Theology and the Philosophy of Science: A First Look at Scientific and Theological Method

Theologians will recognize that the general title of this series of posts is that of the 1976 translated English title of a book by Wolfart Pannenberg published in 1973 entitled, Wissenschafts Theorie und Theology.  My reflections in this blog, however, are entirely my own.  

I have often thought that theologians ought to study the philosophy of science. Why? There are two compelling reasons to do so. Theologians should have a grasp of scientific methodology and theory formation because such knowledge will help them understand the nature of truth claims and justification in the natural and social sciences and help them avoid such statements as, "Well it's not confirmed yet; it's only a theory."  

The second reason to study the philosophy of science is the more important. We should study how it is that truth comes to be declared in the natural and social sciences so that we have a better appreciation of how it is declared in theology. In what ways are truth claims similar in science and theology and in what ways do they differ? The study of the philosophy of science is helpful for both partners in the science and theology discussion to understand each other. 

Some people are surprised perhaps to learn that there is such a discipline as the philosophy of science.  They ask what purpose philosophical reflection accomplishes to the results and trajectories of science.  Do not scientists already know what they are doing?  What could philosophers possibly add to this?  Clearly, they don't generally have PhDs in the fields of study that scientists are investigating.   

I am of the opinion that philosophy is useful in all kinds of areas about which people do not generally know. In addition to the philosophy of science, there is a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of mind, a philosophy of law, and a philosophy of history, to name a few.  While philosophers don't generally add to the content of a field of research, their questions can help those within and outside these disciplines to appreciate the particularity of their own intellectual endeavors and the institutional practices they presuppose.  Philosophers can help all of us gain clarity on the assumptions within an area of research, assumptions that sometimes have empirical support, or assumptions that rest upon human convention.  

I want to provide theologians not knowing much about the philosophy of science some orientation to this important branch of philosophy. I hope that this brief introduction will help theologians think a bit more clearly about the nature of science. Perhaps it will help them think a bit differently about the nature of theology as well.  

All of us probably learned in grade school about the scientific method.  We learned that scientists do observations which allow them to spot regularities.  After finding these regularities, they seek an account as to why.  What is it that grounds the regular nature of these regularities.  What explains them?  The search for explanations lead scientists to offer hypotheses which can explain the occurrence of the regularities.  Such hypotheses are explanatory accounts of why the regularity holds.  The rectitude of the hypothesis is accomplished via experiment.  The story I learned was that hypotheses are experimentally confirmed or disconfirmed.  

As a first step in understanding science, this account is quite helpful.  It does allow young students to grasp some about the tentative nature of science.  Young students should realize that science is a human procedure whereby human conjectures are checked up upon within human experience.  Perceptive children might even think about the common adjective of 'procedure', 'conjecture' and 'experience', concluding that science is a very human activity.  The really bright and informed among the perceptive might even ask this, "Given that human beings get so much wrong much of the time, how do we know they get so much right in science?" 

Given that science is clearly a human activity, and given that people clearly are ignorant and close-minded much of the time -- notice what passes for political conversation in these days -- how could we know that they are not simply being ignorant and close-minded in the doing of science?  Millions of people believed in a species of Marxism during the twentieth-century that both failed to explain and predict pheomenena.  How do we know with confidence that we are not all equally duped in the compelling theories of today, e.g., Darwinian theory, cosmological theory, psychological and sociological theory? 

Despite these global skeptical questions, the scientific method has wide consensus as the way to acquire scientific knowledge.  Understanding it more deeply than we did as children is important in evaluating conflicting truth claims that we sometimes encounter in the sciences, it is important for understanding the basic thrust and orientation of science in general, and it is deeply important in the very human activity of day-to-day living where we have to link scientific truth claims with the other types of truth claims in which we are daily involved, particularly the truth-claims of religion.  

In reflecting upon science we must make an important distinction between data and theory.  The first is what is given in experience, while the second offers a story or an account which both explains how it is that we are given the data we are given, and predicts what our future data might be.  For instance, granted that there is a change in sea level at a particular location, what theory best accounts for this rise in sea-level.  A theory (or better a bundle of theories) appealing to global warming could best explain the increase in sea level. Moreover, the theory might predict that if the causal mechanism it specifies actually holds, we should this reflected in future data.  A theory consists of an account that can both explain the data as it is currently given, and predict on its basis of the account what the future data will be.  

Now we might get a bit more technical in our nomenclature and call the scientific method we learned about as children the hypothetical-deductive method.  It consists of observation, hypothesis, deduction, experimental confirmation/disconfirmation, and adjustment.  People outside science don't often recognize the provisional nature of science.  It is always open for adjustment.  Theory-tweeking is how science progresses.  

Both natural and social science begins with data that is gained through observation.  However, the nature of observation itself turns out to be difficult.  In any observational situation, there must be some consensus about the nature of what it is one is seeking to observe.  Such consensus is necessary to know where to look, as it were.  For thousands of years human beings observed the sun rising in the morning and many thought on the basis of this observation that the sun must go around the earth. But this heliocentric hypothesis has been long disproved. The sun does not go around the earth, but the earth goes around the sun.  Thus, it is that one cannot observe the sun rising?  So what exactly is it that we observe?  It is an appearance of the sun rising? But how do we describe such an appearing?  

The question of what is given in data turns out to be connected deeply to the question of what theories we are assuming.  In the heyday of Logical Positivism in the 20th century, philosophers assumed that they could specify a "given" that was public, objective, and prior to all theory and interpretation.  But such a given has proved very difficult to support. Text implies context. The given is always a given within a context of background scientific theory and practice.  Most philosophers now believe that there is no objective "unvarnished good news" (Quine) of the given upon which we can base scientific theory.  

But scientists have another immediate problem after collecting singular data.  They must look for generalizations of that data, and such looking happens over the course of time.  I can observe data x a time y and then again at time z, and then at time u, but how do I know that the data I am finding in these three times are the data that I would be able to find at every time, were I able to check it?  In other words, how do I know that I am observing a true regularity of nature and not just an accidental generalization I have drawn because of my limited experience?  The problem of generalizing from specific instances is called the problem of induction or sometimes Hume's Problem after the great Scottish philosopher, David Hume. No matter how many times we observe a critical correlation in nature, we do not know if it will happen next time.  We might have a theory predicting it will and find in our next observation that the thing predicted does not happen, and thus perhaps our entire predictive theory is flawed.  Gustav Bergmann said, "Induction is the long arm of science," and he is clearly correct.  If we start from the contingency of empirical experience itself, as we must do in science, we must always recognize that we could get things wrong right out of the chute. We might find ourselves building a theory to account for a regularity in nature that is not a real regularity. 

Given that we have found data and some generalizations to explain, the next thing we must do is hypothesize a theory from which we can deduce ramifications that we can compare to our experience. A good scientific theory has several characteristics.  It must be applicable and adequate to the experimental data, internally consistent and coherent in its formulation, simple in that it posits as few theoretical entities or laws as it can to explain the data, and fecund in that it can ground a continuing research agenda.  All of these characteristics of the "best" theories are put to the task of explaining and predicting the empirical data.  

