Being as the Teological Ground of Divine and Natural Revelation…
Imago Dei’s relationship to Dei
“The belief in inductive logic is so firm and so deeply rooted in most scientists that it is very difficult to make them see how baseless it is. The fact is that there is no such thing as an inductive method in the sense of a method of making discoveries. But I do mean to say that there is no such thing as a logically valid inductive method: there is no method of establishing the truth of a scientific hypothesis by means of inductive inference” …
— Karl Popper
In The Dualism of Consciousness — Vorhandenheit (Present-at-Hand) and Zuhandenheit (Being-Ready-to-Hand) 20th Century German Philosopher Martin Heidegger makes an important distinction that is highly critical of Modern and Post-Modern Philosophy and Metaphysics.
Heidegger uses the term Vorhandenheit (Present-at-Hand) to describe how something appears to our Human Consciousness when we step back from our practical engagement with the World and observe it as an isolated Object.
It separates these Objects from the World (i.e. apart from the World) and strips them of their relational role (i.e. a unity of a Perceiving Subject & Object) in a referential whole.
It is the mode of scientific and theoretical cognition that has the ever-present risk of leading to The Obfuscation of Intelligence — Modernity, Post-Modernity and the Tower of Babel.
Viewing the World as an Observer from a balcony of Cartesian Abstraction rather than participating in Reality — Being in the World — this Being’s (Dasein) relationship to Being (Sein) (refer Heidegger).
Note: — Rene Descartes Cartesianism Philosophy was central to the emergence of the Age of Reason. Descartes viewed Reality as a mechanical system and this World View extended to the Human Body. Sensory mechanics where Human Being engaged with the World through the mechanical actions of a sensory system. Through the application of Liebniz Law ( Identity of Indiscernibles) Descartes distinguished between Res Cogitans (Mind — for example — Idealism and Phenomenology ) and Res Extensa (Matter — for example — Materialism and Body). Cartesian Dualism reflects this distinction (i.e. Difference — A is not B — Mind is not Body), however, how these two different types of Being interact remained unclear. How are human mechanical sensations transformed into Human Thought? Cartesian Philosophy was certain of Human Consciousness and Cognition (i.e. “I think, therefore I am” ) and how ideas & concepts and systems of logic provided the abstract tools of the Human Mind, however, it was less clear has to how these ideas and concepts reflected an external Reality if they are produced within ourselves?
In contrast, Charles Sanders Peirce — Semiotic Triadic & Pragmatic Maxim — answers Descartes unanswered question through a different prism of viewing Reality. Rather than embrace a mechanistic World View, instead Peirce viewed the World in a Monistic way (i.e. in contrast to dualism). Our Minds & Bodies are entangled and Human Being is entangled with Being. It is through the interplay between Presence (i.e. Human Being participates in Reality — Human Beings participation in Being — A is in B and B is in A — Mother Nature & Hegel’s Second Nature — a Unity — a Continuum) and Difference (i.e. Mind Dependent Representation of a Mind Independent Reality — A is not B — Liebniz Law — a Distinction) that Human’s can bring an understanding of Being to the Human Mind. It does this through replacing Descarte’s Sensory Machines with Peirce’s Sensory Semiotics. We can know about the World because it assumes signification. In other words, the World in which we are entangled within is inherently meaningful and intelligible. It is through Meaning (mediated via signs) that Human Being’s have the capacity to couple the Subject (Observer) with the Object (Observed) — noting this coupling of res cogitans and res extensa mediated by signs is not some mysterious internal conceptual representation (e.g. a little man in our heads watching our eyes see — homunculus trap — homunculus fallacy) but rather a coupling of Being (Ontology) and Knowing (Epistemology).
Peirce’s ideas represent a Copernicus 2.0 moment in how we understand Reality. It was a further breakthrough in the Meaning of Being understood by the Human Mind- Being’s way of coming to know itself.
