The Human Question

Theology of the body starts with a story of how Adam and Eve discovered themselves simply by looking at each other.  Upon seeing their respective mate, each of them intuited that both were meant for complete mutual self-giving.  This intuition may be very good, but the account at how we get at it needs to be filled out with an account of how what comes intuitively in the Genesis  story comes about in us only gradually through practices originating from a social context.  The use of the  Genesis story to theologize about sexuality allows us to talk very directly about how a husband and wife relate to each other.  The man and woman in the story not only recognize not only their complementary sexual differences, but also their need and capacity to dedicate themselves to each other--or to put it in language more like John Paul II's: they recognize and desire to realize their capacity for a communion of persons.  But that communion requires communication, a...

What if a future technology were to allow humans to program their desires?  Would it be a legitimate exercise of autonomy to choose to drink alcohol in dangerous amounts?  To engage in mass murder (assuming that one could also take precautions that it could not be carried out)?  To be a slave to others?  To do nothing but count blades of grass? No. Why?

That's all that I need to say.

If Einstein was a Spinozan, then he did not accept falsifiability as a necessary condition for intelligibility or veracity.

My argument from agency is Augustinian inasmuch as--after establishing that our knowledge of the rest of nature is in a sense anthropometric, it establishes that we are measured by another.

That question is, are we able to produce anything new?  That is, creativity is the best evidence of human freedom.

First start with a proof from agency, and point out how in humans (qua microcosms) the nonrational is subject to the rational.  Then talk about plain old things moving about and ask causal questions about them, and ask: does the rational come from the non-rational or vice versa?

Okay, _____, I just finished grading yesterday, so I'm happy to return to our conversation. And yes, bro Steve White, Pascal's Wager, figures in quite well here. Especially when combined with William James' "The Will to Believe." But lets get back to the conversation we were having. First of all you have me contradicting myself, saying at one time that anything that can't be explained by nature is a miracle and then saying at another time that some things that cannot be explained by nature are not miracles. I don't remember saying either of these precisely as you have stated them. But I do remember saying that an event's not being explainable by natural processes is ONE of the characteristics of a miracle. There's more to it than that.  1st description of an event: Suppose something really, really inexplicable happens: the sun appears to move in a swirling fashion and come closer to earth, so that it's seen and reported as having behaved ...

i. Consider the simple enjoyment of our own bodily well-being (contentment, comfort, and the like) or pleasant food or the like:  these are examples of a private good.  The crudest version of so-called egotism would be one who lives for this experience alone: everything else is just a means toward that end. ii. If that were the only thing we could enjoy, then our public actions (as well as the objects of those actions) would have only an instrumental value , but . . . iii. we often take delight IN acting, so action is not always merely instrumental.  This kind of delight is most obvious when we act so as to enjoy "concupiscible" goods.  You might say that we live to act rather than we act to live or to obtain some future reward.   iv. And among those actions that we delight in most are those interactions with other individuals whereby we enjoy the interaction itself as an object OR we cooperate with others so as to create something t...

Many whom we call egotists might be better described as small-minded.  That is, their view of their own fulfillment is so impoverished they see only the goods that can be enjoyed only inasmuch as they are not shared and fail to recognize the goods that can be enjoyed precisely by being shared.

If the many universes really did appear ex nihilo , then couldn't they just as well disappear?  In that case, it would be possible that no universe at all would be in existence.  In that case, Aquinas's third way might be quite pertinent. Of course, the claim isn't really that the big bang occurred ex nihilo , but rather that it was caused by a flux in the quantum field.  But is the quantum field itself contingent?  If it is, then that's where the the third way would be applicable.