How does this way of doing things compare with theology?  I would argue that "theological theory" has  data too, but that this data is not that which is "given" to the five senses. So what could be the data of theology?  One might argue that its data is revelation, but then one must further specify the identity conditions of the term 'revelation'.  Perhaps we say that there is a "revelation" of God's activity through Scripture and tradition.  But is the first primary over the second, and is there stratification within the former?  Are some parts of Scripture more revelatory than others, and if so, how are these differences normed? Moreover, cannot preaching confront the listener in a revelatory way, perhaps more so than simply reading Scripture. Furthermore, theologians often distinguish specific and general revelation, meaning by the latter some intimations within experience of that source which ultimately transcends experience. Perhaps "limit notions" or senses of ultimacy are part of human experience in ways that are useful data for theological theory.  

Assuming that there is data, there is often generalization of that data.  The experience of ultimacy or that of the sacred is a generalization from experiencing this ultimacy or this experience of the sacred.  A little reflection should convince the reader that the same general problems of extending the particular to the general apply in theology as well as in science generally. 

If there can be some agreement on what theological data might be, we then could go to work theory construction.  Just as scientific theory should be applicable to empirical experience as well as being adequate to it, that is, it must not only apply to the empirical, but it must apply apply deeply to all of the empirical, so too must theological theory apply to our experience, to revelation, to our experience as human beings haunted by the question of God.  Moreover, the theory must be deep enough to cover all of that experience.  It must give an account of both the experience of the presence of God (immanence) and of God's absence (transcendence).  

The theory must be consistent, coherent, fecund, and simple. Just as with science generally, theology cannot have theoretical statements that contradict each other.  Why is this the case?  It is clear that from a contradiction any proposition whatsoever can be derived. Assume both P and ~P.  If P, then P or any arbitrary statement Q.  But by disjunctive syllogism, since ~P holds, the given P v Q, Q must hold.  

Moreover, just as in science, theological theory must be coherent.  This means that the fundamental terms of the theory must mutually presuppose each other and there are not ad hoc assertions holding this or that in order to account for the data.  In other words, the first theory much be simple, or at least as simple as a theory can be which asserts both the Trinity and the Incarnation.  Finally, the theory must be fecund.  One might argue, that the Chalcedon Definition has been extremely fruitful in the history of theology generally. Clearly, the notion of the Trinity has generated centuries of ongoing theological reflection.  

Given these similarities, there are overwhelming dissimilarities between the two disciplines (Wissenschaften) as well, and I do not want to minimize that.  I have given the above sketch of similarities simply to get the conversation going.  I will in the next posts return to the field of the philosophy of science and discuss the Received View, the critique of the Received View, and the new vistas produced by historicism within the philosophy of science. 

The Logic of Transcendental Logic

Immanuel Kant employs transcendental logic to show that the synthesis involved in judging that the conceptual "presentation" (Vorstellung) P applying to the conceptual "presentation" (Vorstellung) S also applies to intuitional presentations (Vorstellungen). In other words, the syntheses involved in the act of judgment in general ultimately make possible the world of our experience, a world in which we know objects. 

According to Kant, while general logic abstracts from the particular content of concepts related, concentrating instead on the formal features involved in relating the concepts, transcendental logic deals with the most general features of our experience of objects in space and time.  Unlike general logic, transcendental logic is not about the capacity for thinking as such, but concerns itself with our thinking in relation to our experience of objects as such.  Accordingly, transcendental logic deals with rules of synthesis in so far as this synthesis applies to intuitions as well as to concepts.  It is left to Kant's transcendental deduction to show that the necessary condition for the possibility of experience as such is that there exists a transcendental unity of apperception, an "I think" that is presupposed in all activity of knowing objects.  

Kant famously offers a transcendental deduction in the first edition of the Critique -- the "A deduction" -- which he completely rewrites in the second edition six years later -- the "B deduction." There is a pronounced difference in emphasis between the two deductions with the first being predominantly a "subjective deduction" while the second attempts an "objective deduction."  

The precise contour of the transcendental arguments are a matter of considerable debate, but one might broadly paint the  "B deduction" as follows: 

• Our experience is one of a succession of awarenesses, that is, a succession of contents of consciousness.

• The condition for a succession of awarenesses, however, is an awareness of the succession itself, that is, the successive contents of consciousness must be combined and held together in a unity of consciousness. Such a unity is a necessary condition for an experience of succession. 

• For this synthesis to be presented (represented), I must think it. 

• But this analytic unity of the self thinking its objects presupposes a synthetic unity of the manifold.  In other words, presupposed is a transcendental unity of apperception, a unity of the "I think" that is neither the empirical "self" of psychology, nor a metaphysical thinking substance a la Descartes. (The "I" could never know itself if it were not possible to unify the manifold through synthesis.)

• The transcendental unity of apperception is an objective, not a subjective, unity.  The conditions for this unity are the conditions by which we have consciousness of objects in general. 

• An object is that under the concept of which the manifold is united.  The necessary conditions for uniting the manifold is a unity of consciousness, a unity that bestows objective affinity to transcendental apperception.  

• Since there is an objective unity in the transcendental unity of apperception, the synthesis must proceed according to the categories and the rules required for experience as such.  

My aim in this brief blog post is not, however, to discuss the differences between the deductions, nor to talk about the differing views on the structure of the deductions within the voluminous secondary literature seeking to understand them. Rather I want to highlight the general modal features of transcendental arguments. I am not the first to do this, of course, but sometimes people reading Kant miss the forest for the trees. Sometimes people simply forget to mention that Kant is engaged in a modal argument of a particular kind.  Let us look at the logical structure of Kant's transcendental argument. 

Kant is interested in the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such.  Clearly, the argument is difficult to state if we do not include its modal features.  So what is the argument structure, when these are included? 

• Premise I:  There is the possibility of experience as such.  Using Polish notation of L for the necessity operation and M for the possibility operator, we might say 'Me', experience is possible.  

• Premise II:  It is necessary that, if experience is possible, then there exist conditions C for that experience.   We might express this as 'L, if Me, then o'.  (I am using 'o' for 'conditions'.) 

• Conclusion: Lo. 

Kant is claiming that from the mere possibility of experience we can conclude to some necessary features making possible that experience.  He is not arguing that as a matter of contingent fact some conditions (or other) obtain -- that is, empirical conditions -- that would account for that experience.  He is saying that in each and every possible world, the same conditions C must obtain, if there is a possible world where experience E is had.   

Those familiar with modal logic will understand that Kant is presupposing Lewis' S5 in order to conclude to the necessity of C.  Let us review basic modal systems briefly. 

• We might have a system that might allow us to move from necessity to possibility.  Using Polish notation, we have the distinguishing axiom 'CLpMp', if p is necessary, then p is possible.  (Read the 'C' as the conditional 'if, then', e.g., 'if Lp, then Mp'.) That is, if p obtains in all possible worlds, p obtains in some possible world.  (It is hard to conceive how something appearing in all possible world is not possible, for it is in every world that is, by definition, possible.)

• We could add to this first system another axiom this one from actuality to possibility: 'CpMp', if p obtains then p is possible.  That is to say, if p obtains in the actual world, then p obtains in a possible world.  (This seems plausible since the actual world is a possible world.)