Vorhandenheit (Present-at-Hand) — The Alienation of Being, Mathematisation of Nature and endemic Cartesian World View
“We can look at different levels. One is actually to question authority. One would no longer look up what Aristotle said in order to find out how the world works. Let’s investigate it ourselves. The second is, obviously, the focus on observation. The third, I guess, is to put forward a hypothesis that were tested. Galileo was testing Hypotheses for much of his life, particularly in relation to mechanics. And the fourth was a suspicion that ultimately the World was a “kind of machine” or nature was a Machine. When Galileo said the “book of nature” was written in the language of mathematics, that’s very close to a mechanical idea of nature which was developed enormously by Descartes. As far as Descartes was concerned, all of nature was mechanism including animals and including our body’s, and we were “ghosts in these machines”. And of course, that climaxed in Newton, the whole idea of the Universe being a great huge clock of intermeshing parts”…
— Raymond Tallis
[ LINK ]
Heidegger saw Vorhandenheit as a secondary derivative mode of Being and literally, a decoupling from Reality.
A form of consciousness that had gradually become endemic as Modernity progressed.
It was a mental structure perspective of Reality anchored in the Primacy of Human Consciousness and Logic (i.e. Study of Thought) that was increasingly leading to a view of Reality anchored in more and more rules of abstraction — World as a Machine, Mind as a Computer, Cells as Machines,Body as a Machine, Intelligence as Computation, Geo-Engineering, Bio-Engineering, Genetic Engineering, Algorithmic Management, Technology Society, Technology System, Artificial General Intelligence, Algorithmic Governance, Algorithmic Money etc.
But in doing so, had Western Civilisation increasingly retreated into a World of more and more abstraction?
The mathematisation of nature (Heidegger) where our abstract concepts procede our experiences of them.
Literally, a Kantian Categories mind shaped Reality where everything in nature must be quantified, measured, calculated, and predicted.
A Cartesian World revealed as a standing-reserve (Bestand) — a resource to be used, manipulated, and optimised.
It was the antithesis of the dynamic entangled living World we inhabited.
“Anything alive and evolving from within, from its own self-organisation has always multiple paths and the minute there is multiple possibilities you never have predictability, you have possibilities and possibilities then create the uncertainty and unpredictability which is a quality of an evolving World”…
— Vandana Shiva
[ LINK ]
An ever-present risk of retreating back into Plato’s Cave and Flatlands (i.e. Reductionism & Abstraction).
Alienating the ontological richness, context and complexity of Being.
Being as the Teological Ground of Illuminating Meaning
“The study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is”…
― St. Thomas Aquinas
Both 20th Century Philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and Martin Heidegger’s ideas illuminate the pre-conceptual foundational role of Being.
A pre ontico-ontological understanding of Being:
- Ontico refers to facts and beings — aspects of entities (Seiendes) in their concrete existence (Aristotle & Aquinas — act of Being); and
- Ontological refers to the structures and conditions of Being itself (Sein) — the understanding of what it means to be.
According to Heidegger, meaning — emerges from the relation between this Being (Dasein) and Being (Sein) — is not epistemic in the traditional Cartesian or Kantian sense.
It does not first arise through knowledge but is rather what grounds the possibility of knowledge.
In Heideggerian terms, Bedeutsamkeit (meaningfulness or referential totality) is the condition under which Beings can show up as intelligible in a World — an interconnected web of relations.
“The misconception which has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries is the notion of “independent existence”. There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe”…
— Alfred North Whitehead
Dasein is always already thrown into a meaningful context (Welt — a World of actual & possible relationships), a field of significance where things are encountered as something.
Before Dasein knows Beings, it already dwells in a World where things matter to Human Beings.
Thus:
Meaning is pre-epistemological — it is the ontological precondition that enables knowing.
Heidegger’s project in Being and Time is to rethink ontology itself by grounding it in the lived pre-theoretical conditions of human existence (Dasein).
From Peirce’s perspective, something similar occurs.
His category of Firstness (quality of feeling, pure possibility) precedes actual cognition and representation.
