God is not "pure nothingness"

https://disqus.com/home/channel/philosophy/discussion/channel-philosophy/is_a_theory_of_everything_even_possible/#comment-4382787662

Edit: Be sure to check out the discussion at the above link in order to properly grasp this question in context. Essentially, this refers to the products of our inductive-abductive processes (both inferential & instinctual), where nonfalsifiable hypotheses are concerned, some only temporarily nonfalsifiable but others more intractably so. In such cases, we necessarily must rely on analogical reasoning. Such an employment of analogy is not peculiar to theological much less metaphysical reasoning but is part and parcel of our quotidian common sense and integral to scientific exploration. It is for reasons like this that scientism, logical positivism, radical empiricism, metaphysical ignosticism & theological noncognitivism have all gone into history's philosophical wastebasket. Those who, in their anxiety to annihilate metaphysics, would cursorily & summarily dismiss the Analogia, will unavoidably subvert science, itself, along with their own common sense.

Excellent.

Bottom line: There is a whole lot of "assuming" going on.

I do heartily commend Peirce to you and all others.

Peirce’s epistemology is aposteriorist, scientific, naturalist, fallibilist, semiotic & pragmatist.

The four individuals who tutored me the most regarding his work include both believers (a Protestant Pentecostal & Jesuit Catholic Charismatic) and nonbelievers (an agnostic cell biologist and an atheist neuroscientist), three of whom are personal friends.

It may not be for everybody but it very well could be for anybody!

RE: Even the least physical changes of entropy require positing new qualities of existence that need causal explanation. Yes, that means that even a mere change in spatio-temporal location needs existential causal explanation. The laws of nature that govern the physical direction of entropy are described, but not explained, by physics. They are simply “just-so” givens that we are supposed to accept because some physicist describes how they behave. It is the work of philosophers, not physicists, to seek deeper explanation.

<<<<<

BINGO!

Very well put.

In the very same way that analogous telic realities present vis a vis new qualities of existence, so, too, the concept, entropy, is way too vague to accomplish the explanatory heavy-lifting that some naively imagine they've accomplished. Thermodynamic systems entropy, information systems entropy & evolutionary entropy (rate of organismal environmental energy appropriations & reinvestments in survival & reproduction) are indeed formally homologous & certainly hierarchically interdependent entropieS. We can describe that interdependency but that doesn't EXPLAIN it!

Actually, I need to edit this one & will do so explicitly to better reinforce the point:

THIS: We can describe that interdependency but that doesn't EXPLAIN it!

S/H/B: We can successfully REFER to that interdependency but that doesn't mean we have even successfully DESCRIBED it, yet, much less EXPLAINED it!

And, when we do proffer explanations, that doesn't mean they can't be LAYERED (as Jack Haught has accessibly explained for decades). They may even need to be layered in order to make proper contextual sense of it all. (And no, we don't employ Occam's Razor to adjudicate competing accounts that don't already enjoy explanatory adequacy.)

BTW, your "S", I'm sure inadvertently, caricatured what I actually wrote, which explicitly invoked an irreducibly triadic inferential cycle, including deduction. It begins with experience, inductively, reasoning from effects, which may or not be proper to known causes, then abductively hypothesizes putative causes, then hypothetico-deductive reasoning proceeds. But different interpretive approaches, syllogistically, can begin at different points in the inferential cycling, cf https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09518398.2012.759296?journalCode=tqse20

I may have inartfully articulated my approach. If so, I apologize. It is rather jargonistic.

To be clear, I would intend to say something like this:

Further:
"For Peirce abduction had its proper place in the context of discovery, the stage of inquiry in which we try to generate theories which may then later be assessed. As he says, '[a]bduction is the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea' (CP 5.172); elsewhere he says that abduction encompasses "all the operations by which theories and conceptions are engendered' (CP 5.590). Deduction and induction, then, come into play at the later stage of theory assessment: deduction helps to derive testable consequences from the explanatory hypotheses that abduction has helped us to conceive, and induction finally helps us to reach a verdict on the hypotheses, where the nature of the verdict is dependent on the number of testable consequences that have been verified."

cf. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/peirce.html

Thanks, again.

I like what you did there because it expresses some of the tensions that inhere in epistemic justification.

What one must do, however, is draw a distinction between our methodological approaches, which are inescapably grounded in inductive-abductive inferential processes, and our syllogistic formulations, which then presuppositionally & methodologically stipulate certain of the epistemic products of those processes as necessarily true, even if only for the sake of argument. Such an argu-ment would be formal, in and of itself. The argu-er, however, does indeed proceed in an inherently fallible, nonfoundational manner.

Now, if your intent was to explicate my model of an anthropological episteme, you have indeed captured both that & why the justification of first principles, self-evidentiality and such, explicitly & by definition, do not and cannot proceed deductively, in principle. And why they are only refutable, informally, by reductio & parody.

Induction & abduction are inherently informal. A "formal system of inductive logic" would be an oxymoron.

