Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

As has been my usual refrain of late, I again begin this post with an explanation as to why I have not been posting lately.  It is still due to the recent move and the new job here in San Antonio.  With respect to the move, we are finally getting close to being able to say that we are settled in.  With respect to the job, after one week there is not much to note other than to say: oh boy, there is a lot of work to do before Fall.

Last week while driving home from work I was listening to a program called “El Pistolero ” on a local Spanish language radio station.  The experience was a bit of a déjà vu event but not really.  Normally one has the sense of having experienced the event without knowing why.  In this case, it was clearly because they were discussing the still rumored death of “El Rey de Pop.”  Some 32 years ago, I recall driving to work from football practice in the then Canal Zone and listening to a Panamanian radio station discussing the just announced death of “El Rey de Rock.”  I was surprised in both cases at the interest and effect that an English language entertainer had on another culture.  In both cases it seems, that the “kings”  ubiquitous presence seemed to give them a sense of “power” that made their deaths very difficult to grasp.

This brings to mind a recent event in which I had the opportunity to discuss God’s power.  In a workshop the presenter was discussing the perceptions of power and its affects on others.  A valid enough topic.  However, the way that term “power” was employed caused me some concern.  Now “power” was not explicitly defined.  The various possible definitions were discussed but the precise definition was purposely left amorphous.  Nevertheless, the term was used in the common colloquial sense that suggests that power is the capacity to do what one wills, as one wills.  This sense of power as arbitrary application of force over/against someone or something else certainly corresponds to the arbitrariness associated with modern notions of freedom.  It also is what gave rise to the Hegelian-Marxist-Nietzschean view that conflict is in someway a necessary part of the natural order.  This defective philosophy permeates many aspects of our society.

The temptation to view power as the ability to exercise arbitrarily one’s will is a great danger.  Combined with the suspicion of others motivations, which necessarily comes with such a view, can lead one to view all relationships in terms of whom has the ability to coerce the other person to conform to his wishes.  The accepted pathological diagnosis of such behavior is called borderline personality disorder.  However, this defective way of thinking is omnipresent in politics, in most community organizing movements influenced by Saul Alinsky’s philosophy, in Marxist liberation theology, in radical feminism, in many dissenting organizations within the Catholic Church, and in most post-modern philosophies especially deconstructionism.

This outlook had its western origins, it seems, with an application of such a view of arbitrariness to God.  William of Ockham brought this way of thinking to Christian Europe (some have argued from Islamic voluntarism) with his version of voluntarist nominalism and its corrosive affects have been present in Western thought ever since.  The view that life is a quest for attaining power in order to conform the physical and social order to one’s world view permeates contemporary thinking and sadly, it has made its way in Christian thinking as well.  At its most radical, this world view underlies those liberation theologies which base themselves on Marxian philosophy as suggested above.  However, even those who have attempted to leave Marxism behind, have trouble ridding themselves of thinking in categories shaped by this “power game” albatross.

An example of the this confusion about power applied to God’s power would seem to be author Eric H. F. Law, who proposes a “Gospel Cycle of Living” in his book The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb.  In the book, Law proposes that in order to live the Gospel one must cycle through the powerlessness of the Cross and then “get off the Cross” and choose to act and speak.  The latter “empowerment” mirrors Christ’s resurrection which manifested Jesus’ power while the Cross was a result of His human powerlessness.  We must be in touch with both.  This is a distortion of an underlying truth.

It seems to me that to view the Cross as powerlessness is to mistake the authentic meaning of power and to fall into the “power game” fallacy.  The term “power” arises from the Latin potis, which is the ability to do something.  God is omnipotent.  He has the potency to do everything, but “everything” does not imply an arbitrary potency.  God can only do those things which accord with His nature.  That is not to say that God does do everything He may do.  He chooses to do those things with respect to His creation that are most fitting in accord with His nature.

In terms of the Cross and God’s power, I would argue that one has to consider various facts in order to properly interpret both.  Jesus drew a clear line between rightful authority which is given by God to serve others, and the abuse of authority/power which he says of the pagans who use it to serve themselves.  This is an clear indication that Jesus does not accede to the modern-pagan understanding of power in the arbitrary sense.

In terms of the Cross, Jesus tells His disciples that He chooses to lay down His life, that no one is taking it from Him.  St. Paul indicates that the Cross is the power of God for those who are being saved.  The astute Christian who recognizes the contradiction of the Gospel to the values of the world will be open to understanding how what the world views as weakness and folly is rightly to be understood as authentic power.  The key, I would say, is to go to the very heart of who God is in Himself.  I would argue then that authentic power is inextricably linked to love.

God is love and so love becomes the source of all authentic potency.  Love is the willing of the good of the other for his own sake effected through the total gift of oneself to the other.  The Trinitarian Processions are the theological description of this eternal gift and the Cross is its temporal manifestation par excellence.   The Cross is analogically correlated to the first Procession, the Son’s eternal and total return of Himself to the Father initiative of love.

The reason that the Cross appears to be powerlessness to the world is because love is misunderstood.  Love cannot abide in coercion.  God cannot simultaneously love and coerce the will of another.  This is not to say that God is necessarily compelled by His nature to permit each and every action of one of His volitional creatures.  Nevertheless, it appears to be the case that He usually does so (though we cannot know this for certain).

