The difference is between causation merely being the constant conjunction of events and between there being a necessitarian aspect to it.

Maybe we're getting into an equivocation over necessity. I've already said that any sufficient condition must include any necessary conditions. If C is a necessary condition for B, then by definition, B does not happen if C does not happen. And so if A can happen without C also happening, then it is incorrect, in some sense, to say that A causes B. But at the same time, if A actually is a sufficient condition for B, then we often say that if A happens, then necessarily B will happen.

The best answer to any question (such as "What caused X?") often depends on why we're asking the question. Whenever an airplane crashes, the government spends a huge amount of taxpayers' money trying to figure out the cause. This is not because nobody knows how to create a sufficient condition for crashing an airplane. The purpose of any crash investigation is to prevent future crashes by identifying conditions that (a) were necessary for the particular crash and (b) were preventable. If you prevent a necessary condition for any event, then the event does not happen. And so, what we mean by "cause" may depend on context. In most contexts, I believe, we're looking for a sufficient condition, but in some contexts we're more interested in necessary conditions. But in either case we're talking about a necessary conjunction. When we say that A causes B, we mean either that A cannot happen unless B also happens, or we mean that B cannot happen unless A also happens.

If you trace the requisite dependency backward, how big is the sufficient condition in an actual situation? Is it a time-series of events which stretches back to the beginning of reality?

Again, context matters. Having determined that A caused B, we might have good reason to ask what caused A, and then to ask what was the cause of that condition, and so on as far back as we want to go. But could we trace the conditions sufficient for the occurrence of 9-11 back to a millisecond after the Big Bang? I won't pretend to know, but even if we could in principle do that, we'll certainly never be able in practice to do it.

What I really want to know is whether humans 'causing' things, in your view, is anything other than the cue ball causing the racked balls to be broken. Key here is that the cue ball itself necessarily acted as it did because of some antecdecent state of affairs. When we judge people to be controlled in this way, we generally absolve them of any responsibility; we say that it wasn't really them acting, but instead they were being coerced. However, it's not clear that you can support such a distinction between free action and coercion.

That is a tough philosophical problem, and I cannot solve it in an essay short enough to post here. Daniel Dennett wrote a whole book (Freedom Evolves in which he attempted to solve it, and I don't know anyone (myself included) who thinks he was entirely successful. I do think he is on the right track, though, insofar as his argument hinges on answering the question: Exactly what do we mean by the "free" in "free will"? I don't think the answer is as obvious as many people seem to think it is.

After all: if all perception is interpreted, and we are only conscious of what we percieve, not directly of what we see, then we cannot actually know that they all saw the same thing. Recall that the statement of yours which sparked this tangent is "What happens is what we observe happening." If you define 'observe' = 'see', then this is a faith-statement. If you define 'observe' = 'perceive', then that statement seems manifestly false—at least for some people, since perceptions have changed drastically. If you define 'observe' otherwise, please provide a definition.

Whether I would agree, regarding anything I say, that it is a faith statement depends on how you're defining faith. Like every other human being, there are things I believe but cannot prove. If you wish to call them faith statements, go ahead, but I prefer to call them assumptions.

As for the distinctions among seeing, perceiving, and observing, I just don't have time. From that, you may infer what you will.

I cannot discuss the strengths or weakness in theological methods of reaching conclusions because no one seems to be able to identify what theology is or how it reaches conclusions. What distinguishes it from other disciplines.

Oh good grief, did you just 100% ignore this and surrounding paragraphs:

LB: Your questions about theology are awfully broad; it would be like asking how science works (perhaps: how it has worked over the last 400 years) and how confidence science is in the conclusions it reaches. Especially if one takes into account work like Paul Feyerabend's Against Method and Nancy Cartwright's The Dappled World, the answers will be vague if general, and otherwise different based on the area asked about. I'm pretty sure some scientists think that what other scientists do isn't even science (e.g. some physicists about sociologists).

?

Well I do agree that we can be confident about most things without the assistance of the scientific method. I just don't think any other method can give us as much confidence.

I feel quite confident in my moral foundations and I am sure many others do too. But I do not consider a strong feeling or emotions to be a good basis to build confidence.

I cannot discuss the strengths or weakness in theological methods of reaching conclusions because no one seems to be able to identify what theology is or how it reaches conclusions. What distinguishes it from other disciplines.

I recognize the problems with my foundations of morality. But I have seen no way to overcome these. If you have one, please share it.

Nonsense, what I have asked for is simply a description of what theology,how it reaches conclusions,and what level of confidence we should accept.