• We can add to this second system another plausible theorem: 'CMMpMp'. We have now arrived at Lewis' system S4 holding that if something is possibly possible, then it is possible.  In other words, if p is possible in a possible world, then p is itself in a possible world.  (This seems plausible since all there are are possible worlds, and it would be strange were something possible in a possible world to somehow not simply be possible.) 

• Finally, we get to S5, sometimes assumed to be the "standard" system of model logic.  This system is generated from 'CLpMp', 'CpMp', CMMpMp' and the distinguishing assumptions of S5, 'CMLpLp', that is, if it is possible that something is necessary, then it is necessary.  Simply put, if there is possible world where some necessity holds, then, since for something to be necessary it obtains in all possible worlds, that which is necessary in that possible world is now ingredient in every possible world. (It is hard to see what being necessary in a possible world might be, if that necessity does not extend over all possible worlds.)  

Those familiar with ontological arguments for the existence of God should immediately recognize the importance of S5. Assume it is possible that God exists. Now reflect on the nature of God. Is God the kind of being that could exist contingently like a rat or an apple, or is God the king of being who, were God to exist, would exist necessarily?  If one's intuitions are of the latter, then God either exists in all possible worlds or in no possible worlds. But how do we know?  We know by checking whether or not God's existence involves a self-contradiction.  If God's existence is self-contradictory, then God does not exist in a single possible world. However, if God's existence is not self-contradictory and God's existence is not contingent, then the very possibility of God existing entails that God exists in all possible worlds including the actual world!  

So how do we apply S5 here?  Let us look at the argument again, and see if we can arrive at the conclusion. 

• Premise I: Me

• Premise II: LCMeo   (This says that necessarily, if possibly e then o.)

• S5 Assumption: CMLpLp

• But (2) is logically equivalent in all modal systems to 'CLMeLo'

•  From(3), 'C~Lp~MLp'. 

• (5) is equivalent to 'CM~pLM~p'. 

• Substituting 'e' for '~p' uniformly, we get, 'CMeLMe'. 

• Thus from (1), we derive 'LMe'. 

• Now by (4) through modus ponens we get 'Lo', and thus 'o' constituted necessary conditions for the possibility of 'e'.  QED. 

It is not immediately apparent what is wrong with this proof. Kant is engaged in critical or immanent metaphysics in the Critique. He is not talking about his believing or knowing primarily, but those states of affairs making true his believing and necessary for his knowing. The transcendental unity of apperception constitutes a necessary condition for any possible experience, that is to say, if there is a world in which there is experience 'e', then there can be no worlds in which transcendental unity fails to obtain.  The very possibility of 'e' entails the necessity of 'o'.  

Now the question of the claim: Is Kant really trying to say that 'o' obtains in all worlds, or simply that there is no world having 'e' that does not have 'o'? Are we saying that worlds in which 'e' does not obtain have 'o'?  In other words, are we asserting a necessity of consequence or a necessity of the thing consequent.  

In the medieval tradition God's foreknowledge was figured as a necessity of consequence, not a necessity of the thing consequent.  If God foreknows that S rejects God, does God's foreknowledge itself logically entail S cannot reject God? The solution was to discriminate the scope of the modal operator.  In worlds in which God foreknows S rejects God, S cannot not reject God.  However, in worlds where God does not have this foreknowledge, then S is presumably not logically determined to reject or not reject.  Are we saying that the transcendental argument is more like a necessity of consequence: In worlds were 'e' occurs, it cannot be that 'o' fails to obtain.  But how about those worlds in which 'e' does not transpire?  Must 'o' be ingredient in them as well?  And if 'o' is not ingredient, then how must we adjust the transcendental argument?  Clearly, these questions motivate a deeper investigation.    

Reflecting on Reflective Judgments and Kant's Attempt to Reconcile His First and Second Critiques

Immanuel Kant famously argued that the categories of cause and substance could only apply to the world of empirical experience.  The pure concepts of the understanding unite the manifold of intuition in ways that deliver to us objects and events in space and time causally connectable to other objects and events.  

To attempt to think metaphysical reality using the categories of cause and substance is, for Kant, to misapply these  concepts beyond the bounds of their proper application.  When these concepts no longer apply to intuitions -- that is to the spatio-temporal particulars resulting in the application of "pure forms of sensibility" of space and time to the realm of things in themselves -- then their use eventuates in a "transcendental subreption" or "transcendental illusion" of thinking metaphysical reality must be structured in the ways in which our thinking conceives this reality. 

By the conclusion of the First Critique, Kant's readers realize that he has indeed provided the necessary philosophical framework to underpin Newtonian mechanics. Instead of holding that substances and causes are in the world apart from human cognition -- and thus being susceptible to the skeptical arguments of David Hume -- Kant places them solidly within the human epistemological domain. While whatever exists apart from us, exists apart from our awareness, perception, conception and language, the empirical order clearly does not. Apart from human beings, there would be no spatio-temporal particulars and no substances which our concepts synthesize from the manifold of sensibility.  The phenomenal world, the only world we can know empirically, is nicely ordered causally because we ourselves apply the category of causality and accordingly order the world causally before we empirically investigate it.  

Kant believes that the only way to save empiricism -- and thus to be an empirical realist -- is to be a transcendental idealist.  If space, time, substantiality and causality were not denizens of our epistemic equipment, the skeptical arguments would finally win the day, and the universality and necessity trumpeted by Newton in his mechanism could never be ultimately justified. In order to have a nature like Newton's, one needed to adopt a transcendental position like Kant's. 

So the story at the end of Kant's First Critique is that nature is closed under the operation of physical causality.  Physical entities, and the events in which they are ingredient, are causally related among themselves. There are no uncaused physical events, and no physical events causing non-physical events. There is no "free play" in the universe. In order to save Newtonian mechanics, Kant gives us an underlying determinism of a mechanical kind. The world of nature must conform to a deterministic mechanism, because our epistemological equipment process the world in this way.  All this is clear. 

But Kant did not want to stop writing books after the Critique of Pure Reason.  In his Critique of Practical Reason, he argues that the things in themselves, which are only mediatedly accessible through knowing the phenomenal world in the First Critique, are immediately and nominally accessible through an encounter with duty and the moral law in the Second Critique. Now the realm of freedom, responsibility and dignity are opened to human beings; we already are living noumenal reality in our moral experience.  While Kant banishes freedom in the First Critique, he gives it back in the Second Critique. The practical postulates of God, immortality and freedom of the Second Critique have no echo in the First Critique.  While the latter is the precondition for encounter with the moral law itself, both God and immortality are postulates needed for a complete moral theory, a theory in which the summum bonum is obtainable, i.e., the "highest good" wherein those doing their virtue and thus "worthy of happiness," can be, in fact, recipients of that happiness. 

Prima facie, the results of the first two Critiques seem to be in tension with each other.  How can a human being with a body possibly have free moral experience when the bodies in and through which that moral experience is had are denizens of the phenomenal realm and its mechanistic determinism? Nobody can do the right thing, it seems, without an act that is somehow physically expressed.  One cannot help a little old lady across the street without a body.  One cannot bring about the good if one cannot bring about anything at all. If nature is the realm of the bodily, and human beings have bodies and presumably act in and through them, then how can one ever do that which is better than some other act. If the phenomenal realm is the realm of "one cannot do other than one did do," and empirical reality is coextensive with the phenomenal, and if human freedom is "one can do other than what one did," then how can freedom be exercised for coporeal human beings?  If one do other than what one does do, then deterministic mechanism is false, and if physical entities cannot do other than what they do, then human freedom is impossible. 