Love, rather, invites the other into a relationship.  Relationships worthy of the name demand trust and faith in the other.  When one accepts and returns, in trust, an invitation of concern and care for the good of another, the structure of a loving relationship has been established. When creatures respond to God’s initiative of love, in trust and faith, a transforming relationship has been created. God’s love is in this sense, omnipotent love.  It is power to bring life from death but volitional creatures may always choose death.

God does not change.  His offer of love and eternal life is always available.  Man in this life can and do change.  The life giving relationship with God is only possible when we accept God’s initiative of love and thereby, use the grace given in this relationship to cooperate in transforming ourselves into what we need to be.

God’s love is the power to complete His plan using many times uncooperative secondary efficient causes without having to violate the free will of any of them.  The power of God is manifested in the Resurrection for sure but it is similarly manifested in the Cross.  Power is not about being able to have your way for good or ill over against the will of another.  Ultimately, power is about “willingingly” transforming and conforming wills to Love Himself.

I continue now with my posts on why philosophical materialism and, by implication, contemporary atheism, undermines human reason and science. I shall explore in this and the next couple of posts the reality of formal causality in nature, which is implicitly or explicitly denied by philosophical proponents of the proposition that all that there is to know can be known by modern science.

The concept of forms or ideas is not understood in our day by most educated people, so a bit of historical exegesis is necessary. One has to go all the way back to Plato, following Socrates, to get at the origin of the concept of forms and of formal causality. I shall enlist the aid of the Catholic philosopher and Lonergan scholar Hugo A. Meynell, in his essay “How Right Plato Was,” [In Meynell's Redirecting Philosophy, University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 241-51] to briefly bring out salient features of Plato’s doctrine and its contemporary relevance.

Meynell says that it is characteristic of Platonic forms:

1) that they correspond to universal terms; 2) that they are realities as opposed to appearances; 3) that they are intelligible as opposed to sensible; 4) that they make knowledge possible; 5) that they are permanent as opposed to changeable, ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’; 6) that mathematics as well as ethics and aesthetics have to do with their apprehension.

These characterizations require a bit of unpacking. To say with Plato, as in points one and two, that forms are realities that correspond to universal terms is to say that there are objective realities that correspond to predicates applied to many subjects. So, we speak of “virtue,” or “health,” or “good,” applying these terms to many subjects and assuming that they have common or universal meanings. These universal meanings, according to Plato, correspond to formal realities. For instance, we say of a man or a woman that he or she is healthy. Does health have a completely different meaning for each of them, or does it have a common meaning? Plato answers that though health is realized in different subjects to different degrees, there is a common meaning to the term “health” and an objective reality that is common to or shared by all who are healthy. There is an objective reality or “form” corresponding to the universal term “health.” The same can be said of “good,” or “justice,” or “virtue,” or “beauty.” These are all terms with common meanings that correspond to objective realities or forms that individual things in the material world, the world of sense, can share in or participate in to varying degrees.

Needless to say, such universal realities as “health” or “virtue” or “goodness” are beyond the capacity of science to discover. These are objective realities, in the Platonic view, but science cannot prove or disprove their existence or scientifically demonstrate their meaning. They are, as said in point three above, intelligible realities, but they are discoverable by theological and philosophical reason not by scientific reason. Also, as intelligible realities rather than sensual or material, they can be shared in by individual beings.

What if we were to deny that there are such things as formal realities corresponding to universal terms? This is what the late medieval nominalists, following William of Ockham, did at the Catholic universities in England (Oxford and Cambridge). The British Empiricists would bring this nominalist tradition of thought to its fruition, ending in the skepticism of Hume. Plato was right to see, as in point four above, that the objective existence of forms is necessary for human knowledge. And Hume, assuming the rejection of forms as part and parcel of his Anglophone tradition, was right to see that his tradition of thought should end in skepticism toward all knowledge.

This gets at the fifth characteristic of forms mentioned above: they must be eternal and unchangeable, otherwise their meaning would be fleeting and so equivocal that they could not be known. If there are no “supersensual,”  eternal forms of goodness, truth, virtue, beauty, justice, health, etc., these realities could only be ephemeral constructs of our minds. They could have no set and discernable meaning. In reducing reality to that which is available only to fleeting sensory experience, a reduction that is essential to the nominalism of Anglophone thought, Hume had to come to skepticism. I have described Hume’s basic position enough now in this series of posts that I don’t need to reiterate it here, except to say that he failed to understand that sensory objects are “in-formed,” and so can correspond to a universal intelligibility that we can understand by intelligent reflection on our sensory experience.

So, there are objective correlates, “forms,” to universal terms (though not, as Plato realized, to all universal terms). Science cannot discover the forms that are correlated to terms that are related to ethics or aesthetics. Only theology or philosophy can do that. Only theology or philosophy, then, can discuss in a meaningful fashion goodness, or virtue, or truth, or justice, or beauty. But is science absolutely powerless to discover the reality of forms? Not when it comes to the sixth characteristic that Meynell describes: the mathematical dimension.

Indeed, science only “works” because it presumes the reality of that which transcends the sensory and the material. It  presumes the existence of universal logical laws (or forms), and the explanations that science provides are not complete until mathematical “form-alization” is achieved. Science ultimately, contra to the myth of modern Anglophone empiricism, deals with ideal meanings which correspond to human intellectual judgments applied to the parsing of our sensory experience.