Trying to guess at how Aristotle would think of these matters: If the four elements could, as it were, "have their way," then they would settle out so that all earth would be inert at the bottom, above that water, above that air, and above that fire.  Perfectly orderly, but perfectly lifeless. The churning of these elements that is brought bout by the motion of the spheres may be a necessary condition for the maintenance of life, for it causes a disequilibrium which in turn... (I am not sure of where to go with this). That churning's source is something that is in some sense alive (actually, for Aristotle, it's not some "one" thing but many spheres, and the many spheres are either ensouled or are moved by immaterial intellects). Now to the present way of looking at things: Those aspects of our world which are susceptible to mechanistic description might be the parts that likewise seem to seek equilibrium.  More than mechanics may be needed for life...

It supposes that all actions are at some basic level the result of instrumental reasoning, i.e., wherein someone who desires pleasure x calculates that by doing y he may obtain x, and hence decides to act. Pleasure IN cooperation is a great counter-example to egotism as calculus.  And it is a better counterexample than examples of pure altruism.  It is neither egoistic nor altruistic.  It's not, "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours," but it is capable of giving rise to such reciprocity.  It is not "I will act for your sake without seeking benefit," but is capable of explaining how actions that benefit the other while leading to self-harm can seem desirable to animals.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism

Zachariah's question was epistemological.  Mary's: metaphysical .

In De anima,  Aristotle struggles to give an analogy for the soul as entelecheia .  At one point, he compares it to habitual knowledge, which is a kind of form that actualizes the capacity to know so that one is ready to act.  The capacity is like matter and the habit like the form.  Helpful, but just an analogy, But I think that the scholastic saying "action follows being" is also helpful, possibly mores than the above-mentioned analogy.  "Being" seems to be a more accurate description of the activity called the "soul."

If higher level operations were principled by lower operations rather than by a higher level of being, then those (higher level) operations would merely be an effect of the interactions of lower level beings: they would be epiphenomenal.  And if epiphenomenal, then agency would be an illusion.  But if agency is not illusory, it is not epiphenomenal and higher level operations are not the effect of lower level operations.  The only alternative is that there is a higher level of being present.  But how does that relate to the lower--as being is to capacity?

There are two preambles to the acceptance of miracles: either is sufficient. The first is the conviction that God is provident.  If God is, then it would be fitting for God to have something to say, and communicating is generally a free action, and God's freedom would be demonstrated by supernatural intervention.  In other words, we at least hope for God to show us that He is speaking to us, miracles are God's way of initiating communication. The second is the recognition my existence is good, but that this goodness consists precisely in my searching for meaning.  "My" hear ends up including all of "us."  And "meaning" ends up being all encompassing.  So we are naturally searching for God.  We are, as Giussani says, beggars.  Miracles are crusts of bread given by God to coax us to (the thought of Panera as a prelude to heaven just popped in my mind) become His companions.  Compañeros.  Refusing in principle to accept this invitation until...

Words are our gestures toward the infinite; language, the choreography.

The number 'pi' looks random from one perspective, but not to one who knows how it is generated. What looks random from a quantum point of view may be determined by an act of free will.

I would like to argue that altruistic behavior is derived from the valuing of a good that one has shared with the one for whose sake one acts.  The problem, however, seems to be that the altruist doesn't hope to enjoy that common good: that is, if you give your life to save your children, then once you're dead you are no longer enjoying the good of community.  But at the moment you are acting for their good, you are sharing in some sense sharing that good with them and possibly doing so more abundantly than you otherwise could.  So you not only act so that they will live well later on, but to be with them-later-on right now.

The being at work of a capacity while  it is still potentially fully realized.

All living things seek "to be inter-active" and for animals the preeminent form of interaction is cooperation; and for humans the preeminent form of interaction is... liturgy.

non-living things seek equilibrium; living seek what would be disequilibrium for a non-living thing, but is for them an increase in useful energy (think ATP molecules); for a living thing to achieve the sort of equilibrium sought by a non-living thing would be death.

Freedom is the ability to act for transcendent reasons.

What would happen to our society's mores if its members very suddenly lost the ability to contracept? How would that society manage  fertility, love and sexual desire?  What practices would it praise, allow, condemn?  What would it come to regard as vice? As virtue? One thing is certain: it would no longer condemn the call to self-control oppressive or repressive. And if inhabitants of this society suddenly found themselves in one where sexual technology allowed for contraception, would the old virtues become obsolete?  Or would they still be needed?