Fortunately, Kant wrote another book, one that is not read as often by philosophers these days, but nonetheless must appear within the top 100 of philosophical classics. This book is entitled Der Kritik der Urteilskraft, translated as The Critique of Judgment, though a better translation would have been The Critique of the Power of Judgment.  In the Introduction to this book, Kant claims that he wishes to reconcile the two earlier Critiques, and introduces the notion of a reflective judgment.  Unlike a determining judgment which operates determinately to think a given particular under a given universal, the reflective judgment is one wherein their is freedom to think a universal on the basis of the particular.  It provides, as it were, some "free play" in understanding the particular.  After introducing this, Kant launches into a wide-ranging and very famous discussion of the notion of beauty and related concepts, followed by a discussion of teleology and purpose in their relationship to the aesthetic.  Many readers become frustrated in the The Critique of Judgment because it does not seem that Kant ever gets around to providing a sustained argument for what is promised: a reconciling of the results of the first two Critiques.  

It is possible, however, to provide an overview of his intended "solution." The relevant sections of the Critique are these: #8 and #9 in the Introduction, and #70 - #85 in the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment and the Methodology of Teleological Judgment.   

In #70 Kant distinguishes reflective and constitutive antinomies.   

• Thesis of reflective judgment: "All production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws."
• Antithesis of reflective judgement: "Some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." 
• Thesis of constitutive judgment: "All production of material things is possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." 
• Antithesis of constitutive judgment: "Some production of material things in not possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." (Pluher, 267, KU 367).
  

 Kant points out the the thesis and antithesis of a constitutive judgment are antinomies or contradictories, i.e., the truth of one entails the falsity of the other.  In other words, they cannot both be true at the same time.  But Kant does not believe that the first two statements are contradictory: 

But if we consider instead the two maxims of a power of judgment that reflects [i.e., the first thesis and antithesis above], the first of these two maxims does in fact not contradict [the second] at all. For if I say that I must judge all events in material nature, and hence also all the forms that are its products, in terms of merely mechanical laws as to [how] they are possible, then I am not saying that there are possible in terms of mechanical laws alone (i.e., even if no other kind of causality comes in).  Rather, I am only pointing out that I ought always to reflect on these events and forms in terms of the principle of the mere mechanism of nature, and hence ought to investigate this principle as far as I can, because unless we presuppose it in our investigation [of nature] we can have no cognition of nature at all in the proper sense of the term" (267-68, 387-88).

What is going on here?  

Clearly, Kant is understanding a reflective judgment to be quite different than a determining or constituting judgment.  In the First Critique, Kant had laid out the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such -- an experiencing of empirical nature in Newtonian ways -- as the determining judgments under which intuitions fall.  The result is a mechanistic determinism.  But does Kant's move to a reflective judgment allow him to escape the charge that just as there is a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis of a constitutive (determining) judgment, so there is a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis of a reflective judgment? Is this not a case of what is good for the goose is good for the gander? 

The key to holding that there is no antinomy in the reflective judgment rests upon the ability of the thinker to recognize that the reflective principles in question are heuristic, that far from "carving the beast of reality at its joints" (Plato), they simply are principle by which we might think nature. We attempt to see nature as entirely deterministic, but it is possible that that we adopt a different principle for regions of our empirical investigations.  (Think of how difficult it would be actually to give a mechanistic/deterministic account of beavers building a dam.  One could not use the category of final causality or employ any implicit purposeful functionalistic explanations, e.g, the beavers are acting this way "in order to" bring about some state of affairs.)  It might allow us to understand more about nature to employ the reflective judgment that "some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." Something more is needed. 

Kant reconciles the two reflective judgments because there is supersensible ground allowing both judgments to be used heuristically, if not descriptively.  Kant writes: 

If we are to have a principle that makes it possible to reconcile the mechanical and the teleological principles by which we judge nature, then we must posit this further principle in something that lies beyond both (and hence also beyond any possible empirical presentation of nature), but that nonetheless contains the basis of nature, namely, we must posit it in the supersensible, to which we must refer both kinds of explanation" (297, 412). 

But what is accomplished here?  It seems that the thesis and antithesis of the antinomy of reflective judgment still form a contradiction.  Yet Kant is suggesting that this clear and present contradiction is "taken up" by the reality of the supersensible of which the thesis and the antithesis are partial grasps.  So the supersensible substrate supports a coincedentia oppositorum in a way not unlike how God could only be thought in the mystical traditions through dialectical formulations.  'All P is J' and 'Some P is not J' are contradictories and cannot be other.  However, these contradictions are somehow sustained in the ground of the supersensible.  We are permitted to use either because the nature of the supersensible cannot be articulated by either.  When one says them both, one learns something about that which cannot be known.  

The fundamental problem of philosophy since the time of Decartes has been this: "How is human freedom possible in a determinstic physicalist universe?" Kant is taking on this big question and saying that the problem is one of thinking how it is possible, not it being possible.  It is possible after all, because it is actual.  The supersensible substrate is worked up mediately in the First Critique, more immediately in the Second, and these varying accounts put together in the Third.  We can't do metaphysics, so cannot carve this "beast of reality."  We will always end in antinomies when we do.  But nonetheless the supersensible grounds the possibility of corporeal entities acting freely.  Purposefulness in nature attests to an opening by which freedom can be instantiated in a physical system.  

Kant says that the antinomies of reflective judgment are not antonomies because the truth of one does not entail the falsity of the other.  He might have better started to index judgments to standpoints. Clearly, the antinomies are contradictories for us and how we must think the universe. They are contradictory coram hominibus.  But they are not contradictory from the standpoint of the supersensible. That is, they are not contradictory coram deo -- if we might  apply that term here.  Kant knew that ultimately the tools of human understanding and thinking simply were inadequate to think reality as such.

Covid 19 and the Church

In my last post I discussed the phenomenon of hyperreality as it pertains to the Coronavirus. Clearly, there are elements of the real in what is happening today. There is a virus that can make some people quite sick; it can even on occasion lead to death. This is reality.

But history will likely not judge what happened in 2020 in terms of the pathology of the virus. What happened in 2020 was a coordination by the governments of the world to enact draconian measures in response to the threat of the virus, measures incommensurate with that threat. Businesses around the world have been shut down, schools closed, routine medical treatment ended, beaches and parks blocked off, mask wearing prescribed, personal freedoms compromised, and the hospitality industry completely decimated. The pain of all of this blends so seamlessly into the underlying Covid threat that it appears to people as one thing. Nobody is responsible. Covid-19 causes all of this.

The Covid-19 panic of 2020 has hit the Church very hard. Traditionally, to be a Christian has meant to be connected corporeally with a community. While the Church continued to gather during the Black Plague, somehow Covid-19 has given it an excuse to no longer bring its people together corporeally. Once can, of course, watch church on YouTube.

