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Tom: Oooo. What conference?
Jeff: Try this link, Tom. http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2006/08/miniconference_1.html
POW: I see no reason to object to that.
Jeff: My main question, B., is "to what extent do our categories apply to a sans-creation reality?" To my mind, they apply consistlently in the creational and sans-creational realities. Because I don't know what more fundamental principle would tell me how or whether they should apply thus. Consequently, I don't know how to not apply my understanding of time, space, causality, final causality, etc. to the sans-creational reality.
Indeed, as I said, I don't know how I come to the idea there is a God, otherwise. For otherwise, my categories and the apprehension regulated by them would be bound and limited to created reality. This is, basically, what modern scientists do. They lock themselves in to applying categories only to empirical experience. Hence they speak of time and space coming into being. Even then, they admit that Einsteinian relativity is counter-categorical, unlike Lorentzian relativity. I don't conceive of time and space as beings at all, though.
Moreover, the new move by materialistic naturalists of positing infinite universes and big bangs to account for the appearance of design entailed in the precision of physical constants, etc. would seem to force them to re-evaluate time and space, anyway. How do we even conceive of an infinite history of infinite universes unless we apply "uncreated" frames of temporal and spatial reference by which to relate them one to another?
This subject, then, is a question for epistemology, to my mind. And this means that we all must answer the question for ourselves after doing the most honest epistemological reflection we can do. Obviously, we will differ, as we do on inductive inferences, etc. But I doubt seriously that the Eastern Orthodox fathers were doing anything other than just that. No group has a monopoly on epistemology. Like all hypotheses about human psychology, we test them by personal reflection to see whether they contradict or cohere with our own conscious experience and apprehension.
Because of this, there is profit in bouncing our ideas of off each other. Sometimes, someone can have an insight that might otherwise elude us. But once someone brings it to our attention, we can reflect and see if it makes more more sense than our own ideas, or see if accounts for things our own views don't account for, or see if it explains things more parsimoniously or more aesthetically. In short, B., it's like Tom always says: We need each other. And the voice of "fathers" is just a collection of other voices. They do for us the same thing we do for each other. But we can't let the epistemological pursuit end with them, because epistemology is not revelation "once and for all delivered."
And this still leaves plenty of room for mystery in the form of extra-categorical relations and realities. And that is in addition to those kinds of mystery that have to do with inexplicable modes of creational and divine activity occurring right now. With regard to some activity, e.g., we just know that it occurs, not how.
Post Edited (jefscott) : 6/5/2007 8:48:09 PM (GMT-5) |