Plato realized all of this long ago. In his Republic, he issued a criticism of the sciences whose essential insight, as described by his modern commentator, A.E. Taylor, is still valid for us today. Taylor describes this essential insight: “in all the sciences the objects we are studying are objects we have to think but cannot perceive by any of our senses. Yet the sciences throughout direct attention to these objects which are, in fact, forms, by appealing in the first instance to sense” (quoted by Meynell, p. 243).

Many people presume that science is just an inductive, measuring, taking-a-look-at-sensory-things that leads to technologically useful information. But that is not what science is at all. Science discovers ideal meanings through the a priori hypothetical postulation of ideal concepts whose explanatory value for material causality is tested and verified or falsified (this is somewhat Popperian, though Meynell himself is not afraid to invoke a modified Popperian view). So, science can give such positive in-form-ation as the chemical structure of water, or the atomic weight of silicon. These scientifically described realities are, in fact, eternal, ideal realities instantiated in particular, individual compounds or elements. The chemical structure of water is invariant and would be what it is even if there were no water; likewise, the atomic weight of silicon. These descriptions correspond to ideal, supersensual realities, even though their explanatory value is realized through intelligent description of the sensory-perceived action of chemical compounds. But isn’t this idea of supersensual forms corresponding to atomic weight or chemical structure abstract and unreal? Exactly where do these ideal meanings exist? They cannot exist in physical nature, merely, because they do not require the existence of physical nature in order to have their ideal or formal reality. They cannot exist in the human mind, merely, because they are more than human mental constructs. Where, then, precisely, do they exist, and how? I shall address these sorts of questions in the last post in this series.

The standard inductive account of science is historically and philosophically inaccurate. It fails to recognize that the entities of science transcend direct access to our senses. Meynell himself gives a description of the process of scientific investigation, more true-to-fact than standard empiricist or materialist theses, that it is worth quoting in full:

…the scientific community has arrived at a peculiar conception of things in various fields. What is characteristic of this conception? (1) It is in terms of entities and properties which, while they are (at least provisionally) verified in experience, are not themselves direct objects of experience. Newtonian mass is not exactly the weight you feel when you lift an object, but it is logically related to a ‘force’ and an ‘acceleration’ which similarly are not directly perceptible; and no sensation, or imaginative picture based on sensation, could really be of a photon with its paradoxical part-wave part-particle nature. And even the child’s conception of an elephant as a large animal with trunk and huge ears is hardly the same as the zoologist’s conception of it, as member of a species related more or less closely with other mammalian species, and having evolved in morphology and habit to survive within a certain range of environments. The elephant of the zoologist, scarcely less than the photon of the physicist, is not so much a direct object of experience as an intellectual construction rather comprehensively verified in experience; one might in both cases, with only a little poetic licence, say that the entities and properties concerned can be grasped only “with the eyes of the mind.” (2) It is plausible (here a subjective idealist would disagree) to say that the aspects of the world so envisaged constitute the real world, or at least tend to constitute it (since scientific theory is in a constant state of revision), in contrast to the merely sense-related world of ordinary experience. We may say that by means of scientific inquiry we come increasingly to know things as they really are, as really related to one another, “in their causes” as Aristotle would say, as opposed to merely as related to ourselves. (3) It seems to follow from this last point that the existence of such things and properties makes knowledge properly speaking possible, if by ‘knowledge’ one means well-grounded apprehension of the truth about what really is so. (4) Mathematics (at least in the case of physics, chemistry, or astronomy) is par excellence the discipline by way of which these entities and properites may be grasped. It is by now a cliche, of course, that “mathematics is the language of science.” In each of these four respects, it seems evident that the whole development of science constitutes a massive vindication of Platonism.

Of course, Meynell is not unaware that modern science is, in fact, in its origin the off-shoot of the revival of Christian Platonism in the Renaissance. But that is beside the point for the purposes of this post. The main issue to be emphasized here is that science cannot work without connecting to “supersensual,” formal entities. And its descriptions are not complete until they express formal, invariant, “supersensual” meaning.

Science is not the only path to formal realities, as I have said. It deals with mathematical forms, but mathematical forms are powerless to encompass biological explanation or to account for such realities made present to human experience as the objects of moral and artistic endeavor. In the next post, I shall consider the biological aspect of forms, which brings Aristotle rather than Plato to the foreground, and requires us to consider forms in their causal efficacy and not simply in their bare reality.

A final post in this series will consider a cosmological argument for the existence of God that starts from acceptance, based on intelligent consideration of empirical experience, of the reality of forms.

The blog list at “Inside Catholic” is quite perplexing. On many days when I go there I find links not only to the loathsome “Vox Nova” (which I’ve described here), but to Commonweal and to the National Catholic Reporter. Indeed, there are times when the list of linkages at Inside Catholic is full of these latter blogs. This raises a question: does the publicity that “Inside Catholic” gives to these blogs constitute a cooperation in evil? I’ll take Vox Nova and Commonweal out the picture. These are highly annoying blogs,  to be sure. Vox Nova strikes me, as I’ve said, as yet another front group for George Soros. Commonweal is a promoter of the passe liberalism of the 1970s. But the National Catholic Reporter? It is nothing more than a propagator of lies and heresy. It is outright destructive of the Church.

