Panentheism and Brute Facts

[Angrboda]

I think you're just kicking the can down the road, and worse, pushing it into god-of-the-gaps territory.

If Divinity is part of (or in my opinion the whole of) reality then it makes sense to its influence could be ‘observed’ (more on that below) in natural phenomena.

"If"

"Makes sense" is not a high enough bar to add God into the model of reality, especially when it really doesn't explain anything, but merely serves as an empty explanation for anything that needs explaining. Do the attributes of God give rise to the photoelectric effect? Bell's theorem? Black body radiation? No? The reason is because it is not a complete and full explanation for anything. It is just a placeholder for an explanation which never comes, and isn't coming.

Since primal matter has no properties, it can only be known through inference and deduction, making it impossible to demonstrate in any observation.

There is no such thing as purely empirical knowledge. Pretty much everything not immediately visible to the naked eye is known by inference and deduction. For example the star and spiral patterns visible in a chamber are just that, spirals and stars, until placed in the context of atomic theory. People consider a theory justified if their interpretation of the data fits neatly in their theoretical framework. Observation is itself a theory-laden claim. Moreover, you are completely wrong about primal matter, it has one and only one property, potency, the propensity to be.

The fact that there is no completely empirical observation does not put a theory with no empirical content on an equal footing with theories that do have substantial empirical content. This is little more than an attempt at the nuclear option; you can't obtain victory with your ideas, so you will attempt to deny it to every other alternative. Only it doesn't work, because there are legitimate reasons to prefer theories with empirical content to ones without it. Theories without it are near impossible to verify, there is no demarcation between alternative empiricism-free theories except on the basis of fancy and imagination, and theories with empirical content can be rationally demonstrated, and, they have a much better history of enabling the production of instrumentally useful things. You're essentially arguing that because we cannot eliminate the non-empirical in any theory, there's no reason to prefer theories with empirical content to those with none. This is pure bullshit.

I personally do not put any faith in the premise that rationality is ultimately reliable, effectively infallible, but the long and short of it is that it is a premise that simply won't bear the weight. As noted before, the counter-factual of the premise that reason is reliable yields a paradox which can't be evaluated under classical logic, so that's two of your premises that have been pushed into the realm of the unknowable.

Is this a rational position? What other means of gaining this type of knowledge do you recommend “bear the weight”…intuition, mystical visions, tarot cards? Everyone knows that ideas can appear to be rational without actually being so. We’re only human. The reliability of reason depends on clear thinking and having good information. If you’re going to use that against me by saying my position is “little more than an assertion” then you must also level that charge on all positions, including your own.

Your reference to the liar’s paradox in no way undermines the validity of classical logic. Without content a proposition has no meaning. The self-referential structure of something like “This statement is false,” just keeps trying to borrow content from its own empty pockets. This is not a serious objection to the validity of logic or its application.

That wasn't my point. And pointing out that your basis for concluding the existence of primal matter depends solely on this premise isn't "hand waving," it's a little thing called "entailment." My point is not that reason is so flawed as to be useless, it is only that, under what appears to be your conception of it, reason and rationality are simply not sufficiently well justified for you to be able to cash out the concept of primal matter on the justifications for the sufficiency of reason and logic which exist. Logic and reason, as popularly conceived, have serious limitations in terms of determinacy and completeness which cannot be closed at this time; as long as they have these limitations, any purely ontological argument, whether Anselm or Aristotle, is going to be unable to demonstrate its own validity.

As a Hindu, I postulate that "All is Maya," everything is an illusion. How is one or the other more supportable in any real sense?

From having discussed this concept with life-long Hindus, I can say with confidence that “all is maya” does not undermine my position. In Western terms, a Maya-type illusion happens when accidental or secondary properties give the ego (itself a secondary construct) the false impression of a plurality that distracts it from the fundamental unity of reality. “All is Maya” is not the actual solution; but rather a prompt to contemplate of the tension between the Unity & Plurality and Being & Change. The difference between East and West is that, starting with the Greeks, the West’s intellectual tradition has approached the problem using rational inquiry whereas in the East various spiritual practices evolved to invoke experiences of gnostic insight. I see these as complimentary approaches, not in direct conflict.

I think you're failing to address the point, which is, if you have equivalent theories, that conflict, both of which "make sense," yet neither has empirical content, on what basis should we prefer one to the other? On who has the most eloquent spokesperson? On which side produces the most papers? On who has the most adherents? What is your criteria for demarcating fact from fancy in non-empirical theories? Reason? I think we've already been there.


As long as I'm here, I'll point out another flaw, which is that you rely on "popular" conceptions of 'god' to inform how we should derive the properties of reality. The current conception of Him is far from unanimous, either currently or historically. So which "attributes of god" are you going to draw upon which are not plagued by one fallacy or another in invoking them. You're a Christian, so god to you means one thing. As a Shakta Hindu, it means something else. As a Taoist, it may mean something else. Again, what demarcation criteria are you using to pick which version of 'god' to base inferences on, and how is that criteria not ultimately fallacious and arbitrary?