intersubjectivity. 2 ) And, perhaps, with Neville, our affirmation of the evaluative (culture) is but the application of Peirces pragmatic maxim, a recognition of the end to which the triad is ordered, teleologically. 3 ) Our distinctions between the theoretic, heuristic, semiotic (Walker Percys protocol statements) and dogmatic thus recognize degrees of pragmatic realization in the cashing out of values from our various conceptualizations. 4 ) Our distinctions between semantical, ontological and epistemic vagueness are recognitions of the fallible nature of semiosis. 5 ) Our suggestion that usefulness, beauty, goodness, elegance, parsimony, symmetry, facility and other aesthetic, pragmatic and ethical sensibilities (including, then, various pre-rational, nonrational and supra-or trans-rational approaches) can serve as truth-indicative signs is but a recognition of the probabilistic nature of semiosis as we reason, retroductively, from predicates back to putative subjects, for example, very often from effects to causes (and such known, or even unknown, subjects or causes to which only those predicates or effects could be proper). This is also to recognize that deductive, inductive and abductive inferences get progressively weaker even as we recognize that theyre all weve got to work with.
This reiterates the distinction between our cosmology as knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and our axiology as Good News .
In Dialogue With Reformed Epistemology & Radical Orthodoxy Of course we have rejected foundationalism but we are also rejecting the solution offered by Reformed epistemology. We are deeply sympathetic to Radical Orthodoxy and its aim to mediate between faith and reason but are offering what we think is an indispensable corrective. Too many in RO seem to be saying that philosophy, metaphysics and theology are integrally-related methodologically and thereby overcome any insidious dualisms with their claim that all approaches are at bottom confessional. Their intuition that all of these approaches to reality have confessional elements is spot on but these approaches to reality remain, indeed and nevertheless, methodologically autonomous. If these approaches stay out of each others way, it is not because theyve been methodologically conflated, its because they are asking distinctly different questions, employing distinctly different commitments, all as explicated in our own heuristic. RO is correct in that these
43
Theology of Nature pansemioentheism, a pneumatological theology of nature Apologetics theological perspectives, a theological perspectivalism; robust realisms rational and presuppositional evidential existential trans-evaluative Anthropological Outlook existential orientations as theological imperatives (theosis) community as orthocommunio creed as orthodoxy cult as orthopathos
See Terrence W. Deacon, Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub, __Chapter 5, The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion__ (Hardcover) by Philip Clayton (Editor), Paul Davies (Editor) Oxford University Press, USA (August 24, 2006)
WHAT IS METAPHYSICS THAT WE SHOULD BE MINDFUL OF IT? In our view, following Whitehead, Christianity indeed remains in search of a metaphysic, but so does all other human endeavor. So, we have a very open mind about "how" it is that all manner of things may, can, will and shall be well. And we have to be similarly open regarding just what well means. Exactly "how" this may be so is, for me, a positivist or descriptive endeavor (e.g. scientific, falsifiable), which articulates its claims with categories and concepts that are, in a word, theoretic, in other words, scientific or positivist. Those claims and concepts and categories are negotiated by those in humanity who participate in our fallible but earnest community of inquiry. As previously set forth, many claims and concepts and categories are still-in-negotiation (heuristic) in this community of inquiry that we call humankind. Humanity, as a community of value-realizers, also engages in interpretive and evaluative endeavors,
AFTERWARD --- NORMATIVE IMPLICATIONS: May namaste, then, become more than a greeting but a way of life, as we look always and everywhere and in everyone for the pneumatological realities we profess herein. May our inter-religious stance be more irenic as we acknowledge the Spirit in one another with true reverence, in authentic solidarity and utmost compassion. A most fundamental aspect of the unqualified affirmation of human dignity would seem to be our nurturance of the attitude that all other humans come bearing an irreplaceable gift for us, that we are to maintain a stance of receptivity toward them, open to receive what it is they offer us through, with and in the Spirit. Whether the Magi were occidental or oriental, Jesus was receptive. When John offered baptism, Jesus was receptive. When Mary anointed his feet, Jesus was receptive. When invited to dine with tax collectors and prostitutes, Jesus was receptive. A critical gaze not first turned on oneself and ones ways of looking at reality will have very little efficacy when it is otherwise habitually and arrogantly turned first on others. All of this is to observe that, beyond whatever it is that we offer to the world as our unique gift, rather than always approaching our sisters and brothers as fix-it-upper projects in need of our counsel and ministry, sometimes the Spirit may be inviting us to listen, observe and learn from them in a posture of authentic humility and from a stance of genuine affirmation of their infinite value and unique giftedness. While our encounters of the Spirit may be manifold and varied from one phenomenal experience to the next, especially when situated in one major tradition versus another, we may be saying more than we know if we attempt to describe such experiences with more ontological specificity than can be reasonably claimed metaphysically or theologically, suggesting, for example, that such experiences necessarily differ in
Suggested Reading Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972) Deacon, Terrence, Emergence: The Hole at the Wheels Hub in The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion by Philip Clayton (Editor), Paul Davies (Editor) (Oxford University Press, 2006) Deacon, T. & Goodenough, U., The Sacred Emergence of Nature in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford Handbooks in Religion and Theology) by Philip Clayton (Editor), Zachary Simpson (Editor) , (Oxford University Press, USA, 2006) Gelpi, Donald L., Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (Collegeville, Minn.:Liturgical press/Michael Glazier, 2000) Gelpi, Donald L. , The Gracing of Human Experience: Rethinking the Relationship between Nature and Grace (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press/Michael Glazier, 2001) Haught, John, The Cosmic Adventure: Science, Religion and the Quest for Purpose (Paulist Press: 1984) Bracken, Joseph, The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link between East and West (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995) For comprehensive discussions and bibliographical materials pertaining to the relation between science and religion, visit http://www.counterbalance.net/ Barbour, I., When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (HarperOne, 2000) and Religion in an Age of Science: Gifford Lectures 1989-1991, Vol 1 (HarperOne, 1990) Polkinghorne, J., Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (Yale University Press, 2007) and Science and Theology (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998) Haught, J., Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (Paulist Press, 1995) and The Cosmic Adventure: Science, Religion and the Quest for Purpose (Paulist Press, 1984) Peters, T., Bridging Science and Religion (Theology and the Sciences) by Ted Peters (Editor), Gaymon Bennett (Editor) (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2003) and Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence by Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett (Abingdon Press, 2003) Peacocke, A., The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 1986) Paths from Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring (Oneworld Publications, 2001) Drees, W., Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Religion and Science in Context: A Guide to the Debates (Routledge, coming in 2009)
Patrological Axiology Eschatology Ecclesiology & Theological Anthropology Sacramentology Soteriology an assist from beyond? Anticipating a Messiah Pneumatological Axiology Orienting
Hermeneutics in Dialogue
Interreligious Dialogue Other Kindred Voices