Lutheran Metaphysics

@Philosurfer, am I getting this right?

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This is an example of paradoxical thinking that is largely foreign to A-T.

You recognize our theories are wrong, but they are useful and our current starting point, so you work with them. All the time, you know they are wrong in fundamental ways. That is an example of paradoxical tension.

Well, to clarify things once again, Iā€™m approaching this debate not as someone who is an orthodox, traditional Thomist who is determined (maybe even institutionally bound) to try to fit everything within A-T. Rather, Iā€™m exploring A-T to see how far it can be taken, and am open to deviating from it if it doesnā€™t work. In fact, as a committed Protestant, by necessity I have to deviate from Thomistic theology. Iā€™m doing this because I think thereā€™s a lot lost in our modern amnesia of A-T. Most presentations of Thomasā€™ Five Ways, for example, hopelessly misunderstand his arguments and the context he was making them in. The same goes for the A-T notion of teleology.

In fact, I would say it is the people who have prematurely declared victory that A-T is completely useless who are not living up to the fact that there are tensions in our modern situation - between the immense success of reductionist science and the fact that we are still clearly conscious, embodied, ethically sensitive, God-seeking humans. A-T is my current mode of trying to resolve that paradox.

Was Einstein wrong in trying to find a unified theory during his lifetime? Are string theorists wasting their time?

Iā€™m not sure our views are that different. I think itā€™s just that you think A-T is by its very nature somehow antithetical to self-correction, whereas I think itā€™s one ingredient that could be used as any other thinkerā€™s.

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Paradox also has its limits. All serious Christians accept some non-negotiables to some extent. For example, I confess that Christ was bodily resurrected 2000 years ago. I think Iā€™m going to stick with this for the foreseeable future. Iā€™m not going to say that (for example) there is a tension between Christ being resurrected and the notion that miracles are offensive to science and/or historical method, and hope for a resolution in the future (by say, believing that the resurrection of Jesus was merely spiritual).

I think we all pick and choose which paradoxes we are willing to live with in hope of future resolution, which ones we must resolve right now with certainty, and which ones we resolve tentatively but with an openness for correction. The question is how to do so wisely.

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Great. What you are doing, then, is not really A-T. You are, rather, trying to see what might be valuable in a type of thinking largely foreign to our current moment. There certainly is value in this, but it also means you conceding up front that the closed system of A-T is not a sensible worldview. Iā€™d agree, which makes you not really in the A-T camp.

Letā€™s certainly look to see what is recoverable and valuable in A-T. Then let us turn to addressing our own Areopagus - Wikipedia, which has a different starting point than A-T.

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A paradox that Iā€™m willing to live with is the wonderful mystery of how our timeless (or timeful) God relates to us in linear sequential time. Iā€™m not enamored of Molinism as a solution ā€“ it seems to me that it turns God into an impersonal epistemological calculator, to some degree. By choosing to actuate this reality he still winds up choosing each of us personally. So I label myself as a God-is-atemporal or a God-is-omnitemporal Calvinist, and, as many of you know, I immensely enjoy his evident interventionism in my life. He delights in delighting me (I just now logged a ā€˜minorā€™ co-instance from today).

Sounds good to me. Iā€™m camping with family currently, so I have shoddy internet access. I invited a few friends to chime in if able on the Lutheran metaphysics idea. What about @CPArand? Anything to add here? You seem to be doing some good work along these lines. Maybe we should team up and edit an anthology along these linesā€¦

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I think this is key. The Lutheran ethos is to start at the bottom, the mucky world, and then work up to the lofty. Literally - our theology begins with a baby born in a manger. You canā€™t get much more down to earth than that. However, we quickly realize that one canā€™t move too far from the down to earth - you might say common sense, but that phrase ā€˜common senseā€™ is philosophically loaded.

I suppose in more contemporary parlance, Lutherans would be something like metaphysical pluralists as we will put more of our eggs in epistemological baskets. Epistemology does not need a robust metaphysics to get up and running - a commitment to deductive, inductive, abductive logic and a commitment to a world that is possible to know. Conversations about evidence, grounding relations, etcā€¦ Will follow, but the metaphysical commitments may remain light.

Also, reiterate that I am speaking as an individual who happens to be Lutheran and a philosopher. I mentioned that the generation after Luther went back to Scholastic categories and many of my brethren find themselves right at home with A-T philosophy. So I speak as, almost always, an outsider to my very own peepsā€¦

This painting captures my academic existence within my Lutheran circles pretty well!

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