Posted on 12/09/2010 7:56:44 AM PST by spirited irish
By the close of WW II, Richard Weaver and countless other classical liberals apprehensively discerned that the Western civilized nations were on the road to breakdown and totalitarianism. Suffering "progressive disillusionment," Weaver perceived that old cultural restraints had failed to control man's propensity for evil. This led him to ponder the fallacies of modernist ideas that had produced the holocaust of evil visited upon the world from WW I to WW II. By late 1945, Weaver published his conclusions in his book, "Ideas Have Consequences."
The subject of Weaver's book was "the dissolution of the West." Its deterioration was traced by Weaver to the late 14th century when, Weaver argued, Western man had made an "evil decision." Enticed by William of Occam's (d. c. 1349) philosophy of nominalism, Western man abandoned his belief in transcendent "universals" and thus the position that "there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man..." The consequences of this revolution in ideas were catastrophic, for "The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably...the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of 'man is the measure of all things."
Things worsened as the downward spiral continued:
God would be conceptually murdered, Heaven shut-down and Nature itself elevated to the supreme reality. The doctrine of original sin was abandoned and replaced by the "goodness of man." With only the physical world of the senses held to be real, Christianity declined, rationalism arose, and materialist science became the most prestigious way to study man. With knowledge limited to the sensory realm, man's spiritual attributes, that is, the soul, mind, conscience, and free will were soon lost in an endless cycle of reductionism and determinism. Man, created in the spiritual likeness of his supernatural Creator would be lost. In his place would stand the soulless human ape, an accidental emergent product of mindless evolutionary forces.
Weaver dubbed this way of thinking the "spoiled-child psychology" of modern man, who had "not been made to see the relationship between reward and effort." This orgy of mindlessness is traceable to certain terrible-willed modernists who, no longer wanting to be created in the spiritual likeness of their Creator, had failed to achieve an integrated world picture, a "metaphysical dream," said Weaver.
Weaver concluded with an ominous warning:
"the closer man stands to ruin, the duller grows his realization (for) the annihilation of spiritual being precedes the destruction of temple walls." (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, pp. 30-33)
What Weaver dubbed a "spoiled-child psychology" can be broken down into a legion of poisonous "isms:"
naturalism, materialism, idealism, empiricism, relativism, positivism, determinism, reductionism, scientism, biological and spiritual evolutionism, Freudianism, progressivism, liberalism, socialism, communism, utopianism, amoralism, and underlying them all....atheism and antitheism.
By 1951, insanity-producing modernism had already contaminated America's Supreme Court. In "Dennis et al. vs. U.S." Chief Justice Fred A. Vinson observed:
"Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes ....all concepts are relative." (ibid, p. 37)
Around that same time, Anthony Harrigan noted that a process of decay was being fostered in America by a "fierce and subtle" modernist orthodoxy. "Modernists are determined," he argued,
"to force the acceptance of pornography as medical science, filth as artistic realism, and abnormality as a mere difference of opinion...Though the life of the country is basically decent, Americans are in the hands of a cultural ruling class which...is conducting us to ruin." The amoral ruling class seeks to raise up a "liberal-bred barbarian" motivated by a destructive impulse" and unchecked by "traditional values and restraints," in order to destroy America from within noted Harrigan. (ibid, pp. 39-40)
That the ruling class of Harrigan's day succeeded in their unholy quest can be seen by Dennis Prager's article, "F — You" from the Music Industry,' wherein Prager succinctly describes today's "liberal-bred barbarians:"
"the music industry, from producers to artists, is largely populated by people who regard social and cultural norms as stifling. Their professional lives are dedicated to lowering that which is elevated, destroying that which uplifts, and to profaning that which is held sacred." (http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2010/12/07/f — _you_from_the_music_industry)
The barbarianism described by Prager is not restricted to music industry insiders. No, it is the prevailing attitude of the class of people described by Angelo M. Codevilla as the "Ruling Class..." In his book by that name, Codevilla notes that contemporary America is a kingdom divided against itself. Today there are two distinct classes and they are as different as day from night.
On the one hand there is the Country Class...the little people. Though in general the Country Class holds a disparity of beliefs, it nevertheless remains the repository of America's founding Judao-Christian philosophical worldview. Hence it is the Country Class that maintains the traditional founding belief that all men are created in the spiritual likeness of God the Father and that all men are therefore subject to His laws.
On the other hand there is the Ruling Class....the liberal-bred barbarians This class is comprised of the people we commonly think of as Leftists, that is, Socialists, Communists, Marxists, Liberals, Progressives, and anarchists. But it also includes people identified as rightwing, notes Codevilla. They are certain positivist GOP and Wall Street insiders, global corporatists, and international bankers.
The Ruling Class was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the very ideas described by early Conservatives such as Richard Weaver as evil, by Harrigan as amoral, and summarized by Whittaker Chambers as "Ye shall be as gods." Hence the key to understanding the ruling class says Codevilla, is its first principle, which is "we" are the best and brightest while the rest (the Country Class) are retrograde, racist, backwards, and dysfunctional and must be properly constrained and managed.
Whereas unscientific, unenlightened Country Class bumpkins still believe in God the Father Almighty, ruling class barbarians absolutely know by way of a "Gnostic knowing" that mankind is the emergent product of mindless evolution. Hence the ruling class "know" that they are the "naturally selected" ones possessed of superior intellect while the unevolved masses are human apes who cannot be trusted with reason or science and certainly not with guns, their own children, and private property.
