Then the the the the the the the the the the people, the the
the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the
the the the the the the the do them all right, all right?
Welcome back, Father Deacon Antonius, Father Deacon doctor Anonius, joins me.
Excuse me, I'm depriving you of your proper titles, uh and uh we
what CP A c I A c CP should those all be on there?
As well all of your uh alphabet acronyms that I'll leave any out. S
sp X, I fel like bond. I need Russian passport here? What's
your Russian code name? Dugan? Are your your Russian code name Dugan?
When you're that's your your Dugan pass can pass right there, so that when
you when you come to Russia, Dugan sits there at the check in gate
and he literally checks every person in and he looks at you and says,
you have good beat or you can post. You look at Russian who can
post? There's only one guy check to Russia. When I go into Russia,
Dugans, the dude with the sign that says f d A you know
what, like the guy that picks you up in the limo he picks you
up in the limo and takes you to McDonald's. Is the Russian McDonald's.
When I was in Russia, I did take a picture of They had all
these ads for like billboard ads for Papa John's pizza, and it was like
this hockey hockey player with like a missing tooth and like, so I took
a bunch of pictures of Michael hilarious. Did you taste the vodka in Russia?
Does it taste different or is it all the same everywhere? I made
the mistake of like we were at a hotel, so you ordered wine cooler
and you ordered Arnolds and James all, what's the Russian zema? You ordered?
The Russians they had like this really nice spread for at this one of
these hotels for breakfast, and then they had like bottles of vodkas kind of
like set up like cannons and stuff. And I asked my spiritual father and
I'm I'm like vodka for breakfast, And He's like, well the Russians and
blah blah blah, said well, can I get your blessing to try vodka
for breakfast in the morning. It was the worst mistake I've ever made because
of course, Like I was just like, I want to go back to
bed. Are you being serious? Like there's actually an option for vodka breakfast.
They drink vodka for breakfast. Wow. And my father was telling me
like, well, you got to see, like a lot of these guys
are just like out manual labor and so they like, you know, you're
just burning through and working it off and stuff like that. I'm like,
yeah, because I mean, I don't want to drink alcohol for breakfast,
man, I was. It's yeah, so terrible, and it reminds me
of in Italy, like the odd choices they have for breakfast. In Italy.
There's there's always like a million like crumpets and cakes, super soggy bacon
which doesn't even look cooked, which is weird, and then like cold ham
and cold eggs, like the eggs are never hot, they're cold. It's
just just a weird breakfast idea. I don't know anyway, Anyways, Yeah,
I was on a pilgrimage, so I wasn't actually searching for like distilleries
and Russian tasting Russian vodka and stuff like that. But when I go back,
I'll make a habit of finding it'll be like an Indiana Jones the Search
for the Holy Vodka. All right, So tonight we're gonna discuss the the
new paper that father Deacon Doctor Anonius has written, which is I thought he
mentioned this idea a few months ago. That was a great idea for a
paper to address some of the specific challenges that we've heard in recent years to
the transcendental argument for God's existence, and a lot of these revolve around higher
level argumentation, and really a basic kind of idea that I think you had
said Russ Manion pointed out to you a while back, which is that it's
really just asking the question of, like, what's the reason for reasoning itself?
And when we think about it in that way, it's actually prior to
any of the atheistic argumentation that they might even engage in, because you're not
even allowing them to sort of make the first move, which any first move
is going to assume again reasoning. So if we're asking questions about reasoning itself,
that's a perfect kind of segue into the domain of tag. So do
you wanna how do you want to kick it off? And uh, and
maybe maybe was there certain discussions you had that prompted you to have this as
your paper topic. Yeah, so I'm really indebted to russ man Into and
just let everybody know he did pass away last week, So keep him and
his family and your prayers. My godson who is dear friends with Russ and
did the dialogue group with They were working on a book, and so I've
been in correspondence with them and reading some other articles that most people haven't seen.
Because what I was trying to think about is what was really good about
russ Mannion is his psychology. The ability to grasp the kind of psychological component
of the other person, kind of get to the question behind the question and
stuff like that, and then reduce it what would seemingly be really complicated to
a really kind of basic way of like explaining stuff. Yeah, I like
this intro. This this intro sentence at the top. The hardest problem is
convincing people the problem is not hard at all, but simple. That's a
good Yeah, that's me. Yeah, I'm saying that's a perfect introductory sentence.
But that's kind of like channeling the you know, russ Mannion. Let
me give you an example of where he could take something that apparently would be
really complex and then boil. And it relates to this opening kind of quote
that you you gave. There's no purely rationalistic rational argument for the existence of
God. Hold on, let me find it. So Butcher the where is
it goes something to the effect that there's no purely rational argument for the existence
of God or for theism. There's only a theistic account of rationality. And
when I heard that, I was like, Oh, that's perfect. And
then I started so I really started kind of trying to get into the psychology
of the other, like what's going on? Why is this so difficult?
Because once you get it right, once you get tagged, don't you feel
that it's like this is so obvious, Like in fact, there's nothing more
obvious. Yeah, it's almost like a hidden in plain sight type of thing,
like this is should have been obvious the whole time. So let me
give you another conversation that I had that kind of illustrates the same point.
I was talking with my chair of philosophy, really great guy. He graduated
from Thomas Quantas College like myself. Of course he's older. But so I
stopped by his office maybe like a month ago to ask him a question if
because I was dealing with arguing with some people about nominalism, and I said,
well, I'm just kind of interesting what his thoughts where I said,
do you have any good arguments against nominalisms? And said he says, well,
what do you mean? And I said, well, that nominalism's false
and he says, well, isn't it obvious? And I'm like, yeah,
it's like this story of my life. I'm sitting here. The hardest
problem is arguing like, isn't it obvious? The hardest problem is convincing people
the problem isn't hard at all, but simple. And I really it's kind
of the frustrating part about philosophy. And it illustrates too that what's really going
on is not an intellectual issue. Yeah, it's a spiritual issue that people
want to attempt to kind of justified their their idols, as they put out
a talk about in the paper and so and Saint Paul talks about this too.
All men know that God exists, but they suppress that knowledge. And
so there's different ways you can suppress that. But the philosophers build systems,
don't they, And they make it super complicated and they're really smart. And
then it puts the burden on us that it's like, well, now I've
got to learn all this stuff. I've got to learn logic, modal logic
and all this analytic philosophy and epistemology just to cut through all the bs and
show you that the problem is not hard at all but simple, and that's
the hardest problem. Would you agree? Yeah? I mean that the there's
this illusion that's cast that makes people think that it's all very you know,
profound and deep and sophisticated, and really the only sophisticated part is when where
a direct asking this supposed sophisticated arguments of the opponents, but are really just
kind of like, you know, smoke and mirrors to cover up total bankruptcy
and absolutely no foundations for anything. And I'm not even sure that most people
are aware that they're doing this. And we also talked about two is that
once the systems are constructed for you, and when I'm talking about the systems,
because we're going to get into the paper of and what I mean by
autonomous epistemology, but it's system building. Once these systems are kind of built,
you're brought up in that right, and a good way to kind of
think about it is, or you adopt it, you work within it.
It's an operating system, and they're operating systems that can make you dumb.
I had one of the interesting enough he was a Jesuit priest, but that
was one of my master's advisors, and he would always criticize different like schools
of thought like Marxism, and he was like, oh, it's stupid.
He's like, but it's sort of stupid that you have to go to school
to learn it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a stupidity that only intellectuals could
believe. That's right. So we have this kind of naive view that it's
like, well, the enlightened you see there in college, and that's there's
the stupid, and then there's the educated. And it's like, no,
you go to school to educate yourself in stupidity. And so part of the
problem is not being able to see the obvious. Is that and we've talked
about this too. You've got yourself into a bad program and a bad operating
system that doesn't allow you to see kind of clearly and think through stuff.
So, you know, the natural theologian at I'll think that what would just
give people arguments and they'll just see it. But the problem is in an
argument, how are you going to see the proof or the argument when you're
operating system doesn't allow you to and you also have you also have an inner
partial motivation to suppress that truth. Right. This is that point about virtue
epistemology, virtue knowledge, or of virtue ethics that is often ignored by the
natural theology proponents, where they which is ironic because I've asked a lot of
them if they think that, you know, choose a person who is an
unbeliever and prefers vice, would that in any way maybe affect the evidences that
they see and how they interpret the evidences, And most of them will say
yes. But then when you really drill drill down into their approach, they're
still acting like, but all I have to do is like pile up evidences
and eventually they'll kind of tip over and convince the person to maybe believe.
Now, all that being said, it doesn't prevent me from trying to figure
out better ways again, kind of in the spirit of russ mannion of cutting
through all of that. And one of the ways that motivated this paper was
if I was the other person, how would I be seeing this why if.
I mean, it's really hard to kind of do to get yourself out
of your own paradigm and think in terms of the other person so that I
can come back into the paradigm and then work some of that into my paper.
So one of the things that I did was just kind of put an
ad out on all the socials, give me your best objections, like,
let me see it from your point of view, so that I can go
back and kind of think through, like what is that people are struggling with,
how can I answer it? And then again how to boil down a
lot of this really kind of complicated stuff and make it a lot more presentable.
So hopefully, you know, I have different kind of reactions to the
paper. Obviously, some people are really confused. I see that there,
and when we get into this second and first order statements and knowledge that people
get really confused about that. And I think one of the difficult things about
this too is I was just talking to my brother on the phone and he
was like, I just found out that like over fifty percent of people don't
have an inner monologue, and I'm like, oh, yeah, we just
I just did a stream on that too the other day. And that this
kind of inabilit this cognitive inability and would also relate to I think kind of
paradigm analysis. So there's we've talked about this, well, this is just
the way you think, right. So I find that people have had it
really difficult kind of stepping out at kind of higher meta levels to kind of
ask kind of metaological, meta epistemological questions. And there's something tied to kind
of introspection, I think, because introspection kind of questions and doubts our own
thoughts, right, I mean, when I would this would an example be
something for the audience, something simple like if I said the dog is brown,
right, that would be a basic knowledge claim. If I said I
have knowledge that the dog is brown would be a higher level order of questions.
And a lot of people get this confused too about what we're arguing.
I've never actually posited that an atheist or anybody else who doesn't embrace the orthodox
worldview can't have knowledge. I think it's possible, But the state that you
have knowledge to claim that you do, or to know that I'm in a
state of knowledge and I know the dogs there, that's a second order.
Yeah. The first time I came to one of those conferences in Texas with
you. There was a bit of a disagreement with an individual over this very
question where he thought that I was saying that an unbeliever literally has no knowledge,
when the point was that they can't justify the knowledge that they have,
but they know things, they just don't have an account for the knowledge.
Yeah. And again, because orthodox provides, as we'll see through the theonymous
epistemology of revelatory theism and epistemically privileged position, we can actually say, of
course the atheist knows. Remember we discussed this too, and I'm trying to
remember if it was Stanny Loy, I think it was that said Orthodoxy is
not married to any particular philosophy. It's not wedded like Tony's wedded to a
restituianism. Why, because it transcends all these man made systems. Yeah,
there's a great an epistemic kind of privileged position to look and be like,
sure, right, here's a there's a Fluorovsky I say, I think that's
really good where he talks about how the Batristic era didn't just adopt Plato or
adopt Aristotle, that they would pull from any of these and the terminology and
the ideas are really revelatory in the sense of the nature person distinction, for
example, is not an Aristotle. It's a unique revelation to the Christian position.