Primarily, I'm pushing back against the idea that there isn't a wealth of things we in the West are confident of which don't come from science. My chosen example was "all people are of equal moral worth". You yourself don't seem to be all that confident of this, but I suspect most in the West are.

If I can convince you of the above, then I can move onto a discussion of how we become confident of things delivered by something other than science. Here, I argue that our ability to deal with justification is extremely weak—I think confidence is primarily built of emotion, instead of having a strong rational component. If this is true, then any weakness in theology may have nothing to do with theology, and everything to do with the current situation we've found ourselves in.

Now, it hasn't always been the case that people weren't confident in axiology, such as moral foundations. There wasn't always a fact–value dichotomy which pushes us toward emotivism. Before modernity came about, I suspect that theology did a lot to shape society and build toward many good things, e.g. egalitarianism. These suspicions do need to be supported by theory and data, but I'm not particularly bothered of the current scarcity of these, given both my second paragraph and the scholarly & scientific animus in modernity toward religion.

The money quote from you is this one:

BGA: Actually I feel very confident in most of the things I believe I ought to do, my lack of confidence is in the foundation for these oughts, namely human well being. But it doesn't bother me because this actually feels very correct and is shared by just about everyone else.

Without venturing into justification of foundational issues and yet connecting those to day-to-day life, theology gets partioned into a component no more relevant than pure maths, and a component which is basically shallow, feel-good pop religion. What you've expressed here is a secular version of the latter component.

And so, I suspect that what you've asked for cannot be answered within your conceptual lexicon. The conceptual lexicon of moderns in general is woefully inadequate, here. There is even the question of whether such a conceptual lexicon could possibly exist. I think one does, but unearthing it from my intuition is a ridiculously difficult task. A good first step, I think, is to demonstrate that my position is no more precarious than the skeptic's.

I am sorry I no longer understand what point you are trying to make.

The problem with terms like "knowledge" is how they are used differently by many people. Let's not worry about the term. What did you mean when you asked me if I agreed it is "knowledge" and I can tell you of I agree. I don't use that term because it is unclear what we generally mean. I speak of belief and how confident we can be in our beliefs.

One option I kept open was that the 'successful' in "How successful has [theology] been?" requires an accrual of 'knowledge'. Another option is that it requires increasing adherence to some standard, although for this to not involve the accumulation of knowledge seems weird to me. (For example: we learn more about reality as we try to match ourselves to it more closely.) The only aspect I think I need to add to 'knowledge' right now is that it be "demonstra[ble]".

I do not think I have been opaque I just do not want to change the subject. I want to discuss what theology and the humanities do, what conclusions they reach, and how confident we can be in their conclusions and why.

Among other things, they spend a lot of time asking what kind of persons we should become, and this has an inextricable moral dimension. They probe the surface and foundations of excellent personhood. The hard sciences probe the surface and foundations of reality. The operations of theology and the humanities can only be a change in subject if they cannot contribute to 'success'.

Actually I feel very confident in most of the things I believe I ought to do, my lack of confidence is in the foundation for these oughts, namely human well being. But it doesn't bother me because this actually feels very correct and is shared by just about everyone else.

Curious; how would you compare & contrast this with where scientists are most to least confident (we have surface, foundation, and everywhere in between)? I would argue that the lack of confidence in foundations lets the ground be slowly changed under your feet without you noticing or at least being able to do something about it. Hitler's rise to power can be instructive here, as can the development of propaganda which ultimately made the Rwandan Genocide seem legitimate to enough people. I worry about what Trump may accomplish in the US in this regard. I don't see how "all people are of equal moral worth" is consistent with his platform.

I've answered your questions, but you have continually dodged mine. What is theology? How does it reach conclusions? How confident is it in its conclusions, and why?

Hey c'mon; you only just answered my opening question, which was my opening sentence to you. It's lame that you write as if you had answered that question any earlier. I think many people would be absolutely shocked to see you say "By knowledge I mean certainty." In order to not look like I'm delaying an answer even more, I have to guess about what you mean by "successful".

Your questions about theology are awfully broad; it would be like asking how science works (perhaps: how it has worked over the last 400 years) and how confidence science is in the conclusions it reaches. Especially if one takes into account work like Paul Feyerabend's Against Method and Nancy Cartwright's The Dappled World, the answers will be vague if general, and otherwise different based on the area asked about. I'm pretty sure some scientists think that what other scientists do isn't even science (e.g. some physicists about sociologists).

Now, I presented an instance of a claimed deliverance of theology: "all people are of equal moral worth". To be more careful, I listed a few sources which argue that the OT and NT "point very strongly in pretty much precisely that direction". To actually get into the details of how this worked, who it convinced of what, and whether we ought to consider that convincing to be legitimate, is a rather large task.

