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Esteemed Uwot, thank you for your kind offer of a biscuit. In return I thought I'd provide a sneak preview of the delicious Christmas Cookies my wife has been baking and which we will attempt to deliver by drone. If you see something streaking toward you in a silver fire do not recoil. We have a personal low-altitude satellite which we have reverse-engineered as a delivery-system. It is entirely rational
in concept but (I admit embarrassedly) only seems to work when we pray over it. I ask you also to please excuse the fact that they tend to look like Dismayed Philosophers and that nothing at all was intended to be implied by the pretzels for ears.
You are free to define explanation like that, if you wish.
It is less that I would 'define' it as such and more that I see utility in examining the entire question of Explanation in that light.
Gus, if you can find an example of me claiming to have arrived at any 'absolute conclusions', other than those of Parmenides and Descartes: 'There is not nothing' and 'There is thought', I will give you a biscuit.
(Once again a very polite, if slightly rococo, South American thank you).
You surely must understand that when I argue I am arguing against a group of different voices. I do understand and I have listened to you when you say you just have no evidence for 'divinity' and so you can have no 'absolute conclusion'. However, I am focussed on what I discern as an insulating attitude as I work toward my own definition of trends that I notice operating in our present. Just as you may not desire to be taken in by (what you will likely understand as my) sophistical arguments, neither am I interested in being bamboozled by 'yours'. Again, I am mostly interested in gaining clarity about the 'structure of predicates' and how they determine our perception. But when I say 'perception' I really think I mean 'interpretation'.
I am not sure that the coherence of the sense of my overall experience (of life, spirituality, divinity, etc.) is a
post hoc pin-on, like the tail on a pin-up donkey, but rather that my sense of things arises because of my relationship to
psyche. It has to do with events of life that impinged on me inexorably. The intellectual-analytical side of things is likely more where the
post hoc aspect comes in.
It is entirely possible to be a first rate scientist and believe that what you are examining is the work of some divine agency. It is also possible to be an atheist and accept that might be true; atheism requires only that you do not believe it.
I have said that in many different ways that I choose to function in this plane of existence (I say that because I find it helpful to contrast it with the possibility of other, discreet 'planes of existence', it produces a delightful metaphysical tingling sensation that shoots like electricity out to my extremities ...) like an atheist. That is, as one who can only refer to any rely on what is immediately in one's domain of influence, and about matters which are amenable to conscious activity. But I do tend to see our 'ontological attitude' as a concoction, as a selection, and as a particular extraction from groups of possibilities. I tend to see modern attitude (and I tend to conflate this common attitude with what I sense here on PN as I gain familiarity with, as I say 'your project') as a sort of regimentation of attitude.
I guess I would say that I have felt too much, lived too much and also read too much of different ways of 'operating perspective' to feel that I have to accept what you-all seem to be presenting. Yet despite what you might think I am a very practical person and understand that there are appropriate methods and attitudes for different epistemological domains. Now, I have pretty clearly stated recently that I see the Christian project - if one were to reduce it to the most essential - as one dealing with
repentance and
transformation. For me, in these conversations, this has been what I have arrived at though perhaps I should already have known this. And in that 'domain' as I call it, I do not think you have anything to say. You have no epistemological relationship with it, that is with a Consciousness that is more and different than your own whose definition you can control, and you likely have no relationship with a presiding spirit that could be said to operate in that domain. Thus, it cannot even appear on your radar.
Once we come to the domain of the Inner Man, at least it appears so, you must go mute. Because the lingo you operate, or which operates you (it is fair to say that our terms and our language drives us, don't you think? Isn't this what 'operative predicates' really means?), has no way to make any but a reductionist interpretation within that area. Am I right? It would be some level of mental aberration, would it not? But this is the domain of activity, influence and interest that has been and still has the most importance for me. More than that, it is the primary area of concern of Occidental ideas. I am interested in *all this* because I am interested in *all that*.
What you seem not to understand, both of me and of Basil Willey, is the allusion to the selective power of the predicates that we choose to handle.
By your own admission, you find your god only by introspection.
You fail to grasp the fuller implication: It is not *me* it is the Occident historically, and it is part of our being, our experience, our art, music, language and so much else. Europe has (in its better moments) engaged in 'introspection' and constructed a world. And a very large part of that has been in that inner domain of the inner man as I have said. Now, the question is: What happens when the conceptual pathway to that Inner Man and Domain is severed? That is my question. What predicates drive that severing away? And what are and what will be the consequences? Bad question? Good question? Please, say something about it.