Even though it might utilize terminology from Aristotle or Plato, the meanings that
fronema behind the terms that are used is intended to be revelatory revelation, not
not just sort of one to one Greek borrowing cribbing from Greek philosophy. So
I'm trying to set up like the kind of whole prolegemina to my paper,
and I'll explained what the motivation was, why this is kind of a different
style that I was trying to also get the objections and then answer and kind
of think through these things and articulate it, which I was. You know,
of course I didn't get all the objections, but I thought kind of
the more serious or more common objections. And the other thing too, If
you remember I had this phone call with you, that first and second order
argument that I developed in there came to it came to me in a dream.
It wasn't a fewer dream. And I remember in the dream I was
arguing with this atheist because I don't know what your dreams are like, but
this is all I do in my serious or joking. Did you really have
a dream about it? I'm not pretty serious. I was debating this atheist
in my dream and I developed this argument, and I remember thinking of the
dream, I'm like, I think I'm onto something here. Now. I've
had all those kinds of thoughts and dreams before, in the totally nonsensical right
when you wake up, oftentimes you're like, what was I thinking? That
didn't that didn't make any sense. But in this dream, I thought about
I think, I'm on, you got to remember this and pull it outside
of your dream and write it into your paper. And I just kept reminding
myself that I pull this out, don't forget, because it's easy to forget
something from a dream. And of course I wake up and I forget,
and I'm driving down to leturgy with my subdeacon and I'm telling him, I'm
like, I think I just stumbled upon this really cool argument, and I
can't remember it. After the liturgy, after partaking of the Eucharist, I
remembered it, and I'm like, I got it, And I tell him,
my subdeacon, and he was just like probably thought I was like super
nerdy, and I'm like, so if you remember I called you because I
don't know, like this is part of my introspection. I'm like, what
if this is totally nonsense, and I think, oh, this is so
great. I got it from a dream and this totally makes sense. So
i'd called you and some other people and I told you about this argument between
this kind of circularity between first and second order knowledge in terms of autonomous epistemology,
and both you and other people said, I think it's a really good
argument, and so that I kind of put it in there and refined it
in the paper. So that was another motivation behind the paper too, which
is really interesting. All right, so's le's get into the paper, like
what's so you lay out the introductory paragraph where you're talking about how you want
to present a theonomous epistemology or revelatory theism account for knowledge versus autonomous epistemology,
utilizing this first order second order tiered approach, and then you argue that the
giving account for second order statements in terms of the existence of knowledge reveals a
unique epistemic problem that requires justification for the second order. And then the conclusion
is that of your argument is that only really theism is capable of grounding a
solution or giving a solution to the necessary conditions for the possibility of knowledge.
Yeah, so what I want to do, there's two things that I did
in this paper is to put in onto a two disjunct And what that means
is in a bunch of Malpass's asses, I call them these alkoli asses that
kind of pseudo intellectuals that just kind of parrot these arguments that they get from
Malpass, and I put this in my paper. They're presenting an argument from
Malpass that basically when I present the orthodox version of tag and one of the
arguments that I used to kind of pedagogically illustrate what's kind of behind all of
this is the disjunctive argument. And so Malpass had this argument that you know,
either it's not a true just junk, meaning there could be other options
like for example, you're iding or eating a peanut butter and Joe sandwich or
a steak. Well, that means a true just junk. It's not either
a arb but a or not a And then we'll get into this later.
They have their own criticism of that, but I really do want to put
it into a true dichotomy within the disjunt, and so it's going to be
either autonomous or theonomous. There can't be any third option. And then what
I do is I take the autonomous project and I look, okay, what
is epistemically more than just epistemically problematic but devastating self refuting. And in this
section I think I had titled it the failure of autonomous pistemology. There's two
main arguments that I develop in here. That's the putting your epistemological horse before
your metaphysical cart argument, which you know that I had already kind of developed
that before the writing the paper, and then the first and second order,
which I had kind of a version of that I actually did something. I
refined it and did something different here, partly in base two, not only
on my dream, but objections that I heard that where people thought that I
was simply just kind of recashing, rehashing the Chisholm problem, and so I
had to kind of make it more clear that it's like, it's similar,
you know, in so far as a dialectical kind of tension and circularity,
but it's it's fundamentally different, so that no answers to Chisholm's criterion problem are
going to transfer over and answer the argument that I'm making. But just let
me restate. Those are the two main arguments of the failure of the autonomous
epistemology, putting your epistemic course before your metaphysical cart and circularity epistemic bootstrapping that
arises from the dialectical tension but between the first and second order knowledge. And
we can go over those, but if you well, one question before that
is why are you Why are you saying a dialectical tension between first and second
order? Excuse me? I meant the dialectical tension was between the the metaphysics
and epistemology. I guess the first I'm not calling it into question, I'm
just could you flesh that out for me and the audience. So the dialectical
tension between and I guess there is a dialectical tension between the first and second
and it's something similar to the the epistemological and metaphysical. Right, So die
two Right, I have two categories. And with the epistemological metaphysical again,
the metaphysics, we would say the way the universe is in the ontology determines
what if we know anything at all and how. But then I have all
these different metaphysical accounts. So then what I have to do is what's contingent
upon metaphysics has to be placed prior to metaphysics so that I can actually determine
I know, before I could even know what metaphysical account is, so that
I can then justify my my epistemology. So what I'm doing is an unjustified
move. I'm going, let's just pretend that's not the case, and like,
let's put this over here and just remember what I always say, grant
me all my assumptions so that I can and then pretend to justify my pistemologics.
So what we see is I can't get to this without this, but
I have to put this to figure out this. Right. So there's there's
two things that are kind of the intension that can't kind of resolve each other.
They both seem to kind of be dependent on each other. But because
they're divided in this kind of dialectical tension, I can't actually solve the problem
or accomplish a task that I set out to actually do in any of the
philosophy or epistemology that I'm trying to do. Likewise, with the first and
second order, I have what two categories. With the first order, John
knows the dog's brown, right, and then our claims that John knows that
a dog is brown, or that knowledge exists. Now, clearly I couldn't
make the second claim order claim unless the first order were true. But what's
the problem. I'm always making second order claims about the first so it's well,
yeah, obviously I've got to provide justification. So what grant me all
my assumptions about first order, so that can make all my statements about my
second order that John knows knowledge exists. Basically everything everybody would ever put in
a chat. All the objections that we're getting are all second order. They're
all making epistemic claims, which is different than a person being in the state
of knowledge. Is very different than somebody actually making claims. So again we
have this kind of tension between two categories. I can't get number two without
number one, but I'm always in number two, so I assume and bootstrap
unjustifiably, so category one to arbitrarily and unjustifiably try to justify, and that
and that's similar to the criterion problem. Move right, it's similar to yeah,
but it's not identical because the criterion problem, he'll be like, people
will be like, well, you start off with a methodology and blah blah
blah. But this is more of a fundamental problem. I'm sure once you
grasp the the circularity, the vicious circularity, and dialectical tension between the first
and second order, and realize I'm always in second order from an autonomous position
starting point, I can never I can never get the one, and so
thus have to get to one in order to established to level Yeah, and
so the conditions for the possibility of knowledge are a level two type of statement.
But but they're also a level one statement, and so that thus the
dilemma. Yeah, so I have this. I tried to put it into
some easy premises. If it's true that knowledge exists first order, then our
beliefs are statements that knowledge exists is also true? Why because one is constitutive
for two. So there's some people in the audience still before you go to
this hold on, people are still kind of wanting to understand. Again,
First we don't get this point. Then we're talking past everybody so again,
help help me with some examples. Yeah, let's assume a kind of standard
with the possibility given gettier that there could be a fourth condition, but at
least knowledge requires a belief, a believer who believes as a true belief that's
for the right reasons, i e. Justified. So a true, justified
belief, with the caveat that perhaps there could be a fourth condition or something.
All right, So that means, let's say John is believe something about
an apple. The apple is there's two apples in front of me, or
something like that. Now he doesn't guess he actually has a reliable let's say,
mechanism, his faculties, whatever. I'll give it whatever you guys want.
Let's say we agree it's possible that John not only has a true belief,
but he arrives at it for the right reasons. Okay. Anybody can
do that, regardless of whether they're an atheist or not. We would say
that's possible. Okay, So that would be a first order. John knows
there's two apples in front of him. Okay, it's different to say,
it's a different claim to say that John knows that he knows. John might
have knowledge. There's two apples. This came up when I was an undergraduate.
We were doing the Pythagorean proof in Euclid, and a professor asked me,
almost kind of a second order question, what do you think of a
student doesn't actually know the proof right or know that they know. Do you
think that they don't know the A square plus B squared equals C square.
So what I would say now is that, well, if they came to
the the belief that A squared basically the sides the area on the sides of
a right angled triangle is equal to the area on the hypot news for the
right reasons, I don't think they would have to know that they know that
as long as they were justified. So again, on all the literature on
epistemology, everybody says you could know something without knowing that you know it.
Does that make sense? That's the first thing we have to grasp something,
or stated knowledge doesn't mean that you know that you're in a state of knowledge.
Yeah. So basically, imagine audience, I'm looking at the pen and
it's just the pen is blue. That's level one. Then the higher order
thinking is it's an abstracted, higher level way of viewing it, Jay knows
that the pen is blue. Is that good? Yeah? Yeah, exactly,
because otherwise it would be way too stringent if we said that knowledge is
a sufficient condition for second order knowledge. I mean, it's just obviously not
true. I think there's many cases where we make that people probably know stuff
and they don't know why that they know it. But yeah, as father
Degan pointed out, like the second statement here, the higher order statement is
also a statement of knowledge, right, But it's a higher order statement of
knowledge, and so this is what you're saying. They're sort of reciprocal,
right in that this one might also lead to this one, but this one
rests on also being a level one type of statement. So the point is
that a person who recognizes this is then in a kind of a dilemma.
And this is the dilemma that we're pointing out that pretty much all the atheists
end up in when encountering TAG. They typically respond to TAG as if every
proposition, every argument, every statement is just a level one statement and never
addressing the meta or the second order type of reasoning, and thus they never
typically get the argument until we really, you know, flesh it out or
hash it out after a while, so anyway, and that's why that's what
happened in my dream is that, Yeah, I'm reading through all this literature
where it's like, this is first order logic, this is second order logic
and epistemology, this is a first order knowledge. John knows there's a blue
pen in front him, and John knowing that he knows as a blue pant
is. They're making all these distinctions. And then in the dream it dawned
on me that I'm like, yeah, but you're talking about you're making claims
about all this stuff, like what order do I put that in? And
I'm like, that's always second order. You're always at the second level,
at the higher level. You're making claims about knowledge about John, about first
order. And then in my dream it started around like, I don't think
you can ever get out of the second order. We're always at this kind
of meta level making claims about assuming what we want to prove that knowledge exists,
because that could only make those claims if knowledge actually exist, which is
the heart of the paper and the heart of the matter. Right, how
do we determine how do we know that knowledge exists? And let's just run
through in our heads, right, Now that's not a level one statement.
I mean, or it is a level one statement, but it's also it's
a both, and it's a level one and a level two statement. Right
that there that knowledge exists, I would say it's a level it's a second
order. That's my point about the first order. Well, but I'm but
you were making the point that every second order statement is also a first order
statement, right at the same time, No, no, that's not the
argument is all of our statements are second order, and concerning epistemology, there's
second order about the first order. But I can't have my second order be
true or justified unless my first order. That's what That's what I mean to
say. So how do I So here's the question to everybody in the audience
and every atheist, how do I justify first order claims? I mean first
order knowledge? Another word? How do I justify that knowledge exists or reason?