What makes this matter even harder is that theology-or rather, the form of it I know most about-is very strongly connected to "the foundation for these oughts, namely human well being". That is precisely the territory where you have "lack of confidence". This isn't surprising; Alasdair MacIntyre argues that modernity essentially nuked moral foundations and moral philosophy has been stuck in a post-apocalyptic wasteland since (After Virtue, 1–5). Brad S. Gregory argues that in the wake of the Thirty Years' War, Christian doctrines became unmoored from social life (The Unintended Reformation, Kindle locations 583–87). Multiple scholars I could cite note the paucity of theorizing about what it means to be a person (including foundations for human flourishing). If these folks are right, there will be a lack of confidence, method, and demonstrability in the kind of theology I picked out in this paragraph. Moreover, that lack will be an artifact of the way modernity changed our thought processes, our conceptual vocabularies.

I have more to say in response to your questions (they are enormous questions—I hope you realize this), but I'll let you respond to the above, first.

Theology is basically a field that assumes a number of things, [...]

Every field assumes a number of things. My guess is that the more complex the field, the more that needs to be assumed to get off the ground. Theology, at least the theology which deals with all aspects of human existence (including those not repeatable enough for scientific study), is going to be pretty freaking complex. That being said, I doubt its essence requires ignoring conflicting material and I know that substance dualism is not required. Aquinas didn't even think in those terms.

I simply yet have to see you advance any knowledge on any definition that was determined by theology or the humanities with anything like the confidence of science or history for example, or to any other.

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of confidence that "all people are of equal moral worth" strewn about history which was very important in bringing about the world that we live today. I'm pretty sure much of that confidence did not arise through science, nor history. And I'm pretty sure that there are other aspects equally important for us having the kind of society we can have today (probably required to even do the science we can do), which came from neither science nor history. Now we can quibble about whether it came from theology or not, but first I think we need to be very careful about what 'success' in modernity we assign to science, and what we do not.

Let me give you some options.

And I would ask how these various abstract things connect to experienced reality. I have made some progress on the matter, but it is still too fragile to withstand a skeptical analysis. This doesn't bother me too much, because I know that your answers to questions in the realm I see as critical to theology cannot withstand a skeptical analysis, either:

BGA: Actually I feel very confident in most of the things I believe I ought to do, my lack of confidence is in the foundation for these oughts, namely human well being. But it doesn't bother me because this actually feels very correct and is shared by just about everyone else.

I'm sure it felt very correct, to "just about everyone else" [who cared to speak up], to execute Jesus. I don't think (i) non-rational feeling and (ii) argumentum ad populum are good enough. Sadly, I think for too long they have been held to be good enough for too many people. Well, that and a facile dependence on 'Reason' to save the day. The means to do something other than (i) and (ii) seem so ill-developed these days that many wonder whether anything else exists.

Even phrased this way my answer is still ¨so what?¨

So theology, the humanities lack the ability to provide us with conclusions, or support for beliefs, in anything like the same way. this is clear from the lack of any systemic methodology with checks that can demonstrate the objectivity of its results. It is further evidenced by the fact that rather than provide progressively a clearer picture of reality, they fracture into literally tens of thousands of schools of thought, religions and so on. We are no closer to having a reliable understanding of the meaning of Oedipus Rex now, than we were when it was written 2500 years ago. We are less clear on the existence and nature of gods than we have ever been. rather than these disciplines figuring our theism and what god(s) are and what he wants, they are more fractured than ever, all equally as confident they have it right. The point is when Bishop Barron says "The physical sciences can reveal the chemical composition of ink and
paper, but they cannot, even in principle, tell us anything about the
meaning of Moby Dick or The Wasteland." Neither can the humanities! They can opine, they can speculate, but as these are inherently subjective and should not be seen as equivalent paths to "knowledge" (likely meaning here justified belief).

I am now not clear on what you disagree with in this.

But logic and history are not theology, they are logic and history, and neither of these lead to a reasonably belief in any deity.

This is why I am trying to bring this back to beliefs about God instead of the study of God because you seem to be mixing up these two. Logic and History are fundamental parts of theology, whether you believe that the logic or history is sound is another thing all together. I also disagree that logic and history do not lead to a reasonably belief in a diety. I think they do.

I never said that and it is not my position. What I said was that widespread consensus on many issues indicates that a process is likely more objective than one which never leads to any such consensus.

Even phrased this way my answer is still ¨so what?¨ There are processes that are more constrained and therefore require less personal judgement than science that lead to more consensus and are more objective. So what?

