The Disjunctive Dominance Argument for Catholicism: Epistemic Implications of Divine Transcendence, Access-Maximality Concept, and Implications for Finding the True Religion and True Church

This paper presents the Disjunctive Dominance Argument for Catholicism, a two-step move beginning with an exhaustive disjunction and a dominance claim followed by a prescriptive wager not unlike Pascal’s. From one premise–the definition of God as transcendent ultimate reality–and the argument’s essential structure, principled grounds are found for the pragmatic dominance of Christian religious affiliation at a macro level followed by Catholicism at a micro-level. The essential argument is that, given the infinite or maximal transcendence of God, we can only know what he allows us to know; hence, the expected value of betting on any hypothesis in which God is maximally willing to be found (“access-maximal”), as reflected through the hypothesis’s own claim about degree and kind of divine activity in the interest of relationality, is always higher than that of any other alternative hypothesis even–or rather especially where–the epistemic landscape is flat as a consequence of divine transcendence. Christianity is argued to be uniquely access-maximal because the Incarnation makes God not merely quantitatively but qualitatively (i.e. infinitely) more accessible than he is other world religions, and Catholicism is likewise argued to be uniquely access-maximal because Papal Infallibility uniquely preserves the possibility of a submission-based true-church-identification principle as opposed to one based on self-reliance, the default represented by all non-Catholic forms of Christianity. This paper introduces and covers such original concepts as the Blind Dart Thrower Thought Experiment, the Aircraft Manual Thought Experiment, the Babel Tower Problem, the DDA-based case for Vatican I’s definition of papal infallibility along with independent theoretical motivation for Vatican I’s ex cathedra criteria, a modal a priori argument against the access-maximality of any other church, and the Capstone Argument, which argues from the normative nature of ecclesiological reasoning and the essential honesty of God to the conclusion that the DDA represents the reason why the true church is true, as opposed to a patchwork or piecewise case for why all other churches are falses, which is currently the default state of ecclesial apologetics. Priority preprint establishing the public record of the Disjunctive Dominance Argument (DDA) and its principal extensions.