And what are like let's go over what would the possible answers people could
give. Well, and I'm not trying to be ob to, but I'm
trying to understand because how is it not the case that the second order statement
isn't also a knowledge claim? Isn't it. Yes, So that's the whole
point, right. It's a knowledge claim only, and it can only be
true if knowledge exists. So it gets us back to number one, how
do we know knowledge exists? And guess what they're going to say, Well,
if knowledge exists, then knowledge exists, right, I know, I
understand, But but isn't the second order statement also still just a knowledge claim?
Yes, but it's a knowledge claim about the it's self referential about the
subject itself, and it's having of the knowledge. Okay, but it's still
a knowledge plant. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. The
content and subjects not different. It's in both cases first order and second order,
the content subjects the same. It's knowledge. Yes. So if somebody
had brought up an objection that, well, I don't need to justify the
two because it's the same content as the second order because it's the same content.
But like, you're missing the point entirely. My questions about how do
we justify number one? I know it's the same content, we're talking about
the same subject knowledge. I'm trying to figure out how from autonomous reasoning you're
ever going to be able to establish without vicious circularity or bootstrapping that knowledge exists,
especially when you're always assuming what you want to prove. So basically,
second order statements are that while making a knowledge claim, and I'm assuming that
knowledge exists because I'm talking, Yeah that's what I'm That's what I was getting
at. Yeah, that's what I meant. So in other words, it's
still it's not answering the question to say that, well, it's a higher
order statement, but it's still just a claim about you know, the subject
of knowledge or the subject in the sense of the agent having the knowledge.
So but that doesn't get you to justification, is your point. It's that's
just that's just kicking the can down the road exactly. And somebody said,
well, because it's the same content, right, the second order statements don't
need a different sort of justification, and I grant that, I'd be like,
that's fine, I'm just looking for a justification for knowledge. Like So,
what they don't realize is this was a really sophisticated kind of amological way
of basically saying what we always say, just grant me all my assumptions so
I can make my case and prove to you that my made up story is
true. Okay, So I have a question here, and this is something
I don't understand. So are you saying that there's this inherent problem in epistemology
just from first and second order statements about justification, or are you saying that
TAG is like this move from one to two. I'm saying epistemology has the
problem that's illustrated between one and two that nobody seems okay, So you're not
likening the transnal categoriess the possibility knowledge to the level too. I thought that's
what you were doing. Oh that is that certainly is so? For example,
because the orthodox tag admits the possibility that people can have first story knowledge
without preposing and the question is how do you ground or count it? What
world views or positions, possible positions could actually account or justify that knowledge exists.
Now that's a second order. And what I'm going to show in this
paper is that, yeah, tag's dealing with the second order. So because
it's admitting, sure, you could know stuff, but you can never actually,
from your position make a statement, an epistemic statement, the claim that
you that knowledge exists or that you're in a state of knowledge. Why,
because you'll assume the exact thing that you want to prove. So put in
the dichotomy, then we see one who is in a radically different kind of
category. Because what I started thinking through is like, well, why is
this even happening? Why is it the autonomous man can't get out of this
epistemic quagmire? And again, the very notion of dialectical tension seems to be
something to do with finitude, right, Finite means abounded, and so you
have these categories of well I would say I would say it deals more so
with the fall rather than than natural nature infinitude, because the way Maximus talks
about the I mean, I wouldn't say there's any dialectical tension that's natural or
in terms of the world. It's just you're probably right because it's just a
result of a division. In fact, you have division and time. This
is where you get chronology. I would have to disagree there, but we
don't have to go into that. But that's a whole lot of meta metaphysical
topic. But I mean, do you think that there's a question here in
then I don't mean like kind of like absolute unity or anything like this,
but there's kind of thing where things are broken and they're not tied together.
Do you see what I'm saying. Yeah, dialectical tension as a result of
the fall is the you know, the result of like the way things are
structured now in terms of all the problems in the world are a result of
the fall, but they're not anything to do with like nature. They're the
corruption of nature anyway, there's a question that is but I still think there's
something to do with that, both the fall and probably the finitude. So
that if you took if you took finite categories, you can't absoluteize them,
right Why Because they're created. They're not all encompassing. In other words,
none of the things that we take right, all of which may be true,
good and beautiful, we can't take those of the created things and absoluteize
them, which is basically what philosophy is actually doing. Right. It's taking
something good, just like every heresy, something true, and it's taken out
of its proper context, right, And it's elevating this to the level of
being an absolute rather than something that's contingent upon. And I think this is
the problem of why these problems can't be resolved. Yeah, but time is
a creation, so I just wouldn't locate dialectical tensions within time or the created
order itself. It's a result of the fault because time is a is a
there's the aon, which is the eternal, timeless creation of God. So
time itself is good and it's as Stenylis has taken up into the divine.
I just wouldn't equate that with thing to do with with dialectics because I was
thin and there's a total different topic. I was actually thinking about chronos,
not aon or Cairos like possibly could be a product of the fall. I
don't think chronological time being lifted up and healed. Yeah, but that's because
of the like, it's not time itself. That's that's fallen, like the
fall into time. Something specifically about chronology that might be that might be fallen,
but not time itself. Yeah, I don't think time itself. Well,
this is this is This is a different discussion. I don't mean to
get off the try, but there is a great question by a person in
the audience I would like you to address. Chroderick says, is what you're
saying. Father Deacon Germane to the discussion with Malpass, where Malpass objected to
necessary preconditions of intelligibility by saying that he lacks a belief in them, yet
his sense of intelligibility is still held. Well, I think this is why
the first and second order comes in, because one of the things that I
noticed that atheists we're saying, was well, I don't have a worldview.
Have you noticed this? A yeah, they'll they'll oftentimes say, oh,
I have actually no position, and that allows them to sort of slip and
slide into different positions. And so what I realized, I'm like, well,
those are second order claims about your position, right, Like you never
get out of the problem, you just move it up to a higher order.
But yeah, this guy says his next statement is is a malpass,
perhaps conflating whether or not he has sense to a proposition with it being true
or not right, like a kind of like fallacy of incredulity, Like well,
I just don't see how it could be, so you know, I
don't believe in it. So yeah, exactly, But again, there's no
way out of it in two senses. I point this out in my paper.
There's nobody that's positionless, right or presuppositionless, So we can just move
it up to higher orders. You're making a whole bunch of epistemic claims about
that. You're understanding my paper, you understanding what the argument is that,
you're understanding what your agnostic position, that I'm not taking a position, all
the various things that even go into that, right. I mean it's almost
kind of reminiscent of like Descartes, right where they think they actually get to
this kind of foundational like what can make this agnostic claim and you see this
doesn't depend on making any other commitments to anything. It's like all you have
to show them it is that It's like that's impossible. Like the cojito assumes
a whole host of different things. So I'd say there's a similarity there that
with this kind of incredulity agnostic position, Right, they don't get out of
the problem because it's like, yeah, but you just you have a whole
host of epistemic presuppositions and commitments just even with that. Yeah, it's almost
just a way of it. It's like another way of saying, I choose
not to address this problem and so it's not there basically. Yeah, Second
of all, it doesn't matter because as soon as I put it into the
dialectical tension. If you don't assume the necessary condition for the possibility of knowledge
is truly put into the disjunct between if you don't accept purposeful intentionalism theistic revelation.
If you don't accept that, then whether you assent to atheism or accidentalism,
you're or saying it's possible. Because notice that's the way that I define
autonomous epistemology. Autonomous pistemology is the thumistic system too. Why even though he
believes in God and then ultimately God grounds everything, including knowledge, does a
quitness not start with the assumption that it's possible to account for reasoning deduction inferences
even if God might not exist, and then it just turns out we find
out he exists later. No, there's an element of irrationality in the tonistic
scheme for sure, which is ironic because it's a highly rational That's what natural
theology is, what the mind, by the natural light of reason, can
know, apart from divine revelation, which is insane. It's totally blasphemous from
our position. So anyways, regardless of whether you're an atheist or not,
if you do not assent because it's in the radical disjunk. It's almost kind
of like Pascal's wager right in the sense that you must wager to not wager
is to wager right. The radical disjunk is actually like that. If you
even think that's a possibility, which is what a gnosticism would suggest, you're
an accidentalism. Yeah, so it doesn't matter what Malpass's arguments are. He's
in the accidentalism and accidental as a defeat for the possibility of knowledge. Hold
On and I agree that accidentalism destroys the possibility of knowledge. But there is
a question by Colby who says, the deacon, it appears that you are
presupposing the thing that you want to demonstrate. You're positing that there's a realist
account for knowledge, realist towards knowledge, he says, but the atheist or
the pragmatist does not grant any kind of realist position. I assume he means
realism in the sense of h No. I think he means like in this
sense of like I just went blank on the account of objects external to you,
uh, in terms of ontology, like you're like, you're really not
necessarily essences, but there are there's a there's real objects that you're apprehending through
your sense data. Colby, do you want to qualify in what's because real
realist is used in different senses and history philosophy, so you want to qualify
in what sense you're using it? Go ahead, a realist account of like
indirect realism and direct realism in the sense of of of Enlightenment debates. As
I think what he's talking about, I don't think so, I think I
get what he's saying. Why because this is a more fundamental that's getting into
the kind of details I feel like i'm the c I do. So let
me let me ask Colby, do you mean realism in the sense of essence
as being real ontological metaphysical things, or do you mean realism the sense of
the Enlightenment debate about whether we apprehend things directly or indirectly in the external world.
So I see what he's saying. He's a scriment ontology to knowledge.
The atheist defines knowledge simply as a system of thoughts. That yeah, well,
first of all, that doesn't make any sense. Nobody's we're all saying
that knowledge is a property of the mind, right, So in other words,
you could make the same arguments with a metaphysically quiet approach, right,
like your approach here is not necessitating epistemal This is prior to any of the
details of those kinds exactly, So it doesn't any of this is a great
point we got we got to address, and I thank you for a pointing
that out, Father Deacon, which is this was your point you made earlier
in than we got sidetrack to apologized for that. That was probably my fault.
You made the point that what we're addressing here is the Enlightenment objection to
metaphysics, which is that you can't put your metaphysical cart before your epistemic horse.
And that's what Father Diagon's pointing out. So Father Deagan's argument is not
relying on any grandiose metaphysics. He's actually critiquing the ancient and medieval idea like
natural theology and Aquinas has that metaphysics is somehow self evident and epistemology is secondary
to that. No, Rather, we're agreeing in saying, yes, how
do you know that you know before you start telling me about all these metaphysical
claims. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, the way that I usually
do my arguments is I grant take whatever definition of knowledge and justification you want.
Why because it's such a general and what's the term I want? These
are such general and more fundamental questions. They proceed the kind of more detailed
questions about like how to cash all this stuff out. So all of these
arguments actually designed to I'll give you everything you want as far as what you
think knowledge is, how that works, it doesn't really matter because issues and
problems about the way that how we would just how we would justify that whatever
you think. Yeah, so this is prior to This is an argument about
arguments. It's an argument about reason itself. Is it even possible? And
now that's why it's prior to any first order claim about what exists, what
doesn't exist, what's out there, what's not out there? Do I know
this? Do I know? No? Redefining it to any ad hoc redefine
is going to escape the problem. And that's one of the things I noticed
with all the objections, is there a saying, well, the atheist isn't
going to do that, Well we'll just suit and there are all these kind
of ad hoc rediffins. Now I'm assuming you're going to say that the ad
hoc redefinings don't work because they're missing the very point, which is that that's
just another type of knowledge claim. And what's in question is the possibility of
knowledge, right, yes, so really easy. If I just say,
I'll grant you whatever you think knowledge is, the issue still stands. Redefine
it however you want. The issue is so fundamental and prior to all of
that that it doesn't really matter. Then there's no kind of way out of
it. And I think that's one of the issues too that I've noticed,
and I put in h the final section of the paper, missing the epistemological
force for the epistemic trees that I'm like, why are these people getting so
bogged down on and being like that it's not a true disjunctive. Well that's
not how knowledge. What if they just define it this way? And I'm
like, what's going on here? Like why are they saying this? And
I realized they're looking at the details and they don't see the bigger question that
the kind of meta question that's being asked exactly. Let's see, this is
one of the this is one of the great points of kant. I mean,
I have a lot of disagreements with Kant. But one of the great
points of Kant is to really go into kind of the possibilities of philosophy with
transcendental categories. And you have this, you had it kind of positive in
aerosols categories what the category worries are. And I disagree with Kant's move to
ultimately make them not metaphysical. But regardless of all that, what he's doing,
the types of thinking that he's doing about these types of arguments really are
revolutionary and they're they're they're worthy of note. And so people that do understand
like the content, not the content system, but the type of questions Kant
is asking with what he has and what he proposes with a transcendental category.
