Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract
Here is it, the paper, starting with the abstract:
The Spirit in the Closed Circuit: Why Catholic Authority Does Not Solve the Problem of Discernment
By Phil Stilwell | Published 2026
https://www.academia.edu/170883041/_The_Spirit_in_the_Closed_Circuit_Why_Catholic_Authority_Does_Not_Solve_the_Problem_of_Discernment
How can a person tell whether an inner prompting comes from the Holy Spirit, a deceptive spirit, or ordinary human imagination? Hans-Georg Lundahl answers by recommending prayer, conformity to Catholic teaching, submission to Catholic authority, attention to moral fruits, and, in exceptional cases, later miracles. These practices may help a Catholic decide whether an impression is safe to act on. They do not identify the impression’s source. A thought produced by religious training can agree with Catholic teaching. An institution can approve a mistake. A decision can turn out well by coincidence, competence, or selective reporting. Even an event that remains medically or historically unexplained would not, by that fact alone, identify the Holy Spirit rather than some other supernatural or unknown cause.
Phil Stilwell seems bent on mixing two problems that have nothing to do with each other.
How do I know?
This is usually not what I or any Catholic of typical Catholic culture (though it wouldn't be heretical) would try to solve with attending to personal promptings of the Holy Spirit.
Nor are such promptings anything like why I converted to Catholicism.
What should I do?
Obviously a Catholic who already accepts the authority of the Catholic Church will not take practical decisions as occasions to put it in doubt.
I can come to doubt whether this or that version of the Catholic Church is the correct one if it's making it harder for me to get a correct decision started.
I have ditched more than one for this reason.
So, I kindly suggest to the author of the paper
to admit fairly and squarely these are separate problems.
And, when it comes to the practical one:
it doesn't even closely matter to you if we can in a given situation know with full certainty or moral certainty that the Holy Spirit actually was behind a prompting.
Far from being a philosophy paper asking a reasonable question, it would then become a kind of psychology paper, or worse, an undercover psychological examination of the one you are dealing with. I have more than enough of that rabble.
Also, you don't start questioning your presuppositions every time you take a decision, so why should I?
Now, let's go to "How do I know" ...
Lundahl tries to close these gaps by appealing to Christ’s promise to the Church, the Church’s preservation of the Gospel accounts, the prima facie credibility of tradition, the growth of early Christianity, and the beneficial effects of Catholicism. But these claims form a closed evidential circuit. The institution certifies the texts, the texts certify the institution, traditions and miracle reports certify both, and the institution’s alleged divine protection supplies the favored interpretation of those reports. Evidence that is genuinely independent—the mere historical existence of the Church, for example—does not establish the supernatural authority attributed to it.
Analysing an argument correctly is a good starting point before trying to answer it.
Stilwell tries to construct a circulus vitiosus in probando.
The institution certifies the texts, the texts certify the institution,
More like, every community that ever existed usually knows how it started. The opposite would be more improbable. The US is not likely to forget about George Washington and Lafayette and replace them with Kemal Atatürk. It is also not likely to forget the actual process and substitute sth like Moses parting the Red Sea or Seven day trumpet blows making Jericho's walls tumble down.
Therefore, it is a priori probable that the texts of an institution that's a community (which the Catholic Church is) and not just sponges of one (like the FBI on the US, I get the impression, when FBI targets Latin Mass Catholics as a security threat) actually do fairly historically accurately reflect the actual process by which the community came to be.
This paper reconstructs Lundahl’s position in its strongest form, then shows why it fails.
Stilwell is hardly likely to be able to do that if he:
- conflates two positions on two subjects with one single position
- generously pretends detecting circuli vitiosi in probando just for ease of refuting, which to me seems more like strawmanning than steelmanning.
It also refines the original challenge. Absolute certainty is unnecessary, and historical claims are not tested exactly like laboratory hypotheses.
Thank you.
The proper demand is more modest: a method must discriminate among the proposed causes better than chance, bias, and hindsight. Lundahl provides no such method.
I did not propose promptings of the Holy Spirit as the best way to evidence Catholicism. If Stilwell wants to evaluate what I'm doing when discerning anything, as if it were a medical cure, no thanks.
Doctors need to be able to verify the kind of medical cures they prescribe to others. People are very much entitled to try and persist in their home cures for coughs, colds, diabetes and whatever without continuously being poked by doctors trying to validate or invalidate their methodology.
If anyone wants to take away that right from me, I take that as a very inimical action. Sufficiently grave, as being a kind of slave hunt, to merit death penalty in a court and therefore sufficiently grave to merit a self defense that could be lethal.
So, I'll suppose we'll be dealing with evidence for Catholicism.
He offers an internally Catholic policy for managing impressions, not a publicly reliable way to discover who—or what—produced them.
Impressions are not public busines, and an internally Catholic policy is good enough for a Catholic.
On top of that, he insinuates that "public" and "Catholic" shouldn't go together, ideally obviously they should.
A dedicated objections section answers the strongest replies in his own words. A verification roadmap then identifies the conditions, possible falsifiers, and prospective tests Lundahl would need to establish his claims,
I hope this deals with "How do I know" in the credal sense. That's all that such verification roadmaps should deal with.
while two appendices supply a formal argument audit
Not sure what that even is. And given certain propensities for overdiagnosing circulus vitiosus, I'm not sure Stillwell is capable of doing one correctly.
and a practical discernment matrix.
This one on the other hand should be on "what should I do" ... thankfully the two appendices are separate items.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Olaf
29.VII.2026
In Norvegia sancti Olavi, Regis et Martyris.
