Prejean's freak-mutant philosophy

One of the greatest oddities in Prejean’s many odd objections to the position of Engwer and me is his insistence on an empiricist epistemology, with which, so he says, the GHM fails to comply.

What is so odd about this is the relation between his epistemology and his Christology. For his Greco-Patristic Christology presupposes a Neoplatonic ontology. Don’t take my word for it. Prejean’s sidekick, Perry Robinson, is quite defensive on that very point.

Now, one’s ontology logically selects for one’s epistemology. Neoplatonism selects for a rationalist epistemology and coherence theory of truth, as over against an empiricist epistemology and correspondence theory of truth.

So Prejean finds himself in the exceedingly awkward position of trying to graft an empiricist epistemology onto a Neoplatonist ontology.

And if that were not bad enough, Prejean has also gone on record as saying that if two parties “don't have commensurable reasons for believing X, then they don't even really have the same belief.”

But the Neoplatonic theory of knowledge espoused by the Greek Fathers is, of course, classically incommensurable with an empiricist theory of knowledge—not to mention the even deeper mismatch between the orders of knowing and being in Prejean’s hybrid Neoplatonic ontology-cum-empiricist epistemology.

All things considered, Prejean would do well to stick with the practice of law.