And again we're not saying that we agree with the content position that they're all
psychologized or they're all just in the mind or whatever. We're setting that question
aside. So let's let's say we don't have any metaphysical commitments. We're just
taking the type of argument that a transcen argument is about the possibilities or the
preconditions for knowledge, and we're saying that that is very useful here because it
shows us that any knowledge claim that an atheist might have the move. Very
first move they make is assuming the knowledge is possible. That's why the question
is prior to the doing of any argument or logic at all. I just
don't understand why this guy colled me the great thinks I'm assuming the type of
exists. The I haven't assumed anything. I've granted. I've literally given everything
over to the atheist. Yeah, we could say that, Let's say let's
say there is no metaphysics that's noble at all. Let's just grant that there's
no realism at all, no essences, no essentialism at all. The question
that then is what is the account for knowing? How is knowledge possible?
Right? I just brought up the metaphysical and epistemological tension because there are people
that would admit and I still think that the pragmatist gives a metaphysical I don't
think there's any kind of way out of making metaphysical claim. I mean,
even if you think you're a metaphysical quietess. I'm just showing that those who
accept that would have this problem. Now, the first and second order issue
has nothing to do with the dialectical tension between metaphysics and epistemology, So any
one of those are sufficient to basically show the flaw of I was just developing
two sufficient arguments together, and I wasn't making any metaphysical claims about or assuming
or anything like that. I was just basically taking other people's positions and be
like, you admit, and this is what people always get wrong about tag
is Oh, so I have to just arbitrarily just assume all of your presuppositions
in order for knowledge to work. No, that's not what we said.
I take as far as the impossibility of the contrary, and i'd show that
people on their own grounds are engaged in performative contradictions and things that might you
yourself the rules that you arbitrarily establish. You say I require this, and
then you do just the opposite. So it's it's not my like, oh,
it's my arbitrary rules of the game here. And if it's like on
your own account, you violate your own principles, like your system doesn't do
what you want it to do. And guess what on your own admittance,
orthodoxy does everything that you want your paradigm or epistemology, philosophy or religion to
do. But it doesn't do. And I find that people really get that
confusion. Yeah, I mean that's that's misunderstanding that even though what we're talking
about focuses on a couple examples, it's still a comparison of paradigms. Right,
If we're going to compare paradigms, we still have to pick something within
the paradigms, Right, the orthodox paradigm, you have an atheist paradigm.
The argument is just simply pointing out that it doesn't matter which thing we pick,
Like, if you have a belief in if you believe that you have
true knowledge about some object or whatever, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter
which object or thing we choose. Within the worldviews, the question that Father
Deacon is raising is always automatically there, because this is a question prior to
any knowledge claim. And they seem to have a really hard problem grasping that.
And because they think that, yeah, they think that when you say
it's a higher order type of argument, they assume that means you're importing a
bunch of metaphysical baggage to this. Oh, you're trying to say that the
higher order is like universals, and like, no, no, it doesn't
matter what you think about metaphysics or what I think about metaphysics is like this
is prior to any any of those types of claims. That's what they have
real quick because this illustrates it too. So what was the gentleman we were
just referring to? Colbally the great? I've heard this a million times.
Well, the anominalists will just say this, or the atheists won't accept right,
they'll say this, and so your argument doesn't work. And what they're
missing again, they're missing epistemologic for us, for the epistemic trees. Guess
what those are second order claims about pragmatism, about how they're defining truth and
falsity and stuff like that. So it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant to the
question of how do you justify that? How would we possibly justify that the
pragmatist is justified in that move to actually say that? And I don't know
why, Like to me, it seems like I said, the hardest problem
is convincing people the problems not hard at all, but simple to me,
that seems really simple. You're making a bunch of epistemic claims about what counts
as knowledge. How they'll redefine it, and I want to know how you
justify that, and nobody can seem to like pick up on like what that
question even is, and like why that's so detrimental. Well, you see
what eventually is going to happen is they're going to say, well, gramting
my assumptions about pragmatism, that I can actually redefine knowledge and all this stuff,
and then that's what would justify my position. So that's exactly what I'm
trying to show in all these arguments is that you're epistemically bootstrapping. You have
no justification for your justification criteria. Yeah, so let's look at look at
this on a diagram, and this illustrates what you're talking about. The tree
is green. Bob knows the tree is green. First order, second order.
The atheist response, like Father Deacon says, is almost always well,
a pragmatist will just say this and then interject whatever the pragmatist account is.
Oh, well, a relatives will just say this, Oh, an epistemic
nihilist would just say this, Oh, matirosts would just say this. These
answers are missing what the argument actually is, because none of this is addressing
what the challenge is it doesn't matter what all types of things you try to
put in there, because every time you try to make a knowledge claim with
one of these failed systems, pragmatist relatives, nihilist materials, it's not going
to give an account for how you ground the knowledge. That's the point.
Then watch what the they'll say that they think this is an objection, because
then it's the burden of proof game. Right, Well, you're seeing the
wrong, so you're gonna have to prove that those are all wrong. Well,
wait a minute, on what terms? If we haven't even been able
to get a justification for proof itself, do you see what the issue is?
Like? Who's proof of proofs? Do we use? Yeah? Just
saying that, well, you can't answer a pragmatis has an account of this,
that's not showing that that is a justification for knowledge. Do you know
what it reminds me of? You know, these weirdo creepers that you get
calling on your Twitter space and stuff like that, and they start toning these
like long, weird, wild stories about you don't understand man. Back in
like five thousand BC, the Mesopotamians were visited by a space force of aliens
that set up and they tell this whole story, and you see what the
Tower of Babbel really was was gamatry and confusing the people. That's why we
have to actually any word that sounds like another word really is that word.
It's not a genetic fallacy that was created. The genetic fallacy was a fallacy
created by the elites trying to right. They have this whole story, right,
and you're like, that's great, wonderful storyteller. I want to know
if it's true, and how we determine. Isn't this exactly the question that
Plato says, I don't. I'm not concerned with doxa. I want so
you opinion versus knowledge. And so all that's happening is with a progmant will
take like congratulation. Pragmas wrote a non fictional progmance history. It never gets
into the category. I'm still wondering, right, telling a story isn't what
it means to give justification? And right, well, what if it's possible
that that's true? Like again, even that it is already assuming epistemic categories.
Yeah, so sudden suddenly the atheists are like these creative writers where everything's
possible. Right, if you're a theist, nothing is possible. That's suddenly
like when this question comes up, anything's possible. We live in a universe
where like metaverse multiverse were like there's a universe where there's dragons and I'm the
king of it, and it's like everything. So it's like suddenly everything is
possible, even though like nine to nine percent of the time when the atheist
is arguing there's nothing that's possible except for material causation, right, like causing
effect, like a determined scheme, And then they think they get out of
this, but it's like you're making second higher order claim about possibility and about
sentences and all this stuff. That's why I'm like, I can't get them
to realize they're committing and presupposing stuff that are unjustified before they provide any justification
for that. So if you remember that guy am Deer came on to your
stream and did the same thing and then with me, and he had some
like ideas. Oh, he was saying something like, well, if it
doesn't plug into the equation right into the modal you know, structure perfectly,
then the whole thing collapses and you can't actually put it into a modal argument.
Well he was saying that with you, but when he was when I
was debating him on Patrick's stream, he had like this kind of mystereingism possibly
in word, what is that? I don't know what that is. I
don't it's I don't know. It's an ad hoc word that like everything made
up. No, he came up with it was like mysterious. Yeah,
he was like, my epistemology is like I have to look what exactly said.
But it was like, I mean, was he using this as like
a hypothetical, Like well, what if I just say my epistemology is mysteriumism
or something. Yeah, that like you know, we may not know what
the justification is, but you know it's there. And started going through all
these like well, it's possible that you missed, and if it's logically possible,
then your position cannot be that it's necessary. And again it misses the
whole thing that it's like, now, guess what you're making third order claims
about possibility and assassin and logic and all this stuff. And I'm like I
just can't get people to actually see what the actual issue is. And that's
the most frustrating thing. It's like, I mean, maybe I could appreciate
this being a d D, but it's like there's a squirrel right, hey,
look at that over and it's like you're just trying to direct people to
It's like, do you not see what I'm saying? You're making all these
epistemic claims. How are we ever going to justify that? And they get
distracted down another route and another route and it's just like I can't holmee people
in to actually see what the problem is. Second issue to so, in
other words, how is any knowledge at all possible? Is prior to any
knowledge claim? And every time you try to answer it you don't get out
of the box because it's a knowledge claim? Right too? That is that
right? Or? Am I miscons? The second issue too that we always
get with this too, is this, well how do we know? I
mean it could be or this person could just say like yeah, it's like,
well there's there's some other justification and uh, you know over in China
that we don't know about that philosopher you know, Ching Dong has developed and
you just don't know about it. But so how does your position, Jim
Bob, this guy in Jim Bob's YouTube today basically saying, what if there
was an alien race that developed the exact same theology is orthodox? I mean,
would that serve as a necessary condition? And I was like, well,
this is ridiculous. Of all, it's just ad hoc. Number two
logical, I mean, uh, conceivability is not a good guide to logical
possibility. And number three, part of the orthodox revealed paradigm is the exclusivity
of the paradigm. In other words, paradigm a orthodoxy says not B.
So an alien race creates theology B that's identically orthodoxy. You know what that
means, be and not be. It would also be obvious that it would
also be obvious that the newer one is totally cribbed from the previous too,
So it would be it was be an obvious fraudulent copy. Because we have
people in the discord making this argument, like five years ago, they so
well, I believe in the new revelation given to me as a Viking of
a Viking trinity that does all the same grounding and justification of your trinity,
except it's my Viking. And I'm like, but that would not be the
historic Christian Church and so evidentialism would come into play here as well. So
that goes back to my uh, excuse me, evidences would come into play,
not evidentialism. Excuse me, Yes, that's right. So anyways,
this goes back to the disjunctive is that, well, obviously, what is
it that they're doing when when they're like, well, I'm thinking of a
possibility, I mean, what if there's this other religion that revealed what they're
doing is system building. Yeah, it's like it's the it's the same thing
when JF said, what if there is a planet I can conceive of whether
there's a robot and no people and the robot runs the planet, then it's
like suddenly creative writing is cool and any kind of metaphysics goes right, which
again the Christian no, no, no, no metaphysics for you. However,
when I do my creative writing hypotheticals, I get to imagine all possibilities.
So they're missing again the epistemological forest for the metal of the pistemological trees,
because guess what they're doing. They don't realize the radical disjunct. That's
autonomous epistemology, and the only other option is theonymous So all of your hypotheticals,
all your objections will always fit into autonomous epistemology because it's not revealed.