I am not really sure of who it was, but I recall (or rather I seem to recall) reading about an Islamic philosopher who so denied secondary causality that it would seem that the whole world is annihilated and recreated from moment to moment (quantum unit of time? :) ).  Let's say it was Al-ghazali. In any case, if one wants to do physics while regarding human agency as an illusion, then the basic concepts of physics would be metaphors based upon illusions: not the sort of foundation that would encourage one who seeks to understand reality better. In such a case, even "force" would be too metaphysical.  So that all that science could deliver to us would be predictions about what appears when and where.  No information whatsoever about causality.  In such a case, nature, as so conceived, would be indistinguishable from nature as conceived by Al-ghazali--the only difference might be that the former offers a grid of Cartesian coordinates as a template for looking a...

You can still recognize that God wants you to believe.  For it's not because we believe in scripture that we believe in Jesus but vice versa.  So your question when you read or listen to scripture should be, what does God want to tell me via this writing?  Am I not better at getting the message when I taking the story at face value rather than when I am reading it skeptically?  Yes, I am. /

Imagine that you are on a life raft that was sinking, and you could save the lives of all by removing one of the members of the raft.  Other passengers include a bonobo monkey that is famous for using signs to communicate and a mentally handicapped person who is less able to think and communicate than then monkey.  Question:  who would you push off the raft.  1. The monkey; 2. the mentally handicapped person. If you are a nominalist & utilitarian, you will think that you are at least as entitled to push of the mentally handicapped human. The same perspective comes into play when one objects to the Church's position about contraception and homosexuality.  The contemporary listener often thinks of the "thou shalt not" aspect of Catholic morality through utilitarian and nominalist lenses.  The result is that this listener equates sexual relations between partners of the same sex with relations had by two sterile partners of the opposite sex. This ana...

Galileo had thought experiments whose conclusion was that -- absent force -- a thing will move in a straight line without ever stopping. Might it not be better to plug in the consideration of gravity to thought experiments about momentum.  And in such a case, wouldn't be end up thing of movement as naturally moving in an ellipsis?  I throw something in the air and it returns in an apparently parabolic path.  Well, maybe it's really a really small part of an ellipsis.  And that ellipsis is cut short by the fact that the projectile hit the earth.  But if the projectile had been flying in the same direction with respect to the center of the earth while the earth itself was thousands of times denser, then the earth's surface would be so much closer to the earth's center that the projectile would not end up hitting the earth at all.  Rather, it would fly in an ellipsis, like other satellites.   One might object that we are better off abstracting from...

We can abstract from teleology in our description of movement by plotting x and y coordinates where y is displacement and x is time.  But if time itself is the measure of motion, then the very way in which we plot movement in a sense presupposes it at a more basic level.  And it presupposes a human who measures.  So if our ability to propose a plausible mechanistic view of human action requires our imagining that human activity, being only a more complicated version of the sort of activity found in non-living things, can be graphed on Cartesian charts, ... if all that is presumed, then this mechanistic proposal likewise presupposes that which it would eliminate.  It uses a feature of humans that cannot be reduced to the mechanistic without acknowledging that it is doing so, precisely at the time that it claims to be reducing the human to the mechanical. Note also that Cartesian-coordinate description of the human act of counting movement is impossible.  For th...

Aristotle points out in Book I, chapter 1 that a plurality of natures is a necessary condition for substantial change to be able to occur.  Why, because new substances/natures come into existence when things of different kinds are combined: "... when things are combined htere is coming to be, and when they are dissolved there is perishing." (314b8) It's obvious that this would (rightfully) seem to be the case at Aristotle's time, for organisms are always made of non-uniform parts.  But we could say the same today on the basis of what we know about atoms, they differ in kind because they consist of different combinations of parts.

Always try to explain as much as you can my means of the discipline in which you are engaged, while being open to the possibility that there are some things that can be explained only by another discipline than your own.