Science is more reliable than the process that was used to establish it.

At science. In other words, if your goal is to come to conclusions about the natural world, it is better to start at science instead of going back to the beginning and starting at the philosophical assumptions that science requires. Science is not more reliable at coming to conclusions about unscientific things, and scientism is the desire to raise scientific thought to non-scientific questions. This is like saying that a ruler is more reliable than the scientific method used to establish it. Well yea, if you are going to measure the length of your Iphone, you should use a ruler instead of going back to the method that defined the ruler. But I would argue that since you are comparing two different methodologies where one depends on the other, talking about how reliable the depending methodology is makes little sense.

What are these better tools?

Here is the example I gave in my previous response to you:

¨Once again, a ruler is more limited and therefore more contrained but it would be silly to say that the conclusions that result from its use are of some higher order than other scientific truth. To this example, it is usually pointed out that the ruler is a tool that we have designed, limited to measuring distance, because of our scientific knowledge and informed by the scientific method. This would be equally true for the ruler as it is for science itself. Science is a tool that we have designed, limited to the natural world, because of our philosophical knowledge that uses the same methodology used in coming to beliefs about god. How then does it make sense to say that scientific knowledge is of some higher order than philosophical knowledge?¨

The problem with terms like "knowledge" is how they are used differently by many people. Let's not worry about the term. What did you mean when you asked me if I agreed it is "knowledge" and I can tell you of I agree. I don't use that term because it is unclear what we generally mean. I speak of belief and how confident we can be in our beliefs.

Actually I feel very confident in most of the things I believe I ought to do, my lack of confidence is in the foundation for these oughts, namely human well being. But it doesn't bother me because this actually feels very correct and is shared by just about everyone else.

But of course we have now moved on from the topic of this conversation and into my subjective moral perspective. That is fine.

I've answered your questions, but you have continually dodged mine. What is theology? How does it reach conclusions? How confident is it in its conclusions, and why?

I remain where I was at the start of this. Theology is basically a field that assumes a number of things, such as the text of the New Testament is the inspired by a god. It applies textual criticism to this to understand it within a set framework (e.g. This god is good and not evil). It references philosophy tend history to justify these things but will constrain or ignore historical philosophical and historical conclusions that conflict with its theological assumptions. E.g. Substance dualism is a metaphysical position that must be correct, otherwise there is no god. Or yes the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, the apocryphal gospels were forgeries. So my understanding of theology is that it is a reasonable and interesting pursuit. But I have yet to see how theological textual criticism is different than secular textual criticism, or history or theology.

I simply yet have to see you advance any knowledge on any definition that was determined by theology or the humanities with anything like the confidence of science or history for example, or to any other.

Let me give you some options. How many people is god? One, three, or millions? What distinguishes a "person" of god, and how do we know.

Why are some things good and others bad? What is the ultimate objective foundation of our "oughts" and how can we gain confidence in these?

What do humans need to do to be saved? Do we need to be baptized? Do we need to confess our sins in life?

By knowledge I mean certainty.

That is a very odd definition of 'knowledge'! So according to you, not all knowledge can be "demonstrated"? (I shall exclude tacit knowledge, which seems irrelevant, here.)

I want to discuss what theology and the humanities do, what conclusions they reach, and how confident we can be in their conclusions and why.

Well, you also asked "How successful has [theology] been?" Unless you only define 'success' via the accumulation of demonstrable knowledge (alternatively: knowledge about which one can be confident), your initial inquiry was wider than you now present it to be.

My current guess is that you don't feel you can be confident, at all, about anything in the 'ought' realm. Is it correct?

I do not see how the reference to egalitarian society is relevant.

Were this a goal of Christians, and perhaps the Israelites before them, I should think they have enjoyed remarkable success. But perhaps I am using the term 'success' differently from how you intended to in your first comment.

You can advance a hypothesis to the contrary, and test that, if you confirm it, you have falsified my claim. I do not think this can be done, which is why I think this is a subjective issue.

Actually, I think the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your claim is falsifiable. If it is not, then it would seem to be more a statement of dogma than anything else. I'm actually not sure there is any way for the claim of perfect subjectivity (very close to 'relativity', here) to be "demonstrated".

If I were to disagree that all humans are morally equal, and take the position rather that some are more worthy than others. How would you go about demonstrating that I am wrong?

There are a number of ways, but to do so I would need this disagreement to be embedded in a real-world situation, with you trying to convince others that you are right (via making predictions of what kind of reality will result from them agreeing with you and acting on that agreement).