I think they're just gonna go ahead as soon as I show the failure of
autonomous epistemology, and it will always fail. That's why there are no objections.
Well, at this point, they're just gonna say, well, you're
that is a mean that yours is revealed. That's your claim. You just
have another elaborately built system, and you engaged in a system building project through
the system of Christianity over many centuries and millennia, and so your system building
and you're not doing anything different than I am. It's just that mine's more
updated with science code or something science was reviewed by science. Well that's why
I look. I put a footnote in there, and I'm like, well,
let's just look at what the ones that are claimed to be revealed,
because that's the next one, right, is that, well, how does
tag prove the Orthodox God? I'm like, all right, so if we
move past the okay, it couldn't be system building autonomous epistemology, but I've
got all these other competitors of religions that are claiming to be revealed. I'm
like, we could look at those. How many are there six, seven,
eight religions that claim to be revealed from God? And remember this is
part of the objection to that, Well, there could be an infinite amount
of you know, possibilities you have to eliminate. Well, first we could
show that most worldviews boil down to a few options. Ultimately with this paper
I do is that it boils down between accidentalism and intention. This is a
example or of something it boiled down to, or theonymous or autonomous. So
let's look at theonymous autonomous. Okay, so there's a few more options that
can consider. Telmutic, Judaism, Islam. I don't think Buddhism claims to
have special revelation, right, like it's not nothing. Hinduism, yes,
Mormonism. I mean really, guys, how many think you think there are
ten? And then I can we can go through and then look at their
paradigms, right, and if they have principles that are would make knowledge impossible,
we can eliminate those. So again, even on other people's grounds,
like they're kind of litimus tasks and their standards, we'd say we fulfill it.
We're not creating our own Hey, in our own game, we have
this, but you don't have it. We'd say everything that you want we
just fulfilled, and your system none of these systems can do. And what
is that, Well, you certainly want to have historical continuity, right,
that's kind of fits the like your paradigm or theory should describe reality to come
up with some physics theory that like doesn't describe anything. So it's a historic
matches historical continuity. It has descriptive power, right, it's describing. It's
uh, not only lacks contradictions, but it's coherent. What does that mean?
That means that, for example, I could hold two different true propositions
that have nothing logically connected with each other. The tree is green and the
apple and the I don't know the MIC's working or something like that. Okay,
they're not contradictory, but I can't derive or infer one to the other.
Now, what's really nice about when we talk about a coherence, Right,
we're not just talking about propositions don't contradict each other. We're saying they
cohere together, that there's inferences from one to the other. So I could
list all these kind of attributes that yes, from your paradigm. You want
all this and you can't pull it off. Orthodoxy does claim to be the
revealed religion, and it can pull it off by your own standards. Where
are you gonna go? Like? What better proof do you want? Do
you know what I mean? Yeah? The next thing I would ask is
could you flash out a little more about the contrast between like a teleological worldview
and a disteleological worldview, or theism versus accidentalism and how they is a great
way to kind of suss out a large portion of worldviews with one question and
a couple other a couple other fundamental types of questions like this would also cancel
out a lot of world views, like is knowledge objective or relative? I
mean, there's if you put together a few disjunctives, you could pretty quickly
cancel out most worldviews. It's not hard at all. So one of the
things I want to qualify, and I qualified in my footnote when I use
the word intentionality. I realized when I was arguing with am dear they were
taking the technical philosophical sense of intentionality and philosophy of mind and philosophy and philosophy
of language. Is our propositions or mental states are about or directed towards something.
No, you mean it in the sense of will and tilo's correct intention,
Yeah, and more kind of a common colloquial sense. This real quick.
So the reason I'm saying that is it oftentimes the argument about I mean
you put God purposefully and intentionally creates the world. So uh, you know
there's a book about this that that it's an Oxford Press book. The name
of it escapes me, but basically it's arguing that there's only two options on
this, and you might just come up with a third where there's maybe some
mix between a God who creates a world with uh, with purpose, purposiveness,
intentionality telos versus a world that has no direction, no guidance, no
end, no no, no purposiveness, or this teleological universe. But to
be clear, the only reason I'm bringing this up is that when we start
saying this, I'll immediately say, oh, you're making the teleological argument.
It's not the teleological Yeah. I think that's what happened with a is He
thought I was making the teleological argument. So he was saying, well,
I can think of things that are His objection was it doesn't have to be
intentional, is it? Because I can if that's what you mean by directed,
because I can think of directedness without intention or a person behind it.
Like now, I don't think that's possible. I think it's plenty of literature,
especially in philosophy of mind, about intentionality as a mental property. We
don't attributed kind of directedness and intentionality in the technical philosophical sense to material objects.
But let's say I grant that, and you're missing the point that but
by intentionality, I mean purpose There's a being who's putting things and directing them.
So, in other words, suppose I grant the argument. Sure,
maybe not every directedness implies a purposeful agent. However, every purposeful agent acting
applies directedness. Do you see that? Yeah? And also to consider the
totality of reality or the entiret universe, Right, it's either purposive and intentional
and has a t los or it doesn't. Yes, so if there is
exactly so, it's really a red herring to get caught up on directedness.
I mean, look, there's either an agent who does things and creates the
laws allows for the possibility of knowledge because he has the intention and chooses it.
So there's purpose behind everything, holliology in that sense, or what's the
opposite, It would be accident. Yeah, So then I think about what
accident like that would be your ultimate principle that you'd have to appeal to.
And at that point you'd have to say, what standing behind everything is the
antithesis, the true dichotomy of a purposeful, intentional action, which is an
accident. So that means I have to explain ultimately everything in terms of like
knowledge, accidental knowledge, yes, accident morality, accidental laws of physics,
right would become non justifiable? Right, well, not only Yeah, it's
self refuting. For example, in when you're reading epistemology and they have these
examples of John on is asked how many jelly beans he believes in the jar?
And he says fifty four. John has a true belief. Somebody says,
well, how did you How did you get that true belief? John?
It matches reality. There's actually fifty four jelly beans in the jar.
And John says it was an accident. I guessed there was no reason for
rhym a reason. I just kind of guessed. When we say that's not
knowledge, you have to have the right reason. So knowledge itself precludes accident.
If you study philosophy of science or even science itself, not only are
laws not simply correlation, they preclude accident as well. There's a causal relationship
beyond just two things being correlated that has a sort of kind of necessity that
precludes accident. So now you have an oxymoron with the accidental laws of physics,
and so on and so on. I can keep going to yeah,
and I want I want to address that. One of the objections is that
the transcenal argument for God does not allow you to come to the particular.
I mean, this is really a fundamental misunderstanding of what the argument's about,
because you could theoretically pick anything in the worldview to make an argument about.
I could start with particulars and make a transitional argument on the basis of the
need for the particular, and so I can make an argument on the basis
of the one and the many that would be relating to the particular. And
also he notes that he claims that tag is inherently self contradictory anytime you come
down to a specific particular. Just because it's a paradigm level argument doesn't mean
that it doesn't account for or belief have a belief in particulars. I mean
paradigms include particulars. So I don't understand even what that objection means. Guess
what. It's another example of missing the Oh it's missing the objection the objection
or so, how do you know that? How do you know? Well,
he would just say here that he would just say here the tag.
I'm not making a claim about paradigms. I'm just telling you a flaw on
tag is probably what he would say. Well, then why is it a
flaw? How do you know it's a flaw? He was He's saying it's
an internal contradiction and tag. I think, okay, But that's an epistemic
claim of correct. What the So that's why I point out on my paper
even if even if the details of my argument are incorrect, let's say I'm
messed up somewhere, I still win. We still win why because of that
exact issue right there is you're saying it doesn't work, the just jump doesn't
work, or it's flawed. This it's a tautology, it's a Those are
all epistemic claims. So even if I mess up somewhere, the question still
stands, how do you know that? How do you know? And you
could say, well, it's an internal critique, Well, then you're putting
yourself in a position to know what the paradigm is. Why all kinds of
stuff right within the assessment of that, and why that would be? Why
is that a list? What? Why not critique? And could we just
frame the question and make it really quick, simple and easy and to the
point, how do we know knowledge as possible? What if we ask the
atheist that, how do we know knowledge as possible? Not can you give
me your list of knowledge claims and beliefs, but how do we know knowledge
as possible? Yeah, that's all I'm trying to do. That's all I'm
trying to ask, and they won't answer it. So let's ask the atheist
that In this so we've got several skeptics and kind of people who are disagreeing,
which is fine. The question is how do we know knowledge as possible?
And every attempt at answering that you give clearly presupposes that you have knowledge,
so it's missing the point. So we want an account for knowledge itself,
not your knowledge claims, but an account for knowledge. That's what you
have to address. That's the point. Yeah, that's the excellent way to
put it. And so you know these are kind of more sophisticated details that
go into in the paper. Oh wait, one more question on that?
Is that a good way to phrase it? Two? Because of like,
because at this point, a lot of times people are going to say,
well, look, I don't know about all this episode. Why can't we
just look to science and like the pragmatic conclusions that we get from the doing
of science. Maybe that's a more reliable pragmatic approach. Why do we even
have to busy ourselves with these kind of abstract kind of questions that you're asking
so that they'll oftentimes defer to saying that you're just doing a lot of word
solid and like fancy tap dancing and and well, why do we even have
to I guess here, rage quit, We're done, So I'm just joking,
I'm out of here. Why can't we just go to science and like
the pragmatic value of the data that we get from science. That's a typical
kind of move I hear at this point. I mean, just it's the
same question, like why a tai to take that? I hear, what
you're saying, I hear you're making claims about that. Now justify why that's
justifiable move like I should take. And what you'll find is they'll assume exactly
what they're proving attempting to prove number two and I even get into this,
So that's the question of like why should I even accept a sort of kind
of pragmatism of science, Like why would that even be a good move for
me to do? And how would that be a justification. The second problem
is science in pragmatics never even get to truth or knowledge far from for you
know, you've seen in the other papers that I've written for a couple of
different issues too. One is the KWin Donheim's indeterminacy of data, Like you
can construct multiple contradictory theories as all were, Yeah, the data doesn't tell
you which paradigm is correct because you never get to truth, knowledge or justification
from science and because it works and number two, all of those are going
to be making universal claims from particulars. And you have the problem of induction
and the problem of circularity with induction too, So you're back epistemic bootstrapping again,
and you don't even get to the Cattrall. I mean basically that move
that we just mentioned, let's just do a pragmatic move to scientific data,
that's really just surrendering epistemology and justification. That's essentially saying we can't do it.
It's not possible, there is no answer, there's no such thing as
justification. That's basically throwing up your hands in giving out. At that point,
then that okay, Then argumentation is not is no longer possible? Right,
And the other the number three is pragmatism is arbitrary because you just pick
arbitrarily the goals that you want to work without any justication. Yeah, like
how do we know what does it mean to work? Right? And that
assumes that you've chosen a criteria, some sort of you know, benchmark of
value judgments to judge the good the thing that works versus the one that doesn't
work, which again makes it arbitrary. Now the same Yeah, all the
same issues that I'm bringing up, But I really like the way that you
put it is, how do we know or justify anything that you're saying?
How do we know knowledge is even possible? Like what's the because that's prior
to all of your first order claims, and the atheists just never understand that
the transfer argument is about second order questions and justification. Now, now Phillips
said, where was his last statement? Yeah, but let's see he had
a comment about Socrates as an example that we could address. Where is it,
I've already lost it. Socrates does the same thing where he goes out
and questions worldviews and he doesn't assert his own Well, Socrates therefore justified in
doing internal internal critiques. Well, my response to this, I'll let further
you can give response is that, now, maybe in the apology he didn't
prefer a worldview, but in the rest of the dialogues he does actually assert
a worldview. It's called platonism. So Platonism does assert quite a bit.