James McWilliams is trying hard--too hard-- to convince the reader that Aquinas believed in momentum/inertia before Galileo ever came up with it. I ain't takin' his word for it, but I will look up the passages that he cites. They include the Commentary on the Physics VIII, lec. 22, where St. Thomas says that "the last quantity of energy is in the stone itself and is spent on the resistance of the object struck.  Here we have our whole doctrine of inertia." Huh? He also points out (on p. 13) that Aristotle was aware that more effort is needed to get an immobile thing moving than to keep an already-moving thing at the same velocity.  "In fact, that this phenomena was discussed  appears from the Mechanica  (intended to complete the Physics ), where we read: 'why is it that a body which is already in motion is easier to move than one which is at rest?'" (see ch. 32 858a3). Fr. McWilliams also accuses Galileo of misrepresenting Aristotle's s...

De Generationibus Book I, chapter 9 makes an interesting claim (if read it correctly and remember correctly what I read).  It argues against the pro-Socratics on the basis that they could not explain efficient causality, i.e., the action/passion relation, precisely because they don't make the distinction between act/potency.

Today I'm skimming Physics and Philosophy , by James A. McWilliams, S. J.  (1945).  It seems that Aquinas mentions in lecture 28 of his commentary on Book VIII of the Physics  that the outermost or near-outermost sphere rotated every 36,000 years.  McWilliams indirectly quotes St. Thomas as saying that the "very celestial pole itself, centered near the North Star, describes an [page3/page4] orbit every '36,000 years.' Although the present calculation is nearer to 26,000, it is enlightening to learn that St. Thomas was aware of the phenomenon."  Aquinas's own commentary makes it clear that this sphere is supposed to be the one with the stars embedded on it.  Okay.  But why does the author say on page 5 that the actual time of rotation 25,800 years?

http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/kelly-lonergan.shtml

Just as the notion of a limitless number line might be entailed in our concept of counting finite numbers, so too when we begin to think of higher/lower modes or rationality, we are treating rationality itself like the number line.

If endless duration is meaningful, then our concept of duration has no inherent limit.

If we are deceived about the nature of human agency, then the basic notions of causality that animate physics are myths or illusions, for human agency is the prime instance of causality: all else is understood analogically.

I am saving this link to read later: looks interesting! http://bigquestionsonline.com/content/does-quantum-physics-make-it-easier-believe-god

sin: misdirecting our longing for the infinite

Forget material substrata for a moment.  Instead think of matter as a lowest level of form (ala Polanyi).  Doesn't that make the contingency of material things all the more obvious... and hence pave the way for  a version of the third way that would work? Weird question: what if one's starting point were the existence of a multiplicity of angelic forms?  Would the very fact that these immaterial forms are different underscore the fact that each one of them is Contingent?  From which would follow yet another workable version of the third way. Perhaps.

To Peter Atkins and others who call the positing of eternal life, with its promise of eternal bliss, mere wish fulfillment: Is positing science as a discipline that attains the truth mere wish fulfillment?  What would it take to know the truth more and more adequately—how long would it take?  If we were able to achieve this goal more and more adequately, would the truth continue to satisfy us?  Eternally?  

In an earlier post I talk about how "Atkins denies that the universe has a meaning or purpose, and then displays at every point in the discussion, a craving for unbounded knowledge of what is. That atheist is so  purpose driven ." More on the same theme.  It seems to me that Atkins' objection to cosmic purpose is based on the fact that there is no measurable "purpose-fact" out there in the world.  Granted.  But he's looking in the wrong place.  Instead of looking for purpose in galaxies and black holes, look at    human beings  (and possibly by other rational beings)  engaged in distinctively human activities.   That is because of the way that purpose relates us to each other and to the universe.  Place a bunch of humans in the same place and you get -- not a sum of individual purposes -- but a community with one purpose: to discover what others would also recognize as true... something naturally achieved together with them. W...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/23/physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-soul/ thanks, Tim, for the heads up!

