Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 1.6AJ2

Summary of text [comment] pages 46 & 47

[I am looking at how the intersecting nested forms clarify Schoonenberg’s text about “statistical necessity” not fully describing the moral dimension of evil.

In the previous blog, I suggested that the horizontal axis was subject to “statistical necessity”.  In addition, the horizontal axis interscoped, so that statistics applied to more than one interscoping nested form.

In contrast to the horizontal axis, the vertical, moral religious axis, is categorical.

The vertical axis of the intersecting nested forms meets with the horizontal axis in the realm of actuality.

The other two categories in the vertical nested forms, normal context (thinkdivine_or_group) and possibility (consciencespecified), act like a voltage that is applied to a transistor (sin or virtue).  Small changes can produce magnified consequences, to the point where the horizontal axis may be in the state of “on” or “off”.

If that is not a categorical attribute (that is, one where statistical variation is reduced to two options, so statistics no longer seems to apply), I don’t know what is.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an entire book on the phenomena, entitled The Tipping Point.

The take home point is that a little moral turpitude can cause a lot of natural evil, (and maybe visa versa) depending on conditions and luck (that is, bad luck).  The worst scenario rarely happens, because spontaneous orders, including the cultural orders of unconstrained complexity, adapt.]