It's very metaphysical and in fact, I mean some of the same types of
transcendental presubsisitional argumentation. You can find that in Plato Platonic dialogues asked some of
the types of questions that we're asking. Aristotle also does transcendental type moves in
argumentation. However, the fact that Socrates is questioning worldviews does not make his
own position justified, and that's also not what we're doing. We're not saying
that just because we question worldviews, they're not justified or excuse me, ours
is therefore justified. Let me read you what he says, Father Deacon Socrates
did the same thing and question world views without asserting his own. Was Socrates
justified in doing an internal critique? Was his question? Well, why would
this gentleman think that we haven't asserted our worldview? That's a good point.
Yeah, he says, why ought we have competing worldview? A competing world
view in order to do an internal critique of another worldview? Oh so he's
saying that you're doing an ought move. Now that we're not saying that you
ought. We're saying that everybody necessarily has a worldview, even if they recognize
it or not. It's impossible to have no worldview, even if you're a
oh I'm a total agnostic. Well that's still a position on epistemology exactly because
you just moved it to a higher order and assume a whole bunch of epistemic
things to even make those statements. So, I mean, the skeptic and
they don't get out of this problem. Now this is a very common objection.
I'm glad we're hitting on this because a lot of times the atheists will
then say, oh, well, actually I don't have any worldview, and
no, I have no commitments. I'm totally neutral. I'm totally agnostic on
everything, so you can't critique me. There's nothing that you can give me
on. Then watch what they do. You make an argument right right,
and it's a slide of hands. So they told you I'm not going to
do this right while they slip in their other hand right and start making a
bunch of that doesn't work. You can't do that. See the tag doesn't
I'm doing an internal critique right. Well, women, you're doing the exact
thing that you said that you're not committed to doing. So again, all
of these things are slides of hands and cons and stuff like that. You
just got. Well, i'll address that more specifically. Why is it a
slide of hand con move? If I'm a total agnostic and then I start
critiquing your position and saying, oh, you're you're, you're, you're contradicting
yourselfiest why am I violating my agnostic stance by using these logical arguments to call
you out on confortas Because they just assume or they just said I don't have
any commitment on logic, contradiction, semantics, reservation experience, right, because
right they're saying that. Because of the next move, they'll come in and
be like, I hear what you're saying, and it's wrong. You're contradicting
to Oh wow, now you're slipping in. All of those are observational statements
and epistemic statements that you said, I've bracketed and I'm non committal with that.
Yeah, And well, I mean just to say, if you know,
the same type of person is always saying something like Christianity contradicts itself.
Then they turn around and say I have no logical commitments to or philosophical commitments
to anything. Well, you just invoked the law of non contradiction, so
you do. And I really think it's a character flaw two you, because
think about the person who can't actually commit to anything like any dates or meetings
or anything like that. Well, what if they're a genuine sort of skeptic
or a genuine person who says I just don't know which you know, I've
had a lot of philosophy classes and I don't know which one's true. Like
there's a lot of positions out there start telling you that you're arguing it's wrong.
That's usually what a genuine person who's well, what if they said,
well, I'm just arguing the positions to see who's got the better case,
right, Well, yeah they might not. That might not be a disingenuous
person or a character flaw. But then they're just confused. We'd have to
just kind of show them. But do you see that you're you're committing to
something a methodology or access to a methodology, or some sort of standard lenses
or anything by which you think that you could actually assess and figure this stuff
out. Right now, we have some questions here in the super Chats Commentsnome's
body noses I'll go ahead and read this and then comment on it, reading
it for him nomes body ten dollars. Can perception of information be relative to
the human mind. There might be a subjective element to the incoming data which
the human mind misinterprets or distorts or doesn't want to see or know that they
might suppress or misinterpret the data or something like that. But I wouldn't say
that the perception of information is therefore completely relative, just because there can be
instances of misinterpretation. I am not entirely convinced that knowledge is transcendent. Well,
knowledge can be had by human beings that is not transcendent. There is
knowledge of the transcendent. So if you mean it's a little ambiguous what you
mean by that? So I wouldn't say that knowledge is like necessarily always transcendent.
We're saying that knowledge it self requires the transcendent to be grounded. Thank
you for being better than a lot of the other online apologists. What you
say makes me think, well, I appreciate that. Numbs body a good
question. Do you want to comment on that? Can perception of information be
purely relative to the human mind? Can, let's say, can perception of
information be relative to the human mind? In other words, is it possible
for the incoming information or data to be relative to each person getting the data?
Um? I don't think so, because this is kind of similar to
like Fickenstein's there's no private language. Yes, so that's a great point.
Yeah, the fact is there's commensurability, and there's clues to that. If
that were actually the case, we could never talk to each other, right,
we could never actually talk to each other. So if everything was completely
subjective, we wouldn't be able to relate with one another, we wouldn't be
able to develop language. And so although like you said, well, certainly
the mind can kind of contaminate the sense data that kind of comes in,
skew it and stuff like that, it can't, you know, And there's
this kind of subjective element and kind of imposing and stuff that could happen.
It couldn't be absolute. Otherwise we wouldn't be understand each other or developing a
language. Yeah, there's a lot of fascinating transmit argumentation that that is just
kind of sitting out there, ready to be the depths of it, ready
to be plumbed. Some philosophers like Carlotto Apple have done this where they look
at the logical structure of languages, and even though languages differ, there's actually
fundamental necessary things going on in every language everywhere. So for the possibility of
language at all, you've got to have certain structures in place to make which
makes that meaning possible. Yeah. Transcendental categories absolutely, yeah, And I
mean they're necessary for language. That's why I mean, like five or six
years ago, every time I was doing TAG, I was just going back
into like language meaning arguments, because every time an atheist makes it's it's similar
to what you're doing with like knowledge claims. I can just say that every
time an atheist makes a sentence, he's assuming all kinds of linguistic structures that
he hasn't proven yet. Homicidal, self conscious cake one dollar? What do
you think of this claim? Epistemology is the expression of a reductionist ontology that
infuses the entire Western tradition. Thus, epistemology reduces all being to some mere
presence. It forces all knowledge to conform to some single standard. My response
would be, I'm assuming that that's a like a Heighigger quote. I think
you were saying, unless I'm mixing out with somebody else that you were interested
in a response to this Highiger objection. Sometimes the German idealists would and people
after them would be very critical of certain schools of epistemology that would reduce ontology
to some minimalist, like hyper rationalist type of uh not rationalists, because German
idealists rationalist. What am I trying to say? Like a reductionist like a
like a materialist type of move right. So let's say epistemology in the modern
sense develops in this anti metaphysical stance of like Kant and Hume. So it's
probably a critique. But maybe he's going back to Plato and saying that all
epistemic search for truth is somehow reductionist against being I mean, this has toy
from Heidiger, but I don't I'm not well studied in Hidigger to know if
if this is the case, I mean in terms of his views, But
I would just say that, I mean, it shouldn't be odd to think
of epistemology as a discipline itself somehow being like necessarily flawed. And we were
just asking the question of what is knowledge? Is knowledge possible? How do
we know? What does it mean to know? You know, I don't
see why that would be inherently problematic, but I'm sure Heideger has some take
that, you know, like back to Plato it was a problem or something.
Yeah, again, it just kind of goes back to my paper too.
I'm staying general enough in these considerations that I'm not wetting myself to any
kind of particular view, particular metaphysics, particular epistemology. There was a guy
that was saying, well, you're to redefine, and I'm like, I'm
not redefining knowledge that I'm giving you because again, these are such fundamental and
prior questions. I'm giving you everything that you want. Whatever you would say,
right, it still stands that there's these kinds of questions exactly like you
said, how do we know that knowledge exists? Oh? Anybody can't?
Like, like, it's really I think I think if if you so,
if Heidegger said to you, father Deacon, uh, epistemology is the expression
of a reductions ontology that infuses the entire Western tradition, and you've missed being
right. I mean, it's kind of like his system building project to dismiss
any sort of epistemology argument that you're making. So how would you respond to
like a Heidigger man that is sort of dismissing epistemology arguments as some sort of
reductionist expression. I would just tell him, you're your president hand bestond standing
reserve and its projectedness has confused the antic and antist relationship on your own metaphysical
and epistemological grounds bracketing, and I just throw out a bunch of Hidiger words
to him back and watch and see what he does, and I'm kidding,
yeah, I would. I would basically try to work through with him and
say, can we get past that, like, I'm not going to make
any commitments? Help me? And again, phenomenologists can be good with the
kind of language. One of the things that Heiderger was trying to do is
the exact task that I'm doing. Is this kind of deconstruction project, right
that there's like all these layers of paradigms and language and stuff like that,
and he's trying to get down to primordial being, right, and so that
he doesn't have to kind of think through incorrect categories, So he's stripping off
the layers. I'd basically say that to Hidiger, why don't you help me?
Maybe I'm not good at my words and arguments, so why don't you
help me? Because he's obviously much smarter than me. I know what you're
doing, though. You want to get in more kind of primordial basic kind
of questions, and that's what I want to do. How would you,
Hidiger, help me phrase this question? How do we know that we know?
Yeah? I think that just responding with things like oh, we have
to plunge into being or find find being he's really missing the point, right,
because I mean, first of all, what does it even mean to
say? I mean being This is like the most generic term in the history
of philosophy, right, I mean it has all kinds of different meanings in
different philosophy, and you always know it's about philosophers. They have these wonderful
proposals, well, I'm going to get rid of all this stuff, and
then their answer is something dumb. Right, Well, not only that they
bring in the exact stuff. They're trying to get the same problem, the
same problems for me. Look at this, Who's roles? Who's roles?
Uh? Discovery of reduction? So I bet that's what did you notice?
This was Dermott Morn's phenomenology here? But I find that funny. I keep
noticing this throughout philosophy. You know, Descartes brings in the stuff that he's
trying to get rid of. The people like responding to Descartes like, we
got to get rid of this stuff, right, and this dualism, right,
We're going to materialism and identity theory, and then they bring in conceptual
like yeah, I think a lot of people misunderstand that what we're saying is
that philosophy is a failed project. So from the pre Socratics to today,
philosophy is a giant failed enterprise. And I think that when they hear us
saying that, they're like, what, because aren't you talking a bunch of
philosophy jargon and baggage and word salad and are you going back to Plato unprestocratics
and using these terms correct? Because yeah, sometimes they say things that are
correct and true. But our whole point is that all of these secular and
man made autonomous system building projects are always doomed to fail, and that's why
they always have these fundamental problems in their systems. John seven point fifty.
I've encountered many atheists that claim that atheism is not a paradigm, it is
simply a non belief based on the fact that there's no evidence for God.
Can you please explain why atheism is actually a paradigm and why there's no such
thing as a quote non belief for theism? Thank you? Yeah, so,
I mean I'll grant you it and be like, all right, it's
not a paradigm. My position is, well, well, hold on,
but wouldn't it be the case that even though the claim of atheism itself is
not equivalent to a paradigm. That person still has paradigm level commitments. Yes,
that's true, paradigm level commitments. In other words, in my paper,
there's nobody that's not presuppositionless. Right, in order for you to make
a statement about that, again, it goes all the way back to everything
I was saying about the second order. You're taking positions, you have a
paradigm in which you make that, whether you realize it or not. And
so I just feel like it's again it's it's a dishonest and ad hoc move.