Fuzzy/raw idea about a response to those who find an adaptive basis for distinctively human modes of cognition: what is the adaptive basis for non-Euclidean geometry?  Evolution does not allow for us to be over-engineered, but we are overengineered in the sense that a thousand years ago, we were genotypically ready to do forms of math invented only in the last two centuries and to listen to/compose symphonies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8510711/Belief-in-God-is-part-of-human-nature-Oxford-study.html

...the need for beauty. In fact,  The Greatest Show could be seen as a persuasive argument that evolution is beautiful.  And he offers such an argument perhaps because he recognizes the divide between beauty and truth that besets a positivistic culture. One might object that if evolution is beautiful, then how are we to understand all of the ugliness that so often attends life?  Here Dawkin's answer would seem to be like that of Augustine: the beauty of the whole is not undone by the ugliness of some of the parts, for they  lead, ultimately into something beautiful (the latter point made rather well by Michael Dowd in his sometimes touchy-feelie Thank God for Evolution ). In such as case, however, what becomes of all of some of Christopher Hitchens'  complaints about the ugliness of nature (thinking here of his allusion to the horror of human existence prior to modern medicine)?  If Dawkins/Augustine are right, then even these horrors are more adeq...

Instead of talking about what is natural in terms of what-is-natural-in-itself-apart-from-our-regard-for-it, instead talk about what is natural (as in "second nature")  quoad-nos (in relation to us) in virtue of our practices.  Then dig deeper till we find the contours of first nature within second nature... get insights into that which is natural " quoad omnes ." At about the same time also look at the   nos and omnes , not as larger and larger collections of rational individuals, but as a members of a community.  Argue that affirming nature either entails or suggests an orientation toward and from the One who is head of the community of rational beings in virtue of constituting nature. Disadvantage of not proceeding this way: without making this move, talk of what is natural in morality seems to be a question begging appeal to God as arbitrary craftsman/or/lawmaker.  It tends to sound like it wants to trump the arbitrariness of our conventions wi...

I have an idea for discussing the so-called subjective aspect of human action (feeling, perceiving, thinking, etc.) in comparison to the so-called objective aspect (human processes and structures that we can observe from the outside and measure).  Historically, we have come to talk about them as if they were two different things that mysteriously interact with each other.  But that is kind of like thinking of magnetism and electricity as two different processes.  Just as one discovers that they are two aspects of the same reality called electromagnetism, so two, one can discover that the subjective/objective are likewise two different aspects of the same hylomorphic reality.  Of course, this analogy limps if you take it too far...

While debating with my friend __,it occurred to me that his anti-organized religion screeds were one-sided because he lacked an appreciation of the desires that lead one to regard religion as good.  I would like to construct an analogy with a tone deaf person who can't recognize the beauty of violin playing, but winces with pain whenever a violinist squeeks a wrong note or something like that.  Such a fellow would look at violin music as pernicious.  Similarly, with __.

He says at one point he asks, rhetorically, why should God care about someone as insignificant as we are in comparison with Himself?  And at another point he lists all the vices of God vis-a-vis humanity with the understanding that God ought to have cared enough to treat us better.  Apparently, we both are and are not insignificant...

"What is the author trying to communicate?" is a question that can be answered only within the context of the answer to the question "What is the author trying to get the reader to do?" And the latter question can be answered only within the context of the answer to the question "Where does the author think everything is heading?" And the latter can only be answered by relating it to "Where are we heading?"

What if the violinist was your mother?

All communication is at some basic level about how the messenger/receiver are to live.  This is like what Aquinas, when talking about scripture, calls either the tropological or the moral (methinks) sense.  And all moral communication is at a certain level about where we are heading, which is like what Aquinas calls the anagogical sense. I need to write up an allegory about what it would be like (in two cases) to find messages that don't match their contexts:  in both cases, the language used is foreign, so that the interpreter must try to figure out what it might mean on the basis of context.  tin the first case one finds a speculative message  on the beach of a desert island composed by a lone survivor; in the second one finds a message of immediate practical relevance in the pages of a reference book in a science library.  Use this to explore how expectation is based upon the practical social context in which something is communicated, and how that exp...

