0155 I turn to the book that follows Emergence (2019).

The book before me is titled Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism (2021, Notre Dame Press).  The book divides into two parts.  Part one concerns emergent phenomena (and looks back upon the previous book).  Part two covers divine action in emergence.

But, is not there already a number of theories in our Age of Ideas concerning the topic of divine action in a world full of truncated material and efficient causalities?

0156 Oh, there is more than a number, which reminds me of the earnestness and ambition of Tabaczek’s graduate project.

Most graduate students, after being lured into an advanced program in science by the philosophical side of Tabaczek’s mirror, figure out that the noumenon, the thing itself, is an inaccessible reflection of the agent-side of science, the side where all the difficult and detail-oriented laboratory work gets done.  That realization takes one or two years.  Then, the rest of one’s graduate career consists of grinding out the data and wondering why doing science is not as fun as thinking about doing science.

In short, most graduate students in the natural sciences learn to live as agents on the science side of Tabaczek’s mirror.

0157 I suspect that the same process should have happened to Tabaczek, entering a graduate program in philosophy of science and getting introduced to diverse machinations of science-agent philosophers, explaining how the hylomorphe on the science side is reflected by the noumenon side of Tabaczek’s mirror as a sort of “cloud of unknowing”, that conforms to the ghost of the positivist intellect.

But, it does not.

0158 Perhaps, it is a miracle that those agents of science who supervise his doctoral studies do not sabotage and destroy this creature, who seems to absorb the soul-breaking literature, yet remains eerily constant in his vision.

Perhaps, Tabaczek holds the element of surprise because he stands in a tradition that loves science, yet despises the positivist’s intellect, which has one rule.  Metaphysics is not allowed.

Most students coming out of the Christian tradition simply get confused and wander into specialized technical fields of either science or modern philosophy.  Will they ever get the memo?  The positivist intellect is dead.