To be clear, many churches have tried to meet during the Panic of 2020. But their meeting has sparked moral outrage. How can these people get together and spread the virus? The hyperreal world in which we now live believes that going to church and risking the spread of the virus puts others at risk, and thus it is morally wrong. How could one do this to one's neighbors?

At the beginning, watching church on TV is not so bad, I suppose. One does not have to get the kids ready; one can stay in one's PJs and watch the liturgy. But, of course, Joan is providing special music and we don't like how she sings so we fast forward through that. And congregational singing really does not work watching church, so we fast forward through that. Those long pauses between liturgical events we can skip, and singing the liturgy in one's PJs does not really work . . . So we listen to the readings and catch the sermon. It is 30 minutes or less! The three hours of getting ready for church, driving there, experiencing it, talking to people afterwards, and driving home has now become 30 minutes.

But one can read the lessons on one's own and maybe even find a couple of nice sermons on-line on the text. One really does not need to listen to one's own pastor. In fact, there are thousands of pastors across the world one might find on-line, and one could listen to them. Maybe one does that at 11:00 Sunday night. In fact, one might get up on Sunday morning, forget one's mask, go fishing and take one's Bible and read the texts -- or not.

If anybody believes that the Church has not been deeply hurt by lock downs, they are not thinking clearly. Estimates are that up to 33% of people will not go back to church once they are out of the habit of going. Indeed, if pastors so easily gave up on corporeal gatherings, maybe corporeal gatherings are really not that important after all. Every time church leadership suggest that actually getting together at church is not ultimately necessary, they sign to all that the whole institution of church-going might simply be one thing among other things. If one can be a responsible Christian by staying home and watching church on YouTube for 30 minutes, then why go back again?

So the hyperreality of the Covid Panic of 2020 has accomplished something that has not happened before. While the Church always met through the reality of wars and much deadlier plagues, today's Covid-19 hyperreality has given it permission to simply stay on the sidelines and honor the mandates of health officials.

But a church on the sidelines witnesses to all that the threat of physical sickness is, after all, much more important than spiritual sickness; it tells everyone that the life and death matters of the spirit are secondary to physical health and well-being. It declares that what is going on at Church is "really not that important."

The hospitality industry has been decimated by the hyperreality of the Covid Panic of 2020. They might recover someday. The Church, however, has been even more deeply affected, and I am not sure it will recover -- at least in the North Atlantic countries. I don't see how many small congregations who have shut their doors in the name of the public good will have the requisite capital and tenaciousness to open their doors again. After all, if our ultimate concerns are able to be halted by a this virus, then maybe they are really not that important. Maybe Feuerbach and Marx were on to something when claiming that religion is finally ideological and expressive of our fundamental alienation.

It is, after all, a matter of causality. It makes all kinds of sense to quit gathering together in Church if viruses have causality and God does not.

Hyperreality and the Covid Panic of 2020

I want to address the postmodern notion of hyperreality in relation to the current Covid-19 panic. Hyperreality occurs when consciousness is no longer able to distinguish a simulation from reality. What is real, and what is fictional blend together seamlessly so one cannot ascertain where reality ends and fiction begins, and vice versa. Since physical reality and virtual reality -- and perhaps human intelligence and artificial intelligence -- become mixed up, people often find themselves actually preferring the virtual and artificial to the real.

The Covid-19 panic plague of 2020 is real, of course, to some degree. Sometimes people do die from the illness, and some people with the illness get very sick. One can do the numbers and see some effect on world health during this outbreak. Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that if everybody were to wear a mask, the incidence of transmission might fall by some not clearly defined percent. (It would be great to have real numbers!) So there are elements of the real in the Covid Panic of 2020. People die, people get sick, some are sick enough to go to the hospital, and universal mask-wearing might lower the incidence of transmission. This is reality.

Now let us move to the virtual, the artificial and the fictional. While decisions in previous outbreaks were made in the context of the other affairs of humanity, e.g., people marrying, people dying, people going to school, people running businesses, people running for public office, the situation this time is very different. Very early on draconian measures were adopted by governments throughout the world to combat this "threat," measures that often limited the freedom of individuals to deal with the "threat" in their own way. Routine medical care was shut down for millions of people as clinics and hospitals waited for the hordes of infected patients to come. But, in general, the apocalyptic run on hospitals never materialized. The education and play of children was curtailed even though they were at very low risk. Businesses were locked down by governments arbitrarily in the name of the public good. A new morality developed. "Do you wear a mask?" If yes, you care about people. If no, you don't.

Never before in human history has an outbreak been hyped like this. People began to fear, and they even begin to hate those who don't fear. The actual threat of the illness is not at all commensurate with the response, it seems. But this cognitive dissonance does not affect most people, because most simply live the hyperreality of the Covid plague, a reality where one must do whatever is possible to save human life.

The French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard introduced the phenomenon of hyperreality. Consider Walt Disney productions -- at least in its heyday. Clearly, Disney movies are simulations of the real. But Disney's emphasis on dreams and childhood became, says Baudrillard, the American dream itself. The "outside world" of which the Disney world simulates is now merely a simulacrum. The symbolism and signification of the Disney world does not track reality, but becomes the preferred world in which people live. Once this happens, the outside world is made the simulacrum; it itself becomes a mere simulation of the world of dreams and childhood.

This is what has happened. The Covid 19 panic driven by the media and cable news has circled the globe and the hyperreality of a "Covid Pague" has replaced for many what is really happening "out there." The narrative of the virus and its devastating effects is preferred by many to the much more mundane world of a new virus which can be deadly at times. Lock downs, moral shaming and pride, and protecting the public replace the much more mundane story of what is happening on the ground. In our hyperreal land, the President has the power evidently to cause the virus or stop it.

You can live the hyperreal if you want to, folks. It is supported by the media and clearly presupposed by many of our politicians. It is, after all, rather exciting to have a hyperreal war rather than a real one. Not many die in the former, and yet one still can "live the war." It is also more exciting to live a hyperreal plague than the mundane real one. After all, in reality the Covid 19 virus is likely to finish at less than 1/150 times as deadly as the 1918-19 flu worldwide. Over and against the commonplace, it is stimulating to "live the plague," to think and act in all ways as if it were extremely deadly. Living the plague makes it much easier to change the world profoundly in the face of "humanity's greatest menace."

Baudrillard simply has this nailed. I hope you see it. Please don't nail the messenger.

How Big is ILT?

The Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) is continuing to grow. In the fall of 2019, ILT had117 active students with a headcount of 82 and a full-time equivalency (FTE) of 58. Headcount was at 85 in the spring semester 2020 with FTE edging above 60. ILT defines "active students" as those taking courses in the last three semesters that have not withdrawn. Many of our students take courses only one semester a year, so our headcount over the year is slightly over 100. 