On the bright side, The National Catholic Reporter is dying off. By their own account several years ago, though I don’t have time to fact-check this, their average readership was quite aged. Is “Inside Catholic” not helping to prop-up their operation and thereby standing in implicit support of the evil work that is done by them? I don’t want to take a definitive stand on this issue. I’d be curious to hear other opinions.

In this post, continuing in my series of posts dedicated to the issue of why scientific materialism undermines human reason, I want to deal briefly with the question of postmodernism. I take as my starting point this illuminating quotation from Hannah Arendt, wherein she describes the consequences of modernity’s denial of the existence of a supersensual reality, or a realm of being beyond that which comes to us through our senses:

In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development [modernity's denial of the supersensual realm]; and although they themselves seldom invoke it, they have an important argument in their favor: it is indeed true that once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries, is also annihilated. The sensual, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the supersensual. No one knew this better than Nietzsche who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God in Zarathustra, has caused so much confusion in these matters. In a significant passage in The Twilight of the Idols, he clarifies what the word God meant in Zarathustra. It was merely a symbol for the supersensual realm as understood by metaphysics; he now uses instead of God the word true world and says: “We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.” (Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Consideration,” Social Research 38 (Autumn, 1971): 240.

Nietzsche was the “prophet”/philosopher/philologist whose aphoristic, 19th-century utterances became the inspiration of much continental philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century, the type of philosophy that we have come to refer to as “postmodern.” Increasingly, he wields an influence in Anglo-American philosophy. It is, in one sense, good that he should do so: at least if his thought is properly interpreted.

Nietzsche was indeed a nihilist: he denied that we can rationally affirm our intellectual or moral judgments. But at least he was generally honest that scientific materialism, if one is forthright and self-aware, leads to nihilism. He knew that a commitment to scientific materialism or a denial of the “supersensual” world should cut one loose from all conceivable moorings. He knew that scientific materialism implies the unreality of our experience, of all appearances, and of the objectivity of all cultural creations: religion, poetry, art, and even science (and perhaps science most of all). He did not go into a desparate Kantian direction, trying to save science by stressing the universal nature of human mental constructs. Unlike Kant, Nietzsche took the poison pill of scientific materialism with all the of the steely-willed resolve of the uebermensch whom he portrayed as the savior of the world. He did not go in for palliative measures in this regard. He fully embraced, and consistently, the sort of forelorn solitude and dejection that was only an occasional encumbrance to Hume’s daily living (see the quotation toward the end of my first post in this series).

Arendt points out that the reduction of reality to what comes to us in appearances through our sensory organs is in fact the abolition of even the appearances themselves. Appearances of color, fragrance, beautiful music, etc., can only be, if matter is the only reality, as illusory as the world was in itself for Kant.  Indeed, the entire Kantian project rests on self-delusion. Without any external reality as a correlate to our experience, knowledge, and moral judgments, we do away not only with the world-in-itself but with any substance to our own experience and lives. The postulation of universal organizing categories of the self is manifestly lacking in realism and cannot overcome the radically contingent and ephermeral reality of our subjective existence.

It is this general sense of things that feeds postmodernism. Recognizing the radically contingent and constructive character of human experience and judgment (intellecual or moral), postmodernism sees the human person as a being entirely bound by historical and cultural context. It is impossible for us, in the postmodern view of humanity, to reach universal intellectual truths or moral judgments. Least of all can we come up with a logically compelling picture of universal destiny, such as one finds in neo-Darwinism. There is no “Big Picture,”  to use the expression of Richard Rorty, that we can derive from reasoned experience. All that we can do is to construct “metanarratives,” to use the expression of Lyotard, or concoct our own particular tales about reality. Indeed, as the postmodern Catholic philosopher Gianni Vattimo has put it, postmodernism is the “demythologization of demythologization.” Everything is a myth now, a personal story that we tell, a narrative, fit for a particular time or place but with no universal validity. Even modern science tells a grand narrative on this view, a story not unlike the story of salvation that one finds in scripture. It is no more true or false than the cultural stories of human origins and destiny that were edifying to previous generations of humanity, given their own volitional concerns deriving from their peculiar historical circumstances.

There is some good that has come out of postmodernism. Aside from unmasking, in a definitive manner, the dire consequences of modern notions of rationality based upon philosophical materialism, postmodern thought has opened up philosophy to values of a more literary nature. Stories and myths, postmodernism has shown, do not lack cognitive legitimacy. Moreover, postmodernism has the possibility of leading to what the Catholic philosopher Hugo Meynell has referred to as a “New Enlightenment,” where the foundations of human knowledge are definitively established and the materialism or scientism of the “Old Enlightenment” is done away with. Postmodern thought shakes modern thought to its very foundations, denying that there can be any rational grounding for knowledge or the human moral good. A new foundation, in this situation, can be laid. And much twentieth century Catholic thought could come to the rescue in this regard. Meynell points to Bernard Lonergan. But one might also point to the Catholic phenomenologists, or to Aristotelian Thomists, or to the participants in the Augustinian revival in twentieth century Catholic thought. A vast treasure of Catholic thinking, that has dealt with the epistemological problems of modern materialism, awaits recovery and synthesis in the wake of the postmodern challenge. Would that our Catholic colleges and universities would take this treasury seriously and orient their educational pursuits around it!