One way to look at OT authors in relation to their sources is to recognize that, inasmuch as they made use of other traditions and combined them, they regarded those traditions as leading us toward the truth, but they also saw that these traditions needed to be judged. Might inspiration in such cases consist in the making of such a judgment? More later...

One way to understand the "canonical hermeneutic for scripture" is to note that the acceptance of the text by the community  as  part of sacred scripture  is like the promulgation of a law.  Just as the meaning of a law is what it means to the community at the time of promulgation, so too does the meaning of scripture may in some sense reflect what it means to the ecclesial community at the time of its approbation. Perhaps the German distinction between das Gesetz and das Recht figures in here--not sure.

The scientist, in seeking to discover propositions about reality that will, as much as possible, stand the test of time, shows a hunger for what is unchangingly true, and for an ultimate reality to which that truth leads us.  In regarding that reality as beautiful, the scientist shows a hunger for a genuine meaning, for the meaning we find in our lives is inseparable from that which we consider most beautiful.

The new atheists like to go on and on about how ancient man thought wrongly that Earth is the center of the cosmos, etc. and how this mistake supported anthropocentric teleology. A comment made by C S Lewsi in God in the Dock may address this claim.  He points out that the very first page of Ptolemy's Almagest  makes it quite clear that ancient man did not think the earth large in comparison to the rest of the cosmos.  Perhaps this point helps disabuse the new atheists of their view of teleology as being based upon an anthropocentric cosmology.

The defeater "the Gospels are inconsistent with each other therefore no need to take them seriously" is inappropriate because our initial question is whether they are historically reliable.  Witnesses to a crime can be reliable while disagreeing in minor details.  In fact, if they don't show a little inconsistency, the appearance is that they have all been coached by the prosecution... etc.

Part of what we need to recognize is that God, as such, is not the most moral finite being that there is, whose morality is achieved by conformity to standards.  Rather, God is the author of being.  That doesn't make God immoral or amoral.  But it tells us that you don't judge the target by the same standard as you do the flight of the arrow toward it.

It is unreasonable to abstract from the faith of the community when explicating the text.  After all, it is the community that accepts the text, not the text that creates the community.

Only the infinite can fascinate us forever.

Suppose you were convinced that X couldn't have really happened, but all the evidence is in favor of the fact that it did: how would you report it? How would a secular historian with positivist biases report a miracle? He or she might deny the evidence in an ad hoc manner, or he or she might deny that the evidence points in the direction of a miracle. The former would be straightforwardly unprincipled.  The latter would the use of a philosophical prejudice to interpret the evidence--and if that's bona fide history, then so is the acceptance of miracles and the resurrection.

There exists somewhere a couple that is living together without having married that is significantly more competent at child raising than a particular married couple... Use this point to argue modem tollens against SS marriage argument about greater competency of some SS couples than some hetero couples.

The first two recommended by Fr. Michael Simone: http://www.amazon.com/Two-Edged-Sword-Interpretation-Old-Testament/dp/0385069693 http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Old-Testament-Lawrence-Boadt/dp/0809126311/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326574643&sr=1-1 The last by David Armstrong Alleged Bible "Contradictions" and "Difficulties": Master List of Christian Internet Resources for Apologists (Including a Lengthy Bibliography) Also check out  The New Jerome Biblical Commentary 

Apart from the desire to enjoy communion with God specifically in the life of the Trinity, the desire to live forever is not much more than the desire to be rather than not to be.  But merely being forever without such enjoyment would not be fulfillment: it might even be painful.  So  any non-Trinity-centered desire to live forever is the end, amounts to the fear of death.  But the revelation of the Trinity shows us that living forever is desirable...intensely desirable.  And it makes living in the present more beautiful, dramatic, fulfilling.