We should see headcount and FTE growth this fall (2020) of about 30%, much of which is coming from our PhD program and our new B.A. curriculum. So how does ILT compare in size with its competitors?  
ILT ranked in the Fall of 2019 as the 9th largest Lutheran seminary in North America. You might be interested in the sizes of Lutheran seminaries by headcount. I was and compiled the list below. It was difficult to find all of this information, and on a couple I had to do some guessing. I want to be accurate, so if anybody sees an error, please let me know. FTE comparisons show much the same as headcount comparisons as far as the ranking of institutional size. 
This fall (2020) ILT will almost certainly become the 8th largest Lutheran Seminary in North America. We have some lofty goals, one of which is to grow ILT 25% a year for the next 10 years. Whether this is achievable depends in large part on whether our undergraduate program grows. We won't be able to include that growth as seminary growth, of course, but we do plan on growing the seminary itself into the Top Five over the next few years. 
There are many reasons for our growth during the generally declining theological market. The fact that we have done online education rigorously since our inception means that students who are increasingly going online for their theological education -- some of this movement is driven by the covid-19 panic--are looking at us seriously and liking what they see. After all, we have a great faculty and some exciting programming. 
Here is a list of North American Lutheran seminaries by headcount in the fall of 2019.

• Concordia Seminary (LCMS) 592
• Luther Seminary (ELCA): 465
• United Lutheran Seminary (ELCA): 357
• Concordia Theological Seminary (LCMS): 314
• Warburg Seminary (ELCA): 218
• Trinity Episcopal School of Ministry (Anglican) 176 (I include because the North American Lutheran Seminary is a part of this seminary.)
• LSTC (ELCA): 164
• Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary (WELS): 157
• Martin Luther University (ELCIC): 97
• INSTITUTE OF LUTHERAN THEOLOGY: 82 
• Lutheran Theological Southern (ELCA): 68
• Trinity Seminary (ECLC): 64
• Bethany Theological Seminary (Brethren): 58 
• Pacific Lutheran (ELCA): 49
• Lutheran Brethren Seminary: 40 (2016)
• Free Lutheran Bible College: 25
• ALTS (AALC): 25??
• LTS Saskatoon (ELCIC): 20
• Bethany Lutheran Theological Sem (ELS): 16
• Concordia Lutheran Ontario (LCC): 14
• Concordia Lutheran Edmonton (LCC): 9

We look to the future knowing that it is fully redeemed and complete. May God grant that we at ILT continue to live that future today in creativity and faithfulness!    

Why Reason is Ineffective

People watching the protests (or riots) on TV, or accessing live streams from people's phones on YouTube, likely see groups of people walking the streets, shouting slogans, throwing objects, setting fires, etc. They see the protestors disrupting society and occupying parts of cities. In all of this viewing, there has been no occasion, that I recall, in which there have been press conferences on the part of the protestors in which they succinctly, rationally and unambiguously state their demands and give reasons why they are making these demands.

The national news media, in general sympathetic to some of the overall anti-capitalist aims of the protestors, ask few critical questions as to why the people are protesting. The protestors are thus given an epistemic pass: they apparently do not need to justify in the logical space of reasons why they are behaving the way they are. They do what they do without seemingly sensing an obligation to give reasons why they are doing what they do. A visit to the Black Lives Matter website where their "campaign focus" is provided states no reasons for the positions they advocate, but simply lists the following issues of concern:

• Racial Injustice
• Police Brutality
• Criminal Justice Reform
• Black Immigration
• Economic Injustice
• LGBTQIA and Human Rights
• Environmental Conditions
• Voting Rights and Suppression
• Healthcare
• Government Suppression
• Education 
• Commonsense Gun Laws 

Having a position on all of these is, of course, what comprises party platforms. One could argue that there is racial injustice and police brutality by reporting statistics that show that there actually is police brutality, that is, that there is a significant number of acts that the police do that are, in fact, brutal, and that a significant portion of these brutal acts are perpetrated against the Black community. After pointing out the existing problem, a party platform would normally offer a more or less actualizable solution to the problem.

Reasonable people adjudicating any issue first want a description of the problem, a showing that the problem actually exists, before they then offer a normative solution to the problem by providing an account of what ought to be done given the fact that the problem exists. Presumably, the onus is on those wanting to change society to show that the problems of which they are concerned actually exist. Accordingly, to proceed rationally with respect to these issues would be to establish through statistical means the truth of these claims within American society:

• There is racial injustice. 
• There exists police brutality. 
• There is an unjust criminal justice system. 
• The current laws and practices with regard to Black immigration are unjust. 
• There exists economic injustice. 
• Human rights are violated with respect to LCBTQUIA. 
• Current environmental conditions are dangerous. 
• Significantly relevant voter suppression and voting rights transgressions exist. 
• The healthcare system is unjust or not functioning correctly. 
• There is widespread government corruption. 
• Current education is inadequate or not otherwise not rightly occurring. 
• Current gun laws do not conform to common sense.  

To establish any of these rationally means, inter alia, that one cannot rely on the fallacy of anecdotal evidence. One cannot point to a few particular instances of ~X in showing that in general ~X is the case. One needs to show over large populations using relevant statistical techniques that ~X does hold of a population.

After describing the problem -- showing that it obtains and has the contour it has -- then one would have to lay out various possible solutions to the problem, showing that one solution would, if adopted, mitigate the problem. One would need to defend one's solution against other possible solutions normatively, and then offer one's solution as a general prescription for the societal ill at issue. In offering the solution, one must take in effect its "side effects." There are all kinds of drugs that would work for many people, but that kill some. To be reasonable in recommending a solution to a social problem, one would have to show how enacting the solution does not ultimately have more deleterious social consequences than not so enacting it.

But none of this seems to be happening. It is almost as if the alleged societal ills should be self-evident to anyone whose intellect is not clouded by prejudice, scilicet, the prejudice of one's own capitalistic and racially privileged position. The ills seemingly cannot be seen by those who are citizens of the "old order," an order of class, race, gender, and species relying on distinctions and hierarchies. The old can't see what is self-evident because it evidently does not have the eyes to see nor the ears to hear.

There is thus no epistemic criterion by which we might arrive at the self-evidence of the points in connection. While BLM or those protesting would not say it this way, they believe there is a spiritual problem in America. Those of us in the system have our perceptions, conceptions, awareness and language determined by that system. We exist withing a schema of understanding or world that cannot but judge the truth claims assumed on the BLM website as having insufficient evidence. We can neither see these claims as buttressed sufficiently by evidence nor as being solvable by the courses of action recommended. We have a spiritual malady; we are not woke; we cannot see. But those who are economically and socially disadvantaged can glimpse that towards which we are blind. This is why they must protest.

The protesters wish to speak a prophetic voice in and amid the day-to-day activities of men and women in early 21st century America. Just as Jesus and the prophets short-circuited the language-games of the men and women of their age by pointing towards transcendent truth, so the new New Left in America looks beyond the epistemic games of the bourgeoisie towards that which transcends such games. Whereas the Old Testament prophets looked to God as the ultimate arbitrator of what should be the case in criticizing the prevailing social order, the new New Left in our streets look to another what is, they point to an underlying determinism, true in itself, that ultimately justifies their behavior in trying to bring down the prevailing social order.

For many in America, the protests on our streets are simply inexplicable. They don't see the reasons why the protests are happening, nor what the protestors really want to change and achieve. This is because most in America do not really understand the rather sophisticated theory underlying the social protests we are seeing. (Most protestors likely don't understand the theory either, but that is a different story.)