With all of this said, there is no getting around the dark skepticism and cynicism that postmodernism brings in its wake. Postmodernism relativizes truth, goodness, and beauty. But it is often not fully brought out that the cognitive accomplishments of science are themselves relativized by postmodernism, and this fact is the thrust of my posts in this series. 

If matter in motion is the only reality, then human persons are inevitably caught up in a flux of purely spatio-temporal processes, of pure location, and so cannot transcend their biological/historical/cultural standpoint to reach universal truths, including scientific truths. It is meaningless to try to locate the universality of scientific truth in the human subject, because the human subject, on a materialist view, has no lasting interiority. We are, each of us alone and altogether, caught up inevitably and irrevocably in the fleeting processes of material processes in motion. Our natures, then, could not be universal, underlain by universal categories, but contingent upon history and culture. Science has value in our age, given the strong manner by which we experience the technological imperative, but it may just as easily disappear in a future age, where other values are experienced and asserted, and a different story or narrative is told. And if it should disappear, we have no way of adjudicating whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

If you are an atheist, which implies (practically-speaking in our culture) a commitment to scientific materialism, the only intellectual choice you have, ultimately, is this relativist direction of postmodernism. Matter, however it is conceived, does not transcend the locality of spatiotemporal instances. It does not admit of universal knowledge, only of particular moments, times, and places, of a radically individual character. Material processes, if there is no formal causality in nature, could admit of no generalized laws, no universal truths.

I shall make this last point clearer, hopefully, in my next post, where I shall discuss formal causality: the missing dimension of modern attempts to understand human knowledge and the world.

Getting back to my demonstration of why philosophical materialism undermines human reason, I want to discuss briefly Immanuel Kant. Recall that the dilemma posed to human knowledge by materialism was keenly felt by Hume, a problem that has become especially acute in our own day now that many scientists and philosophers have come to argue that human consciousness is reducible to physical brain processes.

If consciousness is just brain activity, how could it reveal to us a world that is external and other? Our neural activity exists entirely in the spatial confines of our own brains. Given that this is so, the best that our brains could do for us is to give to us representations of the world external to us, but they cannot give us the world as it is in itself.

Hume saw that reductionism of the sort that is prevalent in contemporary brain science should lead us to deny the objective reality of all so-called secondary qualities, which is to say of our entire perceptual experience. Our perceptions of color, sound, taste, etc. could only be innate ideas or internal representations that tell us nothing about reality in itself, if we presume philosophical materialism. In itself, reality would be a flux of material processes wholly other from our experience. Hume saw that the materialist account of perception also requires us to doubt the objective reality of our ideas of uniform causal influence and therefore of universal logical, mathematical, and scientific laws. If constant material flux or process is the only objective reality, then there is no “place” in the world to situate universal, uniform, unchanging laws of reason — except in the human mind. Our ideas of universal natural laws, then, can tell us nothing about the world in itself but only about our own psychology and ultimately about our own neural structure (Noam Chomsky has in fact reached this conclusion, albeit inconsistently, with his postulation of a “universal grammar” of the brain). All that we directly experience is the constant, contingent flux of matter striking our sense organs, and this can come to us only in point-instants of material process from which it is impossible to deduce universal causal influence in nature. Any universal laws of logic, math, or science, then, would have to be abstract or purely mental realities.

Hume, in drawing these consequences, was simply bringing a tradition of thought stemming from Descartes and Galileo, and consolidated on seemingly unimpeachable grounds by Isaac Newton, to its inevitable conclusion. In doing so, he unexpectedly shattered the logical foundations of modern science. No one understood the earth-shaking consequences of Hume’s conclusions better than Immanuel Kant, who sought to refute Hume and put science on a surer foundation of reason. But, in the end, all that he ended up doing was to give birth to a fantastic idealism that has given philosophy a bad name in the modern world. At least this is so in England and America, which have never been able to embrace fully the post-Kantian idealist strand of continental philosophy. Though, one could argue that this is largely to the discredit of Anglo-American philosophy, whose proponents are mostly shallow and ignorant of history.

Kant started his career as a science teacher and a physicist. He wrote a treatise in 1755 entitled The Universal History of Nature that anticipated many of the scientific cosmological theories that would be explored in astronomy in the next two hundred years. Kant was thoroughly Newtonian in these early stages of his career, but his reading of Hume in the 1760s called the whole Newtonian project into question for him. The question that Hume raised, that Kant realized was unavoidable, was how Newton’s purely empirical, contingent, and natural science could correspond to the necessary and universal dicta of formal and mathematical demonstration. Mathematical explanation was the ultimate goal of modern science for Newton and Kant (as it is for science today). But how could such universal descriptions fit the radically contingent structure of physical nature as it presents itself to our fleeting experiences?

Kant (and Newton) sought for universal and necessary axioms of nature, a goal that presupposes the conviction that nature is governed by uniform systems of cause and effect. As noted above, Hume called this conviction into question, and rightfully so, given the “sensationism” to which he was committed by virture of his materialism. The presupposition of uniform causal influence has no basis in reason because we have no access to it by experience. If matter is the only reality, there is no way that we could truly be said to know of the existence universal laws of causality. In fact, such laws could not even exist, though Hume himself did not reach this latter conclusion.