I don't have it. It's like, well, then you deceived yourself,
Like, I mean, it's clear you have a set of like what
is a paradigm. Yeah, it's basic beliefs about knowledge, ethics, and
metaphysics. Right, So that's all it is. Well, you can't open
your mouth and make any claims and be like that just came out of nowhere,
Right, I literally have no beliefs. Correct, Yeah, everybody has
some commitments, even if you're a complete like skeptic slash agnostic. Those are
beliefs, those are positions, right, You're basically saying that I and pretty
much no one else can know, or we just don't know, or I
don't know. I mean, that's still a commitment to all kinds of different
things. And you may not think that it is, but it is.
And I think what they'll say to you, Okay, I'll grant that,
But there's no common denominator of which you can categorize atheism is a worldview or
position. It's like, absolutely, that's what the whole papers about your accidentalists
exactly. Yeah, they didn't even realize that they already have a commitment to
accidentalism by just saying that. That's the point. So, in other words,
saying that is already a commitment. It entails all these positions, whether
you've recognized it or not. So the fact that you haven't recognized it doesn't
mean that you don't have all of these commitments to John Bollerman. Ten dollars.
Thank you, gentlemen. I'm from Vancouver aka the News Autumn. Thank
you so much, anonymous. Five dollars. I've been listening to this for
a long time, only just now I have the courage to pipe up.
Jay, You've been very edifying. Thank you for being a nerd who does
my homework for me. Glory to Jesus. Thank you so much, Kristen
five dollars, Thank you, Thank you, Kristin, Sir. From Craig
ten dollars. If we can't accurately, if we can't reason accurately from a
fallen nature to God because of death, couldn't tag fall into the same error.
No, I mean we're not saying that you can't reason accurately because of
the fall per se. You can't. I mean an atheist can write a
paper about mathematics, can write papers about earthworms that are correct and make new
discoveries. Rather, the point is that they can't justify how knowledge is possible.
So those are two different That's another example of the second order. Right,
So let's give an example of an atheist writes a science paper some breakthrough
discovery about earthworms because he's been studying for the twenty years and it turns out
that it's all true. His theories on earthworms are correct. Okay, nobody's
saying that he doesn't have the first order knowledge about the earthworms and his research
and data. What we're saying is that he's not able to give an account
for how that knowledge is possible. That's the higher order claim. Should this
should be obvious that people think about it, that these are two different things,
two different claims. Somebody, Yeah, I'm still confused with this.
Guys saying that TAG can't differentiate particulars. Have you figured that what that means?
I mean, I addressed that earlier. That. I mean, you
could make a transcendental argument with anything within the paradigm. Could I could start
with pencils and make the argument up to God? It wouldn't matter what object
you pick, because ultimately everything it's the same question of how do we ground
the knowledge of those objects? Right? So that's the question he was asking.
He seems to think that somehow TAG is only dealing with universals. It's
not a question of universal particulars. So he thinks that it's a universal type
argument, I think, and therefore there's not a basis for particulars. Seems
to be what he thinks it is. TAG is not the equivalent of universals.
Okay, remember too that it's always misunderstanding everything. Yeah. People get
confused because they hear the word transcendental in yeah, and they think that's reasoning
about universals or something like yeah, or the all presidential category must transit arguments
must be about the reasoning about our grounding transcendental categories, and that's not the
case. So transcendental comes from the transcendental deduction of Kant, and it basically
a transcendental is simply just what's prior, right, transcendare what's over and above
and prior that makes the stuff below p Yeah, well, maybe preconditions is
better, because if we talk about preconditions for knowledge, then that really doesn't
anything to do with the question of universals per se. You might ask other
universals and can you give an argument for universals in your worldview? But preconditions
for knowledge, though it might relate to that, is not the same thing
as the question of universals. So hopefully that clears it up. Because remember,
in just general methodology, the transcendental deduction Kant is actually trying to answer
that exact question of what makes it possible to make predicates of particular sense data
right right, and and entities and stuff like that. So that's exactly what
a transcendental argument generally speak. I'm not saying Kant pulls it off, but
like the type of inference or transiental deduction that's an argument that that's making is
specifically attempting to ground and distinguish between particulars. Yeah, I mean all of
Aristotle's categories at the beginning is dealing with how to pick out and know objects
and to give them, give the relations that make them what they are.
Right, So quantity, position, substance. Right, these are all different
things that are listed in the category. And then cont takes that and then
tries to make his structure of the categories, and rather than than being metaphysics,
they're just in the mind. So it's it's but it's the same basic
idea of what categories are to make knowledge of objects possible. That's so,
in other words, to have knowledge of an object, right, if we
looked at Aerosol's categories, I would need to know that it is one of
the things the categories that we need to know is that is over there,
and over there is five free feet from that thing, and it's ten feet
from this thing. Right, that's the position and relation is one of the
things he lists in those categories. Then he says, what about the fact
that our relationship to transf categories seems contingent on fallen nature? I would not
say that at all has nothing to do with transpo categories. I have nothing
to do with being contingent on fallen nature. So I don't know what you
said that you say, look up the laws of physics. I don't know
how that relates. Thank you for everything that you're doing. First Corinthians one
twenty three. Frankie d five dollars. My brother and me, Austin came
up with a new way form of calculating how far away a different location is.
For example, if you look at a place, we might say it
is one jay dire stream away, and if they say it's two day dire
streams away, you know it's very far. That's creating. Do you have
five dollars? Father deagon ad a nice question for you. Can there be
a contradiction between first order and second order thinking? For example, let's say
somebody says, in the first order statement the law of identity does not exist.
Would that result in a contradiction with a second order statement that they know
that the law of order latinity doesn't exist. Yeah? And then what's really
interesting too that I mean, this gets really met a level, but it's
something I developed with my argument from the immateriality of the intellect and with like
Bullian logic, you can't have existential import with universal propositions. So that means
if you derive a particular for I'll give you an example, all dogs are
animals on the Bullion interpretation, that has no existential import. But if you
say some dogs are animals, it does. It implies dogs exist all right,
So then comes al for Tarski and al for Tarski. Uh makes this
distinction between language, optic language, and meta language. So this is when
we first start getting into this kind of first and second order and eventually this
is going to develop into first and second order logic. So I started thinking
about a statement. Now, the reason why Tarski developed that was because of
the liar paradox. This sentence is false and he was able to make Do
you see how the second and first order is relevant. He's able to make
a distinction between the language that talks about objejects versus language that talks about the
language, and so something could be both true and false depending on the distinction.
Anyways, So then I was thinking about because I'm doing all this work
with second order statements. Yeah, but by the way, that doesn't exist,
right, because j Mike and some of the other atheists said there was
no such thing as that question. So okay, So even though the philosophers
are out here talking about it, it's famous discussion, it doesn't exist because
there's no such thing. It's a nonsense thing that you've made up that you
could talk about the language of objects. So there's knowledge of objects, and
then there's discussions of the language of the knowledge of objects. That doesn't exist.
It's a thing that's made up by you. Well, I'll make sure
to go into I put my time machine in every bean of Patristic faith right
here, so I'll make sure to actually go into my bag with Partrific Faith
coffee, which you can purchase on in the bio from Jays. Yeah,
I'll put the link in the chat. This is real coffee too. By
the way, organic Orthodox based company. Every link is a second order being
that actually talks about lower order beans, and I think you really appreciate the
meta level roast of this particular blend. But I've also put a time machine
here, so I'll make sure to actually go into my bag a pacific faith
go back in time and tell Tarski I'm sorry to tell you Tarski, the
Internet atheist keyboard Wizard. By the way, isn't this the whole Douglas Hofstetter
book that was a Pulitzer Prize winner gourdell Asherbach, Right, do you know
what I'm talking about? Yes? Yeah, where he talks about strange loops
and the whole point is that there's there's language, and then there's a language
about language. And then he talks about how m c ass artwork displays the
like geometric patterns that that evidence this strange loop principle that if you you're just
raising the question one one step above one higher order, he says, answer
that question real quick. I'm sorry for going on tangent on that. So
anyways, think about this second order claim. All propositions are all sentences contain
words. That's a metaw language, right, Why because I'm using language to
talk about the object, right, Okay, So what happens that's an universal
proposition, and therefore I conclude to a particular therefore some words, some sentences
containing words have I committed on the bully interpretation an existential's fallacy, And it
came to this discovery. I actually wrote mathematicians and logicians and nobody's even thought
about this, which is weird stuff that seems so basic that I'm like,
why has nobody ever thought about this? It can't apply to second order.
The Boolean existential import rules can't apply to second order. Why because to answer
your friend's question in the chat, I would be making a second order claim.
That's basically contradictory. Right, I'm speaking about words and concepts and universals,
but they don't exist. Do you see the problem? So to answer
yeah, because the sentence is engaging in it. So the sentence itself,
absolutely you could make second order claims about first order of things in which you're
engaged in contradiction. And it's something I just actually worked out in recently.
Yeah, I brought when I was talking to and Deer, I brought up
the Gardell the move that Gardell makes, and he was like, that's not
a transcendental argument. I wasn't arguing that Gardell was making a transfer argument.
I was saying that the move that he makes from in the in the argument
against Russell, when he makes the set argument, he says that every set
eventually appeals outside of the set, And that's an example of the strange loop
stuff. In the Hofstetter book illustrates illustrates the point that you're making about the
move up to second order and the Tarsky point. It's really difficult. He's
got his other books really difficult to metamagical themos but I mean hop setters,
I mean he's not engaged in a lot of metaphysical Actually kind of is because
he says, maybe we can reconcile some of these things with like Zen philosophy,
and he talks about zen cones and how Zen's philosophy sometimes makes the same
move to first order second order, but the move is the same. That's
the point. It's not saying that that is the transcendental argument. Not saying
that mc esher's artwork exemplifying this move is the transcendental argument is really stupid.
But anyway, Yeah, if anybody just watches, uh, there's actually some
lectures that explain the Goerdell lescherback book to you. It's a really difficult book,
but if you watch some of those lectures, you'll see the point that
we're making here about how whether it's box the beginning chapters, he gives an
example of box fugue. One of his is like fugues, and it's actually
the musical structure repeats, so it's a never ending loop. If you play
it on those old timey pianos or whatever, that it would just play in
a loop and it would be the same structure over and over and over,
and you can by the way, Yeah, I actually did want to.
There's a much better argument than the tag. It's completely an irrefutable proof.
But the problem is it's it's such advanced logic that none of the atheists would
be able to understand it. So I never actually used that one. But
if you come up to Montanica, I might. I might actually pull it
out just so we could actually look at it, and nobody's going to challenges
in trust me. It's an infallible proof because I'm much smarter than all of
you on logic, and so you're gonna have to just trust me on this.
I actually was thinking about, like, what if I came up on
an argument like that. Well, I do have a proof, but it's
just far too complicated for you to understand what the atheist would actually say.
Yeah, there is a hopstarter. Giving a lecture in twenty thirteen explaining the
book and explaining the principle of strange loops. So if you want to watch
that lecture, you'll get an idea about what we're talking about. Yeah,
I wish he had used some graphics, but it's kind of like just him
talking. He should have used some imagery because his book is actually full of
a lot of images. But anyway, so the next question is Frankie die.
On a serious note, I've been struggling with Nietzsche. There's a guy
whose name is Kosten Alamaru. He argues that Plato and Nietzsche were arguing for
an aristocracy and that philosophy is therefore not real, it's only a tool of
stake craft. Well, I mean that would be a theory, but the
fact that he has this theory that mean that it's true. So I'll throw
this one to Father Deacon. What would you say to somebody who said,
look, Plato, Nietzsche, they've shown us. Ultimately the real meaning of
their philosophy is that there's an ari aristocratic elite. There's not a real philosophy.