In order to understand this I want to use the distinction of the philosopher Wilfred Sellars between the manifest image of the world and the scientific image. The manifest image is our everyday view of the world. We live in a world of macrophysical objects that have particular phenomenal qualities, e.g., colors, shapes, textures, etc., a world in which there are persons, that is, human agents who can reason, act freely, and thus have a responsibility for the actions they initiate. Our manifest image of the world is the world as it seems. In this seeming world, people justify their actions by pointing to the reasons that explain them. This world is deeply teleological; it is filled with purpose. The best explanation of why I drove to the airport and stopped by the airport entrance at 2:15 Saturday afternoon is that I believed that Smith was coming in on the 2:05 plane from Chicago, and that I desired to see Smith. Such a world is filled with what are sometimes called folk psychological ascriptions; we regularly explain our behaviors in terms of our beliefs and desires.

Our manifest image of the world is the image of the everyday world in which we immediately and deeply dwell. Such a world was explored with great success by the phenomenologists, especially Martin Heidegger who argued that the everyday world in which we are already embedded, is the world in which Being, though it is often occluded, can ultimately reveal itself. This is the world of primordial meaning in which we find ourselves before we ever become philosophers or scientists.

The scientific image of the world, however, is the world we discover in the natural and social sciences. It is a step away from the immediacy of the manifest image of the world. It is deeper than what is manifest because it reveals the ultimate causal map of the world. Whereas color is part of the manifest image of the world, from the standpoint of the scientific image, all that exists is electromagnetic wave propagation of certain frequencies. The scientific image of the world attempts to uncover the ultimate "stuff" of reality and the laws governing behaviors among these ultimate "stuffs." For instance, quarks of many flavors relating themselves to each other in varying ways constitute hadrons, of which protons and neutrons are fundamental kinds. Hadrons acting with leptons of various kinds, notably electrons, constitute the structure of the atom, that out of which everything else is comprised.

If you are a biologist your scientific image of the world does not contradict that of the physicist, but it concentrates on other aspects of the deep underlying structure that drives the movements and dispositions of objects within the manifest image. As a biologist you might be interested in DNA, genetic mutations, and the synthesis between Darwinian natural selection and modern genetics generally, and you might be prone to explain manifest human behavior by pointing to deeper level causal explanations in terms of natural selection and adaptability.

Sellars believed strongly in science and thought that ultimately we understand rightly when we understand scientifically. To my knowledge he did not write on German social theory, and it would be interesting to see what he would say about the scientific image that putatively underlies the views of the new New Left, the image that seemingly grounds their oracular pronouncements about society and ultimately justifies their deepest claims: Capitalistic society must be overturned if people are to be truly emancipated for life within a just social structure. What is this image?

In order to understand this we must think about parts and wholes and ups and downs. Considerations of parts and wholes within philosophy is called mereology. Accordingly, mereological considerations deal with the relationships between parts and wholes, and the ontological status we afford to each. What is the being of the whole and can the being of the whole be accounted for on the basis of the being of the parts? The question simply is this: If we could accurately describe all of the parts, and all of the relevant laws governing the behavior of the parts, have we given a suitable description of, and explanation for, the whole? Reductionists claim that the being of the whole (or aspects of that being) can in some way be explained by the being of the parts (or aspects of that being).  There are many kinds of reductions, of which the following is a partial list. 

• Ontological reduction is the strongest, claiming that the whole is nothing but the parts. 
• Causal reduction claims that causal relations among the wholes can be explained by, or might simply be, the casual relations among the parts. 
• Semantic reduction claims that the very meaning of the whole is nothing but the meaning of the parts.  
• Type ontological reduction claims that the being of whole types, e.g., general properties, is nothing but the being of particular types in particular relations. For example, the being of the mental event "thinking of Alice" just is the being of some set of brain events.
• Token ontological reduction claims that the being of whole entities is completely realized in the being of particular entities in relationships. Accordingly, while the mental act "thinking of Alice" cannot be biconditionally linked to any particular set of brain events, the individual occurrence of so thinking is nonetheless physically realized by some set of brain events or other. 

The question before us is the relationship between the whole of the realm of social entities and properties and the parts of those entities that ultimately comprise them. The manifest image of the world is one where there are people of various classes, genders, races, etc., making arguments in public space about what ought to be done for the public good. The scientific image, however, is one of that which makes up this manifest doing. At the manifest level, there are free moral agents that make rational arguments in logical space about all types of things. They might make rational arguments about gun control based upon statistical information and ethical value. But this manifest image is explained by, and is ultimately a function of, more primordial relationships holding between more basic entities with different types of properties.

Using merological language can be helpful, of course, in trying to grasp what the ultimate stuffs are that operate to make the manifest world do what it does. More useful, I think, is the language of levels. I want to distinguish lower-levels of description or being from higher-levels descriptions or being, and draw a function from the lower-level to the higher-level as follows: Two lower-level states indiscernible with respect to one another will entail an indiscernibility of states at the higher-level. There is no higher-level difference without a lower-level difference. It is simplest to illustrate this with respect to the mind-body problem.

The higher-level is the level of our psychological states, e.g., our thoughts, hopes, dreads, feelings, particular perceptions, etc.  The higher-level is our mental world and the immediacy of experience we enjoy with respect to it. The lower-level consists of our brain states, the neural firings and flow, synapse formation, C-fiber stimulations, or whatever are the most basic objects over which neuroscientific theories now quantify. To say that the lower-level determines the higher-level, is to say that the neuro causally explains activities at the higher psychological level. Neuroscience advocates, in general, the lower-level determination of the higher-level. The distribution of psychological properties can be understood as a function of the distribution of neuro-properties. Two brains identical with respect to their neuro-states would have minds identical with respect to their psychological states. To capture this asymmetric dependency relationship between the higher and the lower, the language of supervenience is used. The higher-level supervenes upon the lower-level if and only if on every occasion of the instantiation of lower-level states indiscernible with respect to each other, the higher-level would have states indiscernible with respect to each other as well.

We might generalize the example above with respect to the physical sciences. Chemistry supervenes upon physics because there would be no discernibility among upper-level chemical property distributions if two lower-level physically indiscernible instantiations where to occur. The fundamental physical thus determines the chemical. Moreover, this relationship is transitive. If the fundamental physical determines the chemical, and the chemical determines the biochemical, and the biochemical determines the biological, and the biological determines the physiological (of which brains are part), and the physiological determines the psychological, then the fundamental physical determines the physiological. If the neurophysiological thusdetermines the mental, one could say that the fundamental physical actually determines thought itself. 

All of what I said is in some sense part of the scientific image of the world with respect to the natural sciences. We might quibble about certain features of the story, but the story has been with us long enough that we are not deeply troubled by it. After all, Descartes taught us that while bodies are governed by deterministic laws, nonetheless souls are somehow free in the "steering" of those bodies. He was not able to give a successful account of how this was possible, and so the problem was bequeathed to Kant who argued that the deterministic is the way that humans must know the physical empirical order.  However, since duty is immediately encountered in human experience, we are permitted to believe and act as if there were freedom. Late 19th century Neokantian inspired images of the world spoke of the distinction between the realm of nature (with being and cause) and a realm of spirit (with value and freedom). We still deal, of course, with the problem of how the macro-level mind with its complicated psychological properties is possible in a physical universe instancing physical properties very much different from those properties displayed by mind.