Kant, understanding the fundamental truth in Hume’s objection, tried to refute Hume and to establish the reasonableness of the Newtonian project by laying out a highly complex “transcendental” argument that presumed to show the basis in the human subject of all knowledge and experience. Jonathan Robinson, in his wonderful little book detailing the effects of bad philosophy on modern liturgy, summarizes Kant’s argument in support of the universality of science.

Beginning with the fact that physics is possible, because after all we in fact do it, he [Kant] then asks what the necessary conditions for the possibility of physics are. He then argues that among these conditions is the truth of the proposition that every event has a cause; and, if every event has a cause, then this establishes the reign of law in nature. The reality of this reign of law is what makes it possible for us to do physics. His position is that natural necessity constitutes the objective world we all experience, but we have no way of knowing whether or not this necessity also characterizes the world lying behind the objective world of experience. (The Mass and Modernity, 81)

Kant “rescues” or “saves” the reality of science, then, not on the basis of a correspondence between human experience and physical nature as it is in itself but on the basis of our own inner or “transcendental” experience. He remains committed to the materialist axiom that physical nature comprises nothing more than contingent material flux, whose importance for the problem of knowledge was made clear to him by Hume. But he refutes Hume by arguing that there is universality to our experience, as a result of the universality of human nature, and therefore that there is universality to science. In other words, the universal structure of physical laws is not found in nature but in the organizing capacity of the human person or subject.

Kant worked out a list of formal structures of the human subject that he held to be responsible for the ordering of our experience of contingent physical nature and which thereby make universal scientific deductions possible. These are known as Kant’s a priori categories of understanding. He establishes twelve such categories under four headings (quantity, quality, relation, and modality), each with three categories of its own. Kant also absorbed universal space and time entirely into the human subject. As for space, Kant says:

Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside one another, and accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the representation of space must be presupposed. The representation of space cannot, therefore, be empirically obtained from the relations of outer appearance. On the contrary, this outer experience is itself possible at all only through this representation. (Critique of Pure Reason, New York, 1958, 43)

As for time, Kant has this to say:

What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them. (Critique of Pure Reason, New York, 1958, 46)

Space and time, Kant argues, are intuitions or forms of our innate sensibility, but not realities of the objective world itself. They must be presupposed in our experience and not derived from empirical encounter with physical nature. It can be no other way, once again, if we presume that the process, contingency, and flux of matter is the only reality of physical nature. We have to impose our mental life on physical nature in order to establish physical science, not understand nature in itself. If we want to save science, Kant realized, and yet maintain our commitment to philosophical materialism, we have to place the uniformity or universality of science entirely within our own mental life.

Indeed, Kant, through the influence especially of Ernst Mach, had an impact on Albert Einstein’s revolution of modern physics in his formulation of the relativity of time and space, though Einstein, who was not a competent philosopher, did not take things in the purely subjective direction that Kant did.

Can the universality of science really be rescued on a purely subjective basis? Postmodern thought has called the Kantian “rescue operation” into question by stressing the radically historical and contingent constitution of human nature itself. Nowadays, there are many who argue that science is an artifact of a particular historical mentality and not an expression of universal human nature. Indeed, human nature does not, for these postmodernists, even exist. So, the findings of science are not universally true for them in either an objective or a subjective sense. The postmodern turn will be the topic of my next post.

What is missing in the Humean/Kantian analysis? In the end, Kant does not succeed in saving science from Hume. If we truly want to affirm that science tells us about the universal laws of nature and not about our own psychology or history, we have to affirm (as Hume and Kant did not) the reality of formal causality in physical nature. In other words, we must affirm the presence of spirit in physical nature in order to account for the objective correlation of physical nature and human reason. But that will be the subject of my final post in this series.

We finally closed on the house but every step of the way, it looked like it would not happen.  From a loan officer whom we could not get to talk to us to a loan assistant who seemed not to be matched to her particular skill set.  Half way into the process when this became apparent we should have probably cut our losses and went elsewhere.  Any way, unless some surprise pops up (a potential eventuality I am not yet discounting) we may now be officially off the homeless rolls thanks to Shelray’s assistance.

As is usual, I have been quite busy but still have had a chance now and then to keep up on the goings on.  I have been thinking about the unsurprising response of many commentators in the media about the responsibility of the pro-life movement for the killing of notorious abortionist George Tiller along with the broader implications of this response.

Beginning with Mike Hendricks’s illuminating (though not illuminated) blathering in the Kansas City Star and then the subsequent piling on of the likeminded (if I can use the term): see Colby Cosh’s tirade in the National Post, and Ellen Goodman’s tortuous logic in the Boston Globe. The expected theme is the same in all of these: those who call abortion murder are thereby also guilty of Tiller’s murder.  If one looks at the logic flowing from these representatives of the mass media, one finds ominous signs for religious freedom and any speech that does not comport with the ruling party line.

Like BO’s speech at Notre Dame implied, these writers begin with the premise that abortion is not murder.  For BO it may be a significant moral consideration but it is not the killing of an innocent human person.  For BO dispassionate dialog can only begin on this premise.  It is not clear that those represented by the above media representatives are even open to allowing the prolife community a platform.  However, if they are, prolifers must first disavow the equation of abortion with murder.  This is the trap that so-called pro-life/pro-Obama Catholics seem to fall into.  To be invited to the table, they must be willing to reject such inflammatory language as “murder.”