The emergence of meaning in a triadic sign (representamen–object–interpretant) is never merely cognitive; it depends on a more primordial semiotic ground of Being where potentiality and interpretability exist even before conscious judgment.
Meaning, therefore, precedes epistemic validation.
It is what makes signs possible as mediators of knowledge.
We can know about the World because it assumes signification.
Whitehead — Process and Reality
“Each fact is more than its forms & each form participates throughout the world of facts. The definiteness of fact is due to its forms but the individual fact is a creature & creativity is the ultimate behind all forms, inexplicable by forms, & conditioned by its creatures”…
— Alfred North Whitehead
In the philosophy of 20th Century English Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s participating in Reality is understood as a dynamic, living process of becoming.
An intelligibility — our capacity for explanation and understanding — that emerges through the integration of eternal objects (abstract forms or potentials — analogous to Plato’s forms) into actual occasions, which are the fundamental units of Reality — temporal actual entities other than God.
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”…
— Alfred North Whitehead
These actual occassions are not inert substances but contextualised, experential living events that constitute the process of the World.
Creativity is not a personal agent but the metaphysical principle that makes becoming possible.
It is conditioned and given defined expression through the actual occassion that realises it and is the source of all forms and facts that enables our understanding and participation in Reality.
Creativity and actual occasions are symbiotic: actual occasions depend on creativity to come into Being, while creativity requires actual occasions to be expressed in the World.
Whitehead’s philosophy emphasises the intelligibility and depth of the creative prehension (i.e. interaction of the subject with an event ) participation in Reality.
A dynamic inherently creative and relational process.
“Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition”…
— Alfred North Whitehead
The Univocity of Being and Category of Being
In the Univocity of Being some of the key ideas of Medieval Theologian and Philosopher John Duns Scotus were explored.
An inquiry into the innate capacity of Humans to interpret the World through their consciousness and infer relationships of meaning between their Conscious Self & the Physical World and their Conscious Self & the Metaphysical World (a higher-order Reality).
It is through the highest category of Human Thought — the concept and univocity of Being — that Humans have the capacity to understand their relationship with God and the Natural World.
Because Being pertains to everything that can be said to be in any form it provides the foundational basis for Human Consciousness understanding of the nature of Reality.
Being is the bedrock of ontology — what it means for something to exist — and it addresses questions about the nature of existence and Reality at the most abstract conceptual and universal level.
Without Being, no other categories or properties — like substance, form, essence, quantity, relation, time or quality — can be applied to anything, since nothing would exist to which they could apply.
These categories and concepts depend on the notion of existence, but Being itself does not depend on anything more fundamental.
It is through the category of Being that human consciousness can seek Truth (e.g. Rosmini : idea of Being).
A Logical Truth through the Triadic of Reason that reflects the correspondence of human beliefs to Reality noting metaphysics is the study of Being — the science ofReality.
Peirce — Abductive Reasoning, Meaning (i.e. actualisation of the potential of Being — realised intelligibility — disclosure of Being) and Being’s relationship to Being
One of the key ideas of 19th — 20th Century American Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was to extend the frontier of how we understand the nature of Reason beyond Aristotles Metaphysics and Deductive Reasoning anchored in Abstraction and Sir Francis Bacon’s Scientific Method and Inductive Reasoning that combined the dualism of French Rationalism with British Empiricism.
Peirce’s key breakthrough was to recognise that Being in the World and this Being’s (Dasein) relationship to Being (Sein) (i.e. Heidegger) was the teological ground of illumination.
It is through our participation in Reality that new potential relationships of meaning emerge between a Perceiving Subject and Object in the World mediated via Semiotic Signs.
In other words, Meaning can be interpreted as the realised intelligibility or disclosure of Being in relation to a conscious observer (Perceiving Subject) — the actualisation of the potential of Being (refer Aristotle, Peirce, Rosmini — note — Heidegger viewed Being (Sein) not as a substance but the condition for the intelligibility of Beings (Seiendes)).
Meaning as an Ontological Event of Disclosure of Being.
Note: If Human Beings are entangled in the World (i.e. this Being’s (Dasein) relationship to Being (Sein) — Heidegger) then could the Copenhagen Interpretation in Quantum Mechanics be reframed and interpreted as an Ontological Event of Disclosure of Being where the Wave-Function reflects Meaning (Zuhandenheit (Being-Ready-to-Hand) or alternatively the relationship between a Mind-Independent Reality and Mind-Dependent Representation) from our embodied Being in the World and the collapse of the Wave-Function reflects Knowing (Vorhandenheit (Present-at-Hand) or alternatively a Mind Dependent Representation that separates the Object from the World) as we separate the Meaning of the Object to the Mind through the process of abstraction and conceptualisation?
Peirce’s Abductive Reasoning — An Ontological Event of Disclosure of Being — Being reveals itself as possibly Real
Abduction is the term Peirce gave to this new type of reasoning which was anchored in Semiotics (Meaning & Signs), Being and participating in Reality (e.g. Pragmaticism).
Through the process of open inquiry, new relationships of meaning have the potential to emerge that in turn form the basis of an explanatory hypothesis and provide the potential for new understandings of Reality.
It represents an Ontological Event of Disclosure of Being.
The moment where Being reveals itself as possibly Real
“Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces a new idea: for induction does nothing but determine a value and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Just as Aristotle’s Metaphysics & Deductive Reasoning and Sir Francis Bacon’s Scientific Method & Inductive Reasoning revolutionised the World, Peirce’s new philosophical ideas of the Semiotic Triadic & Abductive Reasoning were leading to a deeper and more integrated understanding of the nature of Reality, knowledge and the intelligibility of the Universe.
Beyond Cartesian Dualism.
A Reality where the Actualisation of the Potential reflects the symbiotic relationship between a Perceiving Subject (Observer) and Object (Observed) through the act of Being.
“Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer”…
— Heinz von Foerster
Meaning as the Ontological Event of Disclosure of Being (Heidegger).
Knowing as the Epistemological Event (Kant) and imposition of conditions of Knowability (e.g. Kant’s Categories) through Abstraction and Conceptualisation.
Untangling the relational Meaning (Peirce) of the Object and bringing the concept to the Mind.
The collapse is not simply physical, but semiotic (Peirce): it transforms ontological meaning into epistemological knowledge.
From an Age of Reason (Descartes (Rationalism:Idealism) — Bacon (Scientific Method)) to an Age of Meaning (Peirce (Meaning) — Heidegger (Being) — Knowing(Rosmini) ) anchored in a triadic of Meaning, Being and Knowing.
Peirce — A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God
“ … there is a reason, an interpretation, a logic in the course of scientific advance, and this indisputably proves to him who has perceptions of rational or significant relations, that man’s mind must have been attuned to the truth of things in order to discover what he has discovered. It is the very bedrock of logical truth”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
What was the source of the light of illumination of abduction through participating in Reality and Being in the World?
Peirce’s essay A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God published in 1908 can be interpreted as a response to a growing secularism, endemic nominalism, and positivism (e.g. scientific positivism) of the late 19th and early 20th Century.
Late Modernism’s attempts to deconstruct the traditions of Western Civilisationintellectual thought anchored in Christian Theology and Ancient Greek Philosophyand replace this with a new Theology (i.e. Marxism) based on the Primacy of Human Consciousness and Primacy of Man.
A return to faith not by appealing to emotions or dogma but as a central tenet of understanding the nature of Reality and the order of things.
It was an endorsement of the philosophy of Realism and the notion of an independent objective Reality grounded in Being (Rosmini — Idea of Being — Aristotle & Aquinas — act of Being).
“”Real” is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
A fresh understanding and perspective viewed through the prism of semiotics (Peirce — Semiotic Triadic- Pragmatic Maxim), Being in the World (Peirce — Pragmaticism — Heidegger — Dasein) and a phenomenological interpretation of consciousness (Firstness (possibility), Secondness (possibility and necessity), and Thirdness (actualisation of potential — necessity — law, mediation, habit)).
Peircian Categories of thought — modes of Being — unify:
- Being as pre-conceptual foundation — Teological Ground of Divine and Natural Revelation — A pre ontico-ontological understanding of Being (Peirce — Heidegger );
- Meaning as the Ontological Event of Disclosure of Being (Heidegger — Peirce (Abduction) — Aristotle); and
- Knowing as the Epistemological Event (Kant) and imposition of conditions of Knowability (e.g. Kant’s Categories) through Abstraction and Conceptualisation. Untangling the relational Meaning (Peirce) of the Object and bringing the concept to the Mind. The collapse is not simply physical, but semiotic (Peirce): it transforms ontological relational meaning into epistemological knowledge.
Peirce’s modes of Being intergrates Ontology & Being in the World (embodiment) with Epistemology & Bringing to the Mind (abstraction).
A triadic interpretation of Meaning, Being and Knowing and a triadic interpretation of Human Consciousness (Primisense, Altersense and Medisense).
The Neglected Argument — an Intelligible Universe grounded in the Necessary Being of God
Peirce’s argument for the existence of God is grounded in both Theology (i.e. necessary Being of God) and Philosophy (i.e. Metaphysics — Study of Being).
It builds on the traditions of Western Civilisation’s intellectual thought by recognising an Order to Things and Logos — an intelligibility to the Universe through Human Being’s participation in Reality and the triadic process of human reason grounded in a relational logic mediated via signs (Semiotics).
His novel Biosemiotic Approach — Signs of Meaning represents a philosophical paradigm shift.
It addresses the Mind & Body Dualism of Descartes by outlining a process (via modes of Being (i.e. Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness)) of how our sensory entangled embodiment in the World becomes intelligible through the mediation to the Mind through signs of Meaning.
The sign transcends the Mind Body Dualism — the Ontological Event of Meaning (Disclosure of Being) and Epistemological Event of Knowing.
His Neglected Argument is not a traditional theological proof but an instinctual hypothesis reached through abduction.
By asking the question — Why is there a rational Order to Things, an intelligibility, beauty,moral north-star, and meaning to our experience of the Universe at all? — and applying the same semiotic, metaphysical and relational logical processes that govern all rational inquiry, it becomes self-evident to Peirce through the process of Abduction and Being in the World (Heidegger) that the belief in God is the ultimate explanatory hypothesis.
A participation in Reality by Human Being’s through the evolutionary development of laws, habit, and meaning.
It enables Human Beings to have a Sense of Coherence ( i.e. Aaron Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence: Comprehensibility — Manageability — Meaningfulness or Knowing — Being — Meaning).
A capacity to interpret the World coherently and act pragmatically.
God through grounding thirdness (i.e. laws, habits, intelligibility) in Being enables the practical effectiveness of Human reason.
Peirce defines God as the Necessary Being (Ens Necessarium) where God’s existence is the foundation of Reality.
“The word “God,” so “capitalised” (as we Americans say), is the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium; in my belief Really creator of all three Universes of Experience”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
It is the same relational logic that facilitates and supports both scientific & philosophical inquiry, that illuminates the Neglected Argument and the ultimate source of meaning, knowing and being.
The Neglected Argument is based on Peirce’s phenomenological modes of Beingand is broken down into its three categories:
- First Universe (Firstness — Primisense — Possibility) — realm of possibility and pure ideas;
- Second Universe (Secondness — Altersense — Possibility & Necessity) — realm of brute facts and actualities; and
- Third Universe (Thirdness — Medisense — Actualising Possibility) — realm of signs, laws, & habits. Mediation of facts and ideas.
The Neglected Argument unfolds in three stages beginning with Being in the World and the innate capacity of the Human Mind for wonder and instinctive insight — a humble form of abductive reasoning Peirce refers to as musement (Possibility -generation of new ideas enabled by openness to being — an open, free form, playful contemplation of experience and phenomena).
This leads to the spontaneous formation (instinctive reasoning) of a hypothesis: the idea of God as a real explanatory cause of order and intelligibility in the Universe.
Meaning as the Ontological Event of Disclosure of Being
The second stage employs Deduction (Necessity — Logical Structures) to working through the logical implications of this hypothesis (critical reflection) — its coherence, meaningfulness, and explanatory power.
Evolving the necessary consequences of the hypothesis (Particular Inference).
The third stage is Induction (integration of Possibility & Necessity) where experience and empirical inquiry test the veracity of the hypothesis over time.
This stage seeks to confirm whether belief in God as a hypothesis is supported by the regularities and outcomes of experience, particularly through normative sciences — esthetic, moral, or scientific. The process of evaluation that does nothing but determine a value (Generalisations).
Peirce presents a dynamic triadic process: Abduction (hypothesis generation), Deduction (logical elaboration), and Induction (empirical confirmation) — culminating in a reasoned, though fallible, belief in the Reality of God as the best explanatory account of the Universe.
A belief in God that is deeply grounded in both rational thought and human experience.
Stated differently, Peirce’s Neglected Argument is exploring the relational landscape of Rosmini’s Triadic of Being beginning with the interplay between Real Being andIdeal Being, and at the same time, recognising a Divine Rational Order that illuminates the intelligibility of Reality via Human Being’s embracing both faith and reason.
“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God”…
― CS Lewis
First Universe — Possibility: Being in the World: Abductive Reasoning and Open Inquiry — Meaning and Being
“The whole series of mental performances between the notice of the wonderful phenomenon and the acceptance of the hypothesis, during which the usually docile understanding seems to hold the bit between its teeth and to have us at its mercy — the search for pertinent circumstances and the laying hold of them, sometimes without our cognisance, the scrutiny of them, the dark labouring, the bursting out of the startling conjecture, the remarking of its smooth fitting to the anomaly, as it is turned back and forth like a key in a lock, and the final estimation of its Plausibility, I reckon as composing the First Stage of Inquiry”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Musement (Possibility): A contemplative, playful state of mind where one freely explores ideas without immediate practical concerns.
“ I perform Abduction when I so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Instinctive Reasoning (Possibility & Necessity): From musement arises a natural inclination or instinct to hypothesise the Reality of God as the Necessary Being. Bringing to the mind the relationship between this Being (Dasein) to Being (Sein) (refer Heidegger). It is through Abductive Reasoning that new concepts — new relationships of meaning — an explanatory hypothesis (a theory) emerge. Deductive Reasoning merely explicates and Inductive Reasoning merely evaluates.
Second Universe — Possibility & Necessity: Bringing to the Mind: Deductive and Inductive Reasoning and Scientific Method — Knowing
“Retroduction**** does not afford security. The hypothesis must be tested.
This testing, to be logically valid, must honestly start, not as Retroduction starts, with scrutiny of the phenomena, but with examination of the hypothesis, and a muster of all sorts of conditional experiential consequences which would follow from its truth. This constitutes the Second Stage of Inquiry. For its characteristic form of reasoning our language has, for two centuries, been happily provided with the name Deduction.
Deduction has two parts. For its first step must be by logical analysis to Explicate the hypothesis, i.e. to render it as perfectly distinct as possible. This process, like Retroduction, is Argument that is not Argumentation. But unlike Retroduction, it cannot go wrong from lack of experience, but so long as it proceeds rightly must reach a true conclusion. Explication is followed by Demonstration, or Deductive Argumentation”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
**** Retroduction — Abduction
Critical Reflection (Necessity): This instinctive belief is then subjected to critical examination and testing, aligning with scientific inquiry and logical analysis.
Deductive Reasoning merely explicates. It evolves the necessary consequences of the hypothesis. Universals to Particulars (Particular Inference).
“The purpose of Deduction, that of collecting consequents of the hypothesis, having been sufficiently carried out, the inquiry enters upon its Third Stage, that of ascertaining how far those consequents accord with Experience, and of judging accordingly whether the hypothesis is sensibly correct, or requires some inessential modification, or must be entirely rejected. Its characteristic way of reasoning is Induction. This stage has three parts. For it must begin with Classification, which is an Inductive Non-argumentational kind of Argument, by which general Ideas are attached to objects of Experience; or rather by which the latter are subordinated to the former. Following this will come the testing-argumentations, the Probations; and the whole inquiry will be wound up with the Sentential part of the Third Stage, which, by Inductive reasonings, appraises the different Probations singly, then their combinations, then makes self-appraisal of these very appraisals themselves, and passes final judgment on the whole result”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Critical Reflection (Possibility & Necessity): This instinctive belief is then subjected to critical examination and testing, aligning with scientific inquiry and logical analysis.
Inductive Reasoning merely evaluates. It does nothing but determine a value. Particulars to Universals (Generalisations).
Third Universe — Actualising Potential: Unity of Being: Sense of Coherence — Teological Convergence of Meaning, Being and Knowing
“The third argument, enclosing and defending the other two, consists in the development of those principles of logic according to which the humble argument is the first stage of a scientific inquiry into the origin of the three Universes, but of an inquiry which produces, not merely scientific belief, which is always provisional, but also a living, practical belief, logically justified in crossing the Rubicon with all the freightage of eternity. The presentation of this argument would require the establishment of several principles of logic that the logicians have hardly dreamed of, and particularly a strict proof of the correctness of the maxim of Pragmaticism”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Peirce argues that this process leads to a belief in God that is both rational and deeply grounded in human experience of Being in the World.
The provisional alignment of the beliefs & habits of the contingent being of man with the necessary being of God that reflects an Order of Things, Meaning and an Intelligibility to the Universe.
An Order of Things — Understanding the nature of Reality
Charles Sanders Peirce’s A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God can be viewed as both a continuation and transformation of the theological and philosophical tradition of Western Civilisation, one that includes leading figures like Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant.
Each of these thinkers grappled with the existence of God not merely as a matter of religious faith, but as central to understanding the structure of reality, human reason, and the order of things.
Peirce, while innovating with his pragmatic, semiotic, and abductive method, stands within this tradition in several significant ways.
All four see belief in God as central to human reason, experience, and the metaphysical order of the World.
Yet Peirce’s reinterpretation offers an understanding of Reality teologically grounded in God and provides an illumination of meaning, intelligibility and order.
One that illustrates Human participation in Reality as rational, imaginative, and revealing towards this Being’s relationship to Being (Heidegger).
- Being as pre-conceptual foundation — Teological Ground of Divine and Natural Revelation — A pre ontico-ontological understanding of Being (Peirce — Heidegger);
- Meaning as the Ontological Event of Disclosure of Being (Heidegger);
- Knowing as the Epistemological Event (Kant) and imposition of conditions of Knowability (e.g. Kant’s Categories) through Abstraction and Conceptualisation. Untangling the relational Meaning (Peirce) of the Object and bringing the concept to the Mind. The collapse is not simply physical, but semiotic (Peirce): it transforms ontological meaning into epistemological knowledge.
- Being not as a static substance, but a dynamic process of becoming, meaning-making, and lawful mediation & habit formation;
- Reality constituted by signs, and everything that is real is intelligible through its relation to signs; and
- The Universe itself is structured teleologically — it unfolds according to a logic of growth, habit-formation, and increasing generality, which Peirce calls the evolutionary love. His idea of Agapasm, is inherently teleological, draws the Universe towards that esthetic goodness through its normative impulse — a selfless, unconditional love, benevolent, and generative force. An evolutionary fabric towards harmony, co-operation, complexity and order.
In this system, Being is not merely what is (Necessity), but what unfolds (Possibility) through the interpretive relational process — a semiotic teleology moving from chaos towards order & a sense of coherence — intelligibility, meaning, and law.
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