It's just a tool of control. Man. Well, suppose I grant
that there's a certain element of they're using. Suppose I grant that they're still
telling me if that's really who Nietzsche, Nichtsche, and Plato are, there's
still something viable about philosophy because it exposes the con And I would agree somewhat
with that, right, I think all the philosophers are basically con artists.
Yet I engage in philosophy, in other words, philosophy and the general sense
of thinking correctly and with excellence that you could train yourself in that that.
How would you fight bad philosophy of the elites or something like that with good
philosophy, right, good thinking skills? So even fight granted that, that's
kind of the move that I've taking. Well, I mean, what did
those arguments still be some kind of philosophy and therefore self refuting, because it's
that's what I'm saying, either self refuting or they're still saying there's some advantage
to use this to expose the con So, and what what would you say
this like a like a Nietzsche and it says something like, your quest for
absolute truth is silly. Everything is just sort of uh, you know,
will to power power dynamics, and you're just duped into thinking that you're finding
this absolutely true. Absolutely it's an ass claim so it's the same problem with
you. It's like, oh, I'm gonna pretend I'm not making second order
claims. They are contingent upon the first order. So just grant me my
assumption. Right, there are no absolutes, so I can make an absolute
statement about it. There are no absolutes. It's like mind hacked. Five
dollars, Thank you so much. Robi ten dollars. Do you think that
something deeper concerning knowledge was distorted in the confusion of the languages at the Tower
of Babbel. I don't know. I mean, maybe it's possible that humanity's
knowledge was damaged in some weird way at that time, But I mean it
looks like, as per Daniel what eleven or twelve, knowledge is increasing as
we get towards the end, So good question. I don't know. Prodrick
five dollars. Do you have any thoughts on Mila Sue's necessity of contingency,
appearing like he accidentally stumbled across Saint Maximus is where God exists, I do
not. Where I exist, God does not. I don't know what that
means, honestly. So, I mean, I've read a lot of Saint
Maximus, but I don't know what that means. Maximus is probably just trying
to express apathetic theology that the inner being of God in terms of his essence,
will never know that. I'll never be there, I'll never perceive it,
And it might be a statement of humility to like, where I exist,
God does not exist, just in the sense of like, because I'm
sinful, I don't feel close to God. But Maximus isn't literally saying that
God is not omnipresent. So but I mean, I'm discussing because I don't
know who. I don't know who Melisu is or what this had five dollars?
Is there any atheists that you could think of who does a decent account
giving a justification for knowledge? Claims father Deacon, my PhD advisors and atheists
at that's freaking He's a Contian scholar, He's a Soilarisian scholar, and it's
a sophisticated account of It's people like that that I think of. I would
say Malpass, but he, as far as he knows, Malpass kind of
takes more of like an agnostic like I don't know kind of position, but
typically like at the level of like a good academic professor or something like that
they could give you a good run for your money, if that's what I
mean. I think again it misses the kind of greater points of missing the
epistemological forest for the epistemic trees and getting bogged down on I would just saw
this in like one of the comments too, like the tag doesn't work because
it fits into one of CONT's categories and probably referring back to Stroud's argument of
the lack of verification principle and transcendental deductions that it can never establish an object
to which it and two problems here, and it's again it's this I hate
to say it, this pretended autonomy and kind of holding on to your idols
so you can't actually see the question. It's like, why is anything that
cont said even true or dressed? And we're just granting Kant like his arguments
work and everything that he said let me get my cat by the way actually
works. And again it's just missing the kind of the more fundamental kind of
question of even if my argument doesn't work, tag, it still works.
Right. Let me put it this way to you, what comes first the
necessary condition for all arguments, including transcendental arguments, or the transcendental arguments,
which one comes first? Epistemically speaking, what would you say? I was
reading Phillip's comment, I missed what you're saying. Apologize. So I want
to one way to kind of illustrate why none of these people's objections will ever
work. I want to ask them, epistemically speaking, what comes first?
The necessary conditions for arguments, including transcendental arguments or the transcendental argument. The
condition the conditions that have to come first. Yeah, the necessary conditions.
So what that means is, even if my transcendental argument fails, the question
still stands. Do you see what I mean? Why? Because yeah,
yeah, right, I mean, let's let's say that somebody was engaged,
like was arguing very poorly. Right, Let's say they argue TAG very poorly,
like I don't know a lot of the Matt Slick or one of these
people. Right, Let's say they argued it very poorly, like, the
question is still there, right, Yes, And that's what I'm saying,
even if I granted it to you that like the tag is open to these
continent critiques of Stroud and blah blah blah, all this different stuff, or
I made a mistake or something like that. The question all it means is
I wasn't that great with my language. The argument prior to argument still stands,
doesn't it. Yeah, and this was my point to am Deer or
J Mike. I forget which one, but yeah, this was the point
I was making of them. BMX nineteen six six ten dollars. Thank you
so much for that, Big Boss, twenty dollars. Dang. The FDA
Food and Drug Administration is against people playing tag win will to Tyranny end,
so he's doing a little bit of pun with your name and other things like
tag attack. Thank you so much, Big Boss. Appreciate attack Dog five
hundred and five dollars. Jay, I'm just starting to understand get into presop.
I'm slow boy. What are the top five books or papers or essays
for a nube that doesn't have a philosophy background. I would say watch the
Bonsenstein Debate about two or three times and take notes. I would say,
read the very easy introduction book Ultimate Proof by doctor Jason Lyle. Then I
would read something like Always Ready by Greg Bnson, and then I would read
Father Deacon Ananias's papers, and I would read then Contingency of Knowledge by russ
Manyon. All right, guys, I want to remind you that we do
have a show sponsor. Who is Chalk dot com. Now is your paper
public or not yet? Yes? Here, I'm just because a lot of
people were saying, hey, we want to read this, and we we
got through several key points, but we didn't get through every single thing because
it's uh, I mean, it's not super long. It's a twelve page
paper. But so if you guys want to read the paper, father deacon
and will give you the link right somewhere there is somebody told me that unless
you subscribe to Academy dot e d U can't download the You have to log
in with like your face book or your Google is how you do that?
Okay, you can read it though it's yeah, you can read it,
but to download you have to be logged in through Facebook or Google. Okay,
thanks for yeah, and I guys almost all my papers are on there.
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f E. Uh. And good news, guys, we will be doing
an event in Vegas in June, so look for the Vegas June event.
Father Diggon, I don't know if you've sold your tickets to your event.
If you want to plug that you can. Yeah, So the twenty first
ends the Orthodox Montanica discount UH tickets, the early bird tickets, so get
those. We are expected to sell out. We're way ahead of where we
were ticket sales last year, and we're going to get a lot more.
And also we've if many of you don't know, in Missoula, there's a
mega church, evangelical church about two thousand people that are converting to Orthodoxy,
so we'll probably get a lot of them too, So don't procrastinate, get
your tickets to put it in the chat right there for the conference and what
what what's going on at at your conference? This year? It's themed around
is it film or icons? Theology to icon So we're gonna have film famous
film directors like Nathan Jacobs who's also a doctor of philosophy and uh, I
think he was a student doctor David Bradsha at one point and uh father Turbo
Qualls who's an iconography also father Matthew Garrett from Boise who's an iconographer and WI
Corps. And Shane Swinson who is our resident iconographer paying the temple. Yeah,
shout out to Shane, longtime buddy of ours. So and then it
looks like we might get some other film directors and some other famous guests that
I Stanley Kuberg's coming, Mel Gibson is coming. Uh, that's a jokes.
Burgs, that's a joke. Yeah, Martin Heideger probably will show up,
Lenny Lenny rievanshaul will be there. Yeah, who's it's a joke.
People. Yeah, Now they're going to be like you, I demand my
ticket refunded because you lied and told me that Stanley Kuber would be there and
he's not here. You're a liar. Whatether if if I had to get
any film director who would be your favorite film director to bring in, they
don't have to be orthodox. Well, I think everybody would prefer Mel Gibson
probably like as the most like based film director. I mean, somebody said,
is Tom Cruise coming? No, but Tom kom is coming, and
that's even better, So I don't. I mean, you would probably be
better situated to know orthodox directors. I'm trying to think of the only ones
I've heard of are the ones that you know about. I think I don't.
I can't think of any any other ones that are. We could get
Nick caged because you know that I've met him and had some conversations with down
at the Lava Lounge and Angeles. Oh you know who should get Speaking of
Tom's Tom waits, he has nothing to do with it, so I said
get so, I said, get quit, and Tarantino to go. Yeah,
I don't think that's gonna happen. But anyway, thank you for coming
back. My mind is much I'm so tired from traveling, so thank you
for coming on. And everybody should read the paper and anything you want to
leave us with all of you have at we're halfway through Lent. Have a
great rest of lent. My God give you the grace necessary for that.
Again, you've got our patristic faith. Coffee, Jay, I know that
you're starting up some I think I'm going to be releasing some courses after PASCA.
I'm going to start releasing some new courses, canvas courses, so stay
tuned. Also, we're bringing on other PhD philosophy Orthodox philosophy professors onto particular
Faith to deliver courses, so stay tuned. We're really excited about that.
And just like you, Ja, we want to provide quality university education that
isn't woke, it isn't broke, and it won't cause you to go broke
to for an affordable price. Yeah, I think that's the model. I
mean, the future will be this. People are not going to care about
these mind control brainwashing universities and they're going to be moving to learning what they
want to learn on their own initiative. And that's a much better model anyway.
So that's what I think the future is. So yeah, it's good
to hear that. Big Boston's another five dollars and says if you don't subscribe
to Jason Elysis, you're sigh opping yourself. That's a good selling point.
I like it. So, yeah, you can also subscribe to my website
get access to the archives. I forgot to mention that I did finish this,
so if you guys didn't see the really deep dive that we did on
Through the Looking Glass, I highly recommend it. Actually we touched on some
of the strange loops stuff because Lewis Carroll, if he didn't know it,
was a mathematician and a lot of the word games and word play is highly
philosophical. In fact, Father Deacon, you might find this interesting. There's
elements of the later chapters Through the Looking Glass that not only deal with the
question of identity, but questions of like substance and accident and Arisitilian questions.
There's a lot of weird stuff in this book that you wouldn't think about.
Perhaps even counting by identity versus accounting by division, I think comes up.
And again Lewis Carroll was a weirdo for sure, and we covered that in
Part one, but he does include a lot of interest. Seriously, he
was accused of being a ped oh because of well, odd things that happen.
He was in the circles of a lot of the Golden Dawn ritual magic
weirdos. So there's a lot of bizarre stuff with this book and with him,
And I'll be doing the part two very soon because I just finished it
on the plane. And if you don't know, it also has questions relating
to like word concept fallacies. So a lot of the stuff that yeah,
actually like when she goes into Wonderland or when she goes through the looking glass
into the opposite world, the mirror world, everything functions like fallacies are the
case. So there's contradictions happening. Words are misunderstood in two different references to
different senses, and so Part of the magic of Wonderland is identifying and picking
out things like fallacies and work concept fallacies, et cetera. So Part two
will be up in the next few days. And thank you for your patience
while I was gone hanging out with Sam Hyde. That would a super awesome,
very very thankful. It was a blessing to be able to go do
that. Very thankful to them for hosting me up there and putting me up
and having me get beat up by the Olympic trainer dude. So I got
to do some boxing. It was intense. It was an asthetic endeavor.
I really enjoyed it. So anyway, it's gonna be a fun PGL when
it comes out. And thank you guys so much, and we'll be back
very soon. Everybody, have a good night. God bless