The tactic of censoring speech because it is said to incite violence is nothing new.  The abortion lobby has used it for years and the homosexualist activists have adopted it as well.  However, the circumstances have changed considerably. One who shares this view now has the nation’s bully pulpit and the party most sympathetic to this view now hold dominant majorities in both houses of congress.  This is not to mention that the courts have been increasingly populated with activists who are also more and more likely to abet such a view.

Moreover, abortion is only one plank in the aggressive social restructuring agenda that the current president seems poised to attempt to enact.  His proclamation of June as LGBT pride month was also telling. In making this proclamation, BO put the office of the President squarely against natural law and the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Same sex attraction and gender identity disorders are now protected, nay, preferred and promoted lifestyle choices (see this LifeSiteNews article for an example of the results of this distorted way of thinking).  However, there is a stumbling block in the way of such an ambitious project.  We are beginning to see the administration’s strategy for overcoming this “problem.”

The actions of the Obama administration in appointing radically pro-abortion and anti-family “Catholic” zealots to executive and judicial posts, and its promoting of relationships with “Catholic” notables and organizations that are attempting to attenuate the significance of Catholic cooperating with pro-abortion policies all seem aimed at developing a dissenting “anti-magisterium” that can offset the authority of the only authoritative and organized voice against abortion and for protecting the natural family.  The Catholic Church is in fact the biggest threat to this social restructuring agenda.  No opportunity will be passed up in the attempt to marginalize, discredit, counter, or silence the truth about the human person proclaimed by the Catholic Church in the US.  The media’s response to the Tiller murder illustrates this.

Cosh’s comments are the most illuminating.  He indicates that if abortion is murder, then Tiller’s murder is justified and the pro-life community has to embrace this.  The others writers implicitly accept this when they say that calling abortion murder makes violence the logical consequence.  Obama’s response to the murder seems to imply the same.  For all of their talk of peace and justice, this logic betrays an implied threat to both.

I believe these rumblings to be ominous because they share the thinking of Robespierre and the purveyors of the Reign of Terror.  Declaring themselves the guardians of liberty, they mean their own liberty to act as they wish with no limitations placed upon them.  They have an implicit distrust others because their own will is made the arbiter of truth and so there is no way of adjudicating between competing wills other than through means of force.  Those who do not readily accept their assertions cannot be reasoned with for there is no defensible use of reasoned arguments in their assertions.  Thus, violence on their part is an ever looming threat.  What we are now seeing appears to be the preparations for justifying such violence (intended or not).

By no means is the majority of the country yet with this agenda.  However, neither does it have the intellectual or moral formation to defeat it on its own.  To overcome the current threat, we require the clear and unwavering voice of the Catholic Church.  This is what we began to see from the bishops during the last election and what we saw with the Notre Dame scandal.  The bishops see the impending threat and many are beginning to respond.  I think that the majority within the country is still influenced by natural law and the Gospel.  However, they require our faithful and continuing witness if we are to overcome the deleterious effects of the mass media engine and the bully pulpit of the current administration.

8 Jerusalem has sinned so gravely that she has become a thing unclean. All who used to honour her despise her, having seen her nakedness; she herself groans aloud and turns her face away.

9 Her filth befouls her skirts — she never thought to end like this, and hence her astonishing fall with no one to comfort her. Yahweh, look at my misery, for the enemy is triumphant!

-Lamentations 1:8-9

Before I get to my post on Kant and modern science, I want to take a little diversion.

I must be far too blog curious. I recently followed a link from “Inside Catholic” to a group blog entitled “Vox Nova.” From my brief perusal of the site, I assumed that it was yet another “Catholic” George Soros front group, but I’m not sure. Perhaps it is not professional enough to be that. The blog comprises various grad students at various points in their journey before attaining terminal degrees. They run a mostly political blog, but they have some contributors with a bit of theological training and seem to be inspired to some degree by recent trends in theology which claim to theologize politics rather than letting politics dictate theology. Many of the proponents of these new trends in theology are not very consistent in their claim (think John Milbank), and the Vox Nova crowd seems similarly inconsistent. They give the impression that they are theologically orthodox and above the fray of political reductionism in theology. Even so, they are clearly prone to proof-texting voices from the tradition to support political positions or theological programs that are inherently destructive of Church unity.

As a case in point, one of the contributors, when I got there, had just given a favorable review of a recent book by Rosemary Radford Ruether. The title of Ruether’s book is quite boring, and the content as described by the blogger in question seems even less interesting, however enthusiastic he may have been about it. There is no need to delve into the particulars of this clearly ephemeral and provincial book. It is Ruether in what she represents and her overarching theological program that is the important issue. The blogger described Ruether’s approach to theology as a much needed alternative to the theological imperialism of bloggers who claim that the only authentic theological voice in the Church today is Pope Ratzinger. His post struck me as being rather smarmy. Of course, smarminess is typical of grad students who have not yet had to face in a personal manner learned opposition to their points of view: although, admittedly, as most professors are committed socialists, this particular grad student may never face such a personal challenge. In his follow-up comments, he contemptously described liturgical traditionalists and “Ratzingerian” bloggers as being prone to support “death dealing,” right-wing, fascist politics. With the bemusement of an aspiring grad-school sociologist, he contemplated the prospect of studying this connection of liturgical traditionalism and political evil.