What you might find more interesting, and I'd welcome your thoughtful critique, is how I view the nature of our formal disquisitions, themselves, the argu-ments not argu-ers. I did not make it clear that my reference to a semi-formal nature was being applied to our natural language structures and related syllogistics.

We would have to switch to a consideration of mathematical language structures to evaluate our ability to formalize, for example, a Theory of Everything, which is what I initially thought you may have been asking about, instead. Interestingly, Hawking drew some inferences about how any TOE would be predictively limited precisely because in such a modeling we'd have to self-referentially capture the modelers. I've grappled with the implications of what he was saying, and perhaps not saying, aware of the controversy he launched in that particular Dirac lecture re Godel & the End of Physics. I remain unconvinced that it means we couldn't, in principle, write down an authentic formal TOE of reality's fundamental principles.

If you have such an interest, I've further developed my thoughts on same here:

https://paxamoretbonum.wordpress.com/2019/03/09/notes-regarding-semi-formal-heuristics-syllogistics-for-nondeterminate-determinate-realities/

Thanks.

No, I would hold that it most certainly can be so delimited, formally. Within given layers of complexity, we can not only successfully reference but even robustly describe properties, entities & relations. With such descriptions, we are not only able to abductively hypothesize & inductively test but can complete a virtuous cycle of triadic inference, deductively using univocal terms, both semantically & ontologically, achieving a certain explanatory adequacy.

It is when we are methodologically thwarted & ontologically befuddled by the emergence of novel properties, entities, states & systems, confronted by reality's various aporia, that we are forced to fallback on mere exploratory heuristics in order to make vague, overdetermined possibilities more precise; general, underdetermined probabilities more specific; and ambiguous actualities better defined.

When we are seriously thus thwarted, we can engage in a rather nonvirtuous cycle of abductive hypothesizing & deductive clarifying, unable to interrupt it by inductive testing. That dyadic inferential cycling can be efficacious and hypothetically fecund, if done rigorously, opening our minds to new avenues of exploration. It can also become rationalistically vicious, if we imagine we're thereby achieving explanatory adequacy, as it instead forecloses on research programs.

At the margins of aporia or horizons of knowledge or interface of novelty, we must engage in semi-formal heuristics because we're relying on analogies of proportion & attribution, e.g. the quantum and the gravitational have these similarities, but those are outnumbered by these dissimilarities.

There is another sense in which nondeductive processes come into play. We inductively & abductively infer 1st principles and such, but call them self-evident, so must rely on refutation by reductio to convince others they're wrong about, for example, this or that version of a principle of sufficient reason and, yes, even common sense notions of causation. But the semi-formal in play in this discussion pertains to how we relate nondeterminate & determinate syllogistics, respectively, in their modes of identity & being.

I had put together a few notes on those modes, best I could:
https://paxamoretbonum.wordpress.com/2019/03/09/notes-regarding-semi-formal-heuristics-syllogistics-for-nondeterminate-determinate-realities/

I couldn't a priori say whether, ontologically, there's a single formal system. If there was, then it seems that a single semi-formal heuristic could model it.

That single semi-formal heuristic, which would relate the distinct nondeterminate & determinate syllogistics of a given system, could, in principle, model a single formal system.

Concretely, it seems, for example, that in a materialist monist ontology, nondeterminate static relations,
whether in/finite, un/bounded, un/curved +/- and so on, could constrain otherwise determinate, dynamical activities of an energy plenum. We could only model the nondeterminate relations (nomicities or laws of nature, etc) but not explain them, other than to say they're necessarily like that, noncausally, by the very axiomatic nature of that given formal system.

If I missed the meaning of your question, just explicate it a tad with a concrete example or two, and I'll take another stab at it if it isn't over my head or out of my wheelhouse (not that those criteria have slowed me down before).

Thanks.

To be clear, I wouldn't aspire to dispossess any of their more apodictic approaches, precisely because, in my view, we're not all situated in exactly the same way doxastically. Using Maritain's categories, for example, not all have traversed the same experiential paths exactly so even though we have, in essential ways, largely so, vis a vis philosophical contemplation, subjective & objective intuitions of being, mysticism of self (Eastern) or mystical contemplation. I don't pretend to know why, for it would reduce to a theodicy, evidentially, an enterprise I eschew and find offputting (as opposed to mere defenses, logically). So, justifications can differ.

I variously interpreted your insight in terms of a creatio continua, essentially ordered series, intuition of being & even St John of the Cross' observation that, even in mortal sin, we remain, at least, in ontological relation to One, Who yet lovingly holds us (in existence), calling us into a more robustly unitive relationship & metanoia (orthotheotic becoming).

More directly to the novelty of your insight, transcending a static essentialism, Arraj made an appeal to understanding telos more so in terms of "deep & dynamic formal fields," still classically theist but with a slight nod to process thinkers. Also, you may find resonance in what Norris Clarke & Robert Connor had to say regarding substance as dynamical & relational? Clarke saw this as having implications for both determinate being and God's own esse intentionale, reserving immutability for His esse naturale. At least, that is where my analogical imagination went re the O.P.

Thanks for sharing. Pleased to meet you.