It is clear, however, that we somehow have gotten used to the problem of how human agency is possible in a physical universe. We continue in America to have public forums where, until recently, reason was assumed to be able to justify political positions held and we thought ourselves reasonable free to act so as to change the world. In other words, despite our theoretical problems with determinism, a Lockeian bottom up view of the social order was still in place.  Human beings could meet together, reason together, and upon a common basis of what was natural for human beings (e.g., in accordance with their various rights), argue for, advocate, and bring about social transformation.  While this basic Lockeian view did not want to reduce the autonomy of human decisions to fundamental physical law, many advocates of this approach certainly assumed that the higher-level property distributions of a society were a function of lower-level property distributions in this way: Individuals were conceived to be autonomous moral agents who in their external relatedness with other human individuals could make decisions and carry out behaviors that would affect the higher-level property distributions of the society. Accordingly, justice could be instantiated at the higher-level if some set of properties at the lower-level were themselves instantiated. Simply put, if individual human agents were placed in some set of relationships with respect to each other, then society -- an higher-level entity -- would be just.  If not, the society would be unjust.  Accordingly a just society supervenes upon the relationships sustained among individuals comprising it.  (Note the mereological relationship here.) 

But the Lockean view of things has been under attack for a very long time. This attack was most forcefully made by mid-nineteenth century materialism as it was appropriated by thinkers like Feuerbach and Marx. Many people today hear the term "Marxism" and think of the horrors of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It is estimated, in fact, that Marxist-inspired communism is responsible for over 100,000,000 deaths in the 20th century alone. But I don't want us to detour into a considerations of the effects of Marxism on the twentieth century, but simply to look at the underlying picture of the world advocated by Marxist presuppositions and assumptions.

The idea is that there is an underlying scientific image of the world that provides the causal explanation of human behaviors at the manifest level. For Marx, material conditions at the underlying scientific level determine the distribution of properties at the manifest level. Since human reasoning, human agency, human responsibility et al, is at the manifest level, the basic claim by Marxism is that the Lockeian conception of the world is a manifest image of which there is a deeper structural explanation. This means, inter alia, that reason itself, including epistemic justification and warrant, is itself explainable by virtue of deeper material conditions. For Marx, these lower-level determinants were economic. Money and its movement explains, i.e., determines the existence of, human value and thought. Accordingly, human value and thought supervene upon the material economic conditions of society. Our philosophical and political positions are thus ideological, they are determined by, and thus expressions of our particular location within the field of money and its movement. The guys at the country club hold a different set of values and think differently than the women sewing garments 12 hours a day in the old textile mills. 

While the nineteenth-century world of Marx might seem quaint to most, and while many might believe that his theories were actually disproved by the fact that the proletariat did not rise up spontaneously in opposition to the bourgeoisie and violently end their rule after WWI, Marxist thought was regenerated in many ways in the twentieth century through the work of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School in Germany, and at the New School of Social Research at Columbia University in New York City. There are first-rate scholars attached to these movements, and the last thing anybody should say is that these thinkers are naive. They are, in general, quite sophisticated in their philosophical orientation and method, and they do succeed in providing penetrating insights on great number of social issues.

All of them did notice, of course, that the predicted revolutions in Europe did not happen as Marx had predicted, and all were concerned to adjust Marxist-inspired theory to fit the actual facts. Accordingly, they were noticeably less materialist than Marx and his ilk, and were much more open to thinking that class consciousness was determinitive of thought and value rather than class itself. They argued that there were deep structures of oppression within modern capitalist societies that caused human suffering, that humans could be emancipated from this suffering, and that the normative prescriptions they offered about how this emancipation could take place were themselves an important part of this transformation.  In other words, they wanted both to understand what basically drives social values and thinking and to transform those societies by offering more just trajectories of future development.

These thinkers were neo-Marxist because they held that capitalism itself is a deeply flawed way of organizing society, especially the "monopoly capitalism" of post-war western industrial capitalism, with its commidification of all aspects of our society, including art itself.  (The protestors on the streets today would not want to know what one of the giants of the Frankfurt School, Theordor Adorno, would say of the music to which they listen.)  These thinkers were united that capitalism, and the consciousness of exclusion that arise from it, is determinative of the social ills of post-war society itself. Another way is needed, they thought. 

So far I have only talked about the classic model of bottom up causation, that is, that the distribution of the properties of the higher level (often the whole) is determined by the distribution of the properties at the lower-level (often the parts). But Marxist and Neo-Marxist thought has always sought to transform society, and thus they are committed to the much more philosophically suspect notion of top-down causation. Simply put, they must hold that the social order itself caused by lower level property distributions can produce a consciousness that is itself causally efficacious in changing the distribution of properties at the lower-level. In other words, certain people (or sets of people) can somehow achieve a correct view of things that allows them properly to change the lower level property distributions to bring about long-term positive societal effects!

We might call this the paradox of the woke. If the thought and value of people are themselves wholly determined by class consciousness or class inclusion, how is it possible for the woke to achieve the requisite epistemic standpoint to achieve wokeness? How is wokeness possible, if wokeness itself is determined by underlying economic and social conditions? 

The answer is simple: It can't!  It's impossible. Since the argument by the woke for their wokeness is itself wholly determined by material conditions or material consciousness, the content of their woke thinking cannot literally be true or false, but merely an ideological expression of that deeper level class location and consciousness from which it emerges.

Maybe the woke instinctively know this. If the game of reason-giving and moral responsibility-taking is itself determined by lower-level class, race, gender, etc. consciousness and location that they do not occupy, then they cannot play the game at all. To play the game is to abandon being woke.

At the end of the day, the woke must be as silent as Abraham in trying to justify the murder of Isaac. He heard a voice. Was it of God? Abraham must remain silent, says Kierkegaard, because in explaining his openness to murder his son, he is either a madman or a ghastly man. There can be no comprehension by Reason of why Abraham would hear God saying what He said.

This same seems true of the woke. He or she cannot state his or her position nor argue for it without presupposing the particularity of that position, without exposing that position to the relativism and perspectivalism of all positions that issue from, and are thus determined by, a particular class location and consciousness. The woke can only explain their position by not explaining it. They can show it, but not say it. To say it would be to admit that it cannot be universally true. To avoid the paradox they must simply remain silent.

And so they do. They wait for a new spirit to arise that does not look any longer to warrant, reason and individual responsibility. As they tarry in their wait, they can point to that which they cannot speak, for speaking undermines what they say.

We can speak, however. They can't remember how to hear, of course, but we can speak. Maybe others can hear. Liberal America is not of the same spirit as that which is dawning. They don't know it, and since many of them can still speak, they still believe they can speak to those who are approaching. But this will not be possible. So let us all together who can still speak, speak.

Remember that scarcely anybody thought a little corporal could seize power in Germany. The Nazi movement was lampooned and laughed at by the cultural elite. But something like what happened then could happen here, if we don't talk to each other. The new New Left cannot speak, but only show. Those of us who are Christians know the Word has power.  The Old Way is the way of the Word. Let us not sacrifice the power of the Old for the nameless void that marches today on our streets. Let us call a thing what it is, and not be frightened into not speaking. We must understand that those who cannot speak want the rest of us to be mute as well.