Of course, such political confusions do not in fact accompany most liturgical traditionalists or Ratzingerians. This is certainly true of those whom I have met, and, as someone who has served in an editorial capacity for a scholarly journal committed to such issues, I’ve met quite a few of these people. Moreover, it should be needless to say that fascism is mostly a phenomenon of the left not the right. So, what of the propensity of anti-traditionalist theologians to support death-dealing leftist politics? Also sociologically interesting, no? I felt compelled to point out this obvious fact in the combox at “Vox Nova.” Of course, I have yet to meet a socialist who will admit to it, and the comments following mine on the blog post in question illustrate continued, obstinate, disingenuous reticence in this regard. I was even accused of being a political reductionist myself by these strange people for pointing out the deadly fact of socialism, nationalist or internationalist, in history! The (Pol) pot is always on the lookout to call the kettle black! Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro et. al. are ever vigilant to see the speck in General Franco’s eye!

Be that as it may, what I want to discuss is Rosemary Ruether, and the duplicity that attends those who, like the blogger at ”Vox Nova,” see her as exemplary in giving another side of the theological story to Pope Ratzinger’s presumably authoritarian Roman position. It is necessary to put it bluntly: Ruether’s position on most, if not all, theological issues is in violent opposition to Apostolic Tradition and cannot be accepted as a viable alternative, or complementary theology, to that of Ratzinger, or JP II, or any other pope, saint, doctor of the Church, patristic theologian, or scholastic figure who is a legitimate keeper and expositor of the Tradition. Ruether has spent a career trying to undermine essential dogmas of the Church, teachings essential to the fabric of God’s revelation, indeed, flowing from the very heart of God’s Eternal Word. She is radically opposed to the nuptial mystery of creation, which is the central scriptural image of the God-world relationship and which symbolizes a concrete ontology that has been brought out in the Augustinian tradition and recovered in the twentieth century. Her rejection of the all-male priesthood, of sacramental marriage, of the traditional family, and of the nuptial meaning of the procreative act are all signs of this. She proposes a reimaging of the Trinity that in fact does away with the Triune God. She thinks of the Church as first and foremost a social and historical construct, a free association of bourgeois humanity. It is not, for her, divinely instituted, with a structured hierarchy whose ministerial priesthood was willed by Christ, in accordance with divine Wisdom, to have the special privilege of shepherding, sanctifying, and teaching the flock. The Church is not the Mystical Body of Christ for her, in any sense that sees it in its essential bearing as the continued corporeal, mysterious presence of the Logos made flesh. Henri de Lubac was correct to point out the social character of the Mystical Body of Christ, but this does not do away with the fact that the Church is an organism with an authoritative form set by Christ (its Head) in continuance with his incarnate mission on earth. Moreover, she rejects the salvific uniqueness and universality of revelation in Christ. She does not accept that Christ alone is the Logos made flesh, the historical Jesus alone a divine person and not a human person. There’s no need to discuss Matthias Scheeben on this last point, who said that Christ could be called a human person if by that we refer strictly to his integral human personality and not to his ontological subjectivity. Ruether lacks Scheeben’s subtlety and so cannot make such a distinction. And, needless to say, her rejection of the unifying mission of Peter stems from a gross misinterpretation of Vatican II. Theologically speaking, it should go without saying that Vatican II must exist in a literal continuity with Vatican I, and all other councils, if Catholicism is to have any objective meaning whatsoever. Some commentor at Vox Nova actually tried to argue that poor John Henry Newman, based on one letter that he had written, rejected the special authority of the papacy as defined by Vatican I! Again: proof-texting without proving a point or even understanding it.

So, how is Ruether’s theological project at all salutary for the Church? It is no mere “political reductionism” to see that it is fatally flawed. She represents a theological program that undermines truth, and in undermining truth is destructive of the unity of the Church. Her individualist, nominalist vision of Church progress is not progress at all but annihilation. Hers is not a complementary theological vision to that of Pope Ratzinger but a sundering of the Mystical Body of Christ.

Of course, there is quite a problem with those who, like this grad student at “Vox Nova,” claim to respect the Pope and yet who argue in essence that blog opposition to the likes of Ruether is generally nothing more than a form of irrational, narrow-minded, politically-motivated ultramontanism propagated by those who just aren’t well-read. The Vox Nova blogger essentially claims that Ratzinger, like JP II before him, is hailed by other bloggers simply because he is conceived of as the voice of authority from on high.

To put it mildly, that is all bunk. “Ratzingerian” bloggers love Ratzinger, as they did JP II, because he is such a powerful and trenchant defender and expositor of Apostolic Tradition, whereas Ruether and her ilk seek, like ravenous packhounds, to tear apart Tradition into shreds!

So, by all means, “Ratzingerian” bloggers, stay bold, stay firm, you have chosen the better path over the grad students out there who would seek to undermine you with quotations drawn from Pavel Florensky, or Serge Bulgakov, or Ruether, or whomever else they’ve managed to read passages from or books by in their graduate courses that week, or in their preparations for a course paper or master’s thesis.