The Human Question

This thought is really a diamond in the rough... or perhaps zirconium in the trash. One can think of matter as an inert, pure extension, as a kind of Ding an sich to be acted upon by either laws (a kind of materialism that is really a dualism, inasmuch as laws are not themselves material things) or by an immaterial principle (dualism, properly speaking, with matter as a reified prime matter) Or one can think of matter as the proximate capacity of the concrete individual to exist and hence operate differently than it is now operating (i.e., proximate matter in hylomorphism) Here comes the analogy with theories of intellection: to conceive of sensation as a purely inert substratum upon which intellection must work is either to invoke a psychological dualism in which the intellect is super active (as in innate ideas or forms of judgment or reminiscence) in ordering sensation or to suppose that intellection is really the sum of sensations, which sum can be understood to arise in a la

Every abstraction occurs within a narrative--including this statement! This is true even for science, for it begins and ends with a story, i.e., the story of past discoveries, of how you learned to DO science, the expectation of where science will lead us, the expectation of where we are going anyways (which includes cosmology).

The quantitative approach, inasmuch as it becomes a kind of sola scriptura (sola mathematica?), can understand ligher levels of being only as higher levels of complexity, for it cannot grasp the one that unites the many.

If you think that scientific discoveries can falsify folk metaphysics, then you must also grant that later discoveries can falsify the earlier falsifications.

The efficient cause par excellence is a human agent acting deliberately and skillfully (I am speaking epistemically not ontologically: i.e., the prime example by which understand all other cases). "Lower level" causes must be understood by subtracting attirbutes from the human prime analog. For example, "force" involves an analogy with the kinaesthesis involved in intentional acts. Ditto with energy. A little fuzzy here: If our understanding of "lower level" causes were not arrived at in the manner just proposed, then you certainly could not explain human action (trying to move, wishing, perceiving, judging, etc.) by adding together the lower level actions... or at least not without sweeping the problem under the carpet by using homuncular descriptive language. A mechanism does not cognize, desire, try to act.

The following is a pair of letters and replies between me and a professor who has criticized intelligent design as being "operationally vacuous," i.e., not even having the possibility of a research program. Hello Dr. G I am an adjunct professor at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore and am presently enjoying your ... lectures ... on [s]cience... It occurred to me that intelligent design need not be operationally vacuous: suppose three researchers look at the same phenomena with three different agendas. The first believes that the neo-Darwinian understanding of evolution is sufficient to explain the origin of present life forms; the second believes that evolution could not have occurred unless extra-terrestrials intervened; the third is Michael Behe. It seems conceivable to me that the three could engage in research that might support each of their respective theses. The evidence for ET (#2) would be first of all the improbability that things evolved as they did without inter

The following is a selection of interesting points in Behe's Edge of Evolution: The main planks of his understanding of the controversey are 1.) a complete acceptance of descent with modification, but combined with 2.) a rejection of the sufficiency of natural selection/random variation to explain that modification; 3.) a fine tuning hypothesis to account for radically improbable mutations (this fine tuning is a kind of extension of the anthropic principle to biology). The most helpful argument was in chapter 7, where he said that 1.) the formation of new macromolecular structures in the cell would require two or more protein molecues to become joined through modifications in the amino acids of their respective binding sights; 2). the mutations to these binding sights must result in their being complementary with respect to shape and chemical properties, 3). such complementarity is extremely improbable-- about one in ten to a hundred million. 4). such complementarity must occur in

A positivist can be a fundamentalist in a manner somewhat analogous to a Bible-only Christian. If the former takes the categories of logic, math and the philosophical scientific method as ahistorical and univocal truths, he is like a Bible-only Christian who reasons as if the King James Bible fell out of the sky.

Causality cannot be conveyed simply in terms of a logical relation. Causality is a term (i.e., subject or predicate, not a relation between propositions. For example, “the water is poured by me” “is poured by me” is a term. “By me” makes it causal. *** If those who are fond of wielding Ockham's razor are looking for a big target, then I propose that they dispense with the necessity ascribed to the laws of nature. Why? because we do not perceive or measure their necessity, nor do we necessity in iself. That is, we perceive neither necessity in nature nor semantic necessity. Nor do we perceive contingency. So let those who would replace metaphysics and religion with science take their own medicine. And they will find that they have rendered science vacuous. *** The recognition of non-measured characteristics is a necessary condition for measurement. Measurement is always the “measurement of” something. Inasmuch as the characteristic is that by which we measure, awareness of it c