To the ruling class, science is only science in the "right" hands just as consensus among the "right" people is the only standard for truth, notes Codevilla. By identifying science and reason only with themselves, ruling class barbarians have delegitimized the Country Class, thereby freeing themselves to demonize, ridicule, shame, and scorn the "lower class" as superstition-believing fundamentalists, as mentally-ill, as terrorists, haters, bigots, homophobes, and fascists. And though the ruling class has as yet been unsuccessful in destroying the Country Class' faith in God, they have managed to make it as socially unacceptable and embarrassing as smoking — to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience, said Codevilla.
It is as a whole that Ruling Class barbarians "regard social and cultural norms as stifling" and "are dedicated to lowering that which is elevated, destroying that which uplifts, and to profaning that which is held sacred." Early Conservatives knew this, and as previously stated, viewed Liberalism — by any name — as evil:
Forrest Davis, an adviser to Senator Taft asked:
"Is not the prevailing political 'liberalism'...that potpourri of indiscriminate do-goodism trending into statism and Marxism and blending so indistinguishably with treason, that is the deepest enemy of the traditional America and the West?" The Liberal, exclaimed Davis, "has looked upon the face of evil and found it half good." (ibid, p. 95)
William Rusher, publisher of the National Review in 1957 remarked:
"...the Liberal Establishment...shares Communism's materialist principles." (ibid, p. 137)
In summarizing the conservative case, Frank Meyer commented:
"...Liberalism is in agreement with Communism (it sees) the necessity and desirability of socialism...it regards all inherited value — theological, philosophical, political — as without intrinsic value or authority....therefore (there are no) irreconcilable differences...between it and Communism (thus) Liberals are unfit for the leadership of a free society, and intrinsically incapable of offering serious opposition to the Communist offensive." (ibid. p. 137) Or to today's jihadists, it should be noted.
It was Fyodor Dostoevsky's acute spiritual discernment that ultimately revealed the real source of the evil lurking at the bottom of Liberalism's so-called "enlightened" canon of isms. The evil, said Dostoevsky, is the Original Lie: "Ye can be as gods."
In absolute agreement with Dostoevsky's analysis, many years later ex-Communist-atheist-Darwinist Whittaker Chambers noted that the crisis of the 20th century was a crisis of faith. Communism is a religion, "man's second oldest faith," man's "great alternative faith," observed Chambers. Its promise is "Ye shall be as gods." Its vision is "the vision of man without God," of "man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world," of "man's liberated mind...redirecting man's destiny." Communism proclaims an inescapable choice between two irreconcilable faiths: "God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism." To Chambers, the "crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God."
Chambers despaired of the West because as the death of God movement that gave rise to the poisonous "isms" broadened and deepened, in the blackness of the shadow it cast, the majority of mankind appeared to Chambers to be spiritually blind to the titanic struggle between these two "irreconcilable faiths." (ibid, p. 92)
Like Whittaker Chambers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been a dedicated Darwinist, Communist, and atheist, that is until he was thrown into an earthly Hell called the Gulag. After many long years of unbelievably brutal suffering he emerged one of the 20th century's most powerful Christian prophets. In a message of immense importance to us he said:
"If we surrender to corruption, we do not deserve to be called human. But let us note that the absolutely essential task is not political liberation, but the liberation of our souls from participation in the lie forced upon us...this requires no physical, or revolutionary...measures. No. It requires from each individual a moral step within his or her power....No one who voluntarily runs with hounds of falsehood will ever be able to justify himself to the living..."
Solzhenitsyn is saying that modernist "isms" have corrupted all of us in some fashion. This is because at the heart of them is the Original Lie and all men are naturally attracted to and seduced and tainted by it in some fashion.
Once the Original Lie in its many deceptive guises is institutionalized, it becomes the basis for policy decisions and legislation such as Global Warming, the transnational corridor and highway, redistributive justice, progressive taxation, population control, sustainable development, gay marriage, and Darwinism taught in schools. It likewise becomes the basis for law enforcement, for example, speech codes and hate crimes laws, separation of church and state, and no public nativity scenes. This means that many lies have already been installed as laws, covered by a shroud of other lies and enforced by law. Already in America, to oppose the lie is to be accused of a hate crime.
Solzhenitsyn is also telling us that we must liberate our souls from the power of the Lie. We must become warriors for truth. To fight for truth means defining, exposing, and attacking the lies — Darwinism for example. But isn't Darwinism empirical science? No, absolutely not. At bottom, Darwinism is a Gnostic myth notes Dr. Wolfgang Smith, physicist and mathematics professor at Oregon State University:
"...As a scientific theory, Darwinism would have been jettisoned long ago. The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living things created themselves, which is in essence a metaphysical claim....Thus...evolutionism is a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb....it is a scientistic myth. And the myth is Gnostic, because it implicitly denies the transcendent origin of being; for indeed, only after the living creature has been speculatively reduced to an aggregate of particles does Darwinist transformism become conceivable. Darwinism, therefore, continues the ancient Gnostic practice of deprecating "God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth." It perpetuates...the venerable Gnostic tradition of "Jehovah bashing." (From Old Gnosticism to New Age I, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal Vol. 28:4-29:1, 2005, pp. 30-31)
Darