Cherry-picking my way through Nicola’s re-rejoinder , here’s what pops out:
1. Nicola seems to agree with me that we can’t be certain about our truths because certainty is the wrong standard of assessment for truths. But she says:
I don’t know how truth can function as a locus of value if we can’t know what’s true. Obviously I don’t need to be able to prove something for it to be true in some ontological sense, but how do we go about evaluating our nonempirical truths? I’m not sure we ever can — and then what do we do when we have two conflicting claims to nonempirical truth? How do we choose? Intuition? I believe that things are true, but I can’t prove them; how do I convince someone else that they’re actually true, rather than useful figments of the imagination?
It’s because of questions like these that I’m trying to theorize something called "interobjective knowledge" with a Georgetown compatriot. But to the point here, if Nicola wants an argument as to how we can evaluate our nonempirical truths in the face of moral dilemmas, MacIntyre has one of the stronger ones. In a nut:
A bit less Scholastic than this is Rieff’s reversal of the verificationally-obsessed causal statement "because I cannot, I shall not." Rieff describes the condition of knowledge pertaining to the resolution of moral dilemmas as "I shall not, therefore I cannot." MacIntyre’s claim about shall-nots is that they are amenable to reason insofar as plain persons always already have the capability to clamber up out of quagmires of problematic fact patterns to be certain that they shall not to such and such a thing, or do such and such another thing.
It might therefore seem that we ought to conclude with Edmund N. Santurri that Aquinas allows no place for the occurrence of dilemmas. But this […] is still not quite right. For Aquinas in allowing that one can be perplexus secundum quid does recognize that one may seem to oneself to be in an irresolvable dilemma, to be perplexus simpliciter. What one always has to remind oneself is that this cannot really be so; what one must be is perplexus secundum quid, perplexed indeed but only relative to some factor, identification of which will be the key to resolving the dilemma. Knowing this is never sufficient to determine what it is neglect of or ignorance of or inadequate reflection upon which has put one in this dilemmatic situation and the pain of this type of situation for a rational agent continues until this is determined and acting upon. Hence Aquinas’s position both admits the possibility of an agent finding himself entangled in contradiction and so apparently facing an irresolvable dilemma—that is, he allows for the occurrence of some dilemmas as penultimate facts of the moral life—and asserts that this situation is one from which the agent can always be rescued by the right reasoning—that is, he denies that moral dilemmas are among the ultimate facts of the moral life.
2. But this as yet has little to do with convincing . What does Nicola mean, or want, here?
Shouldn’t religious faith — the kind of thing that fills your life with meaning, that changes not only how you live your life but how you see the world — require something more than “oh, that’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet”? God shouldn’t be just another piece to be slotted into my Weltanschauung ; he should be the center. And he isn’t, and (here I am, caught again with the whole reason thing) I don’t have a good reason to put him there.
Ah. If convincing as to truth means filling the life of the person you’re convincing with a comprehensive, centering worldview, then yes, convincers are in for a time of it. But I think that Nicola suspects what I’m about to say, which is that we all know convincing doesn’t characteristically work in everyday life like ‘gotcha’ journalism. We do ourselves a disservice if we think of, say, the onset of faith in religious truth too exclusively in terms of Big Sudden Conversion Events. (Attn: Charles Taylor.) We start longing for the experience of conversion, the gratifying sensation that we are surrendering ourselves completely to an insuperable power, rather than longing, say, to have been converted. This presumptive longing for the sudden, totalizing experience of comprehensiveness is, I think, a bit too driven by envy. And our longing, post-conversion, for the enduring, permanent experience of fullness is ditto too driven by pride. As Rieff has also quipped, in a warning to those who would demand such a perfect, comprehensive fullness from God in His grace, "grace may not condescend to descend." We need to think a bit more about what it means in the context of truth for love to be patient. We may rediscover that there is an important difference between the truth and its occasional, derivative, merely human goods.
I’d conclude by asking whether we might also discover an important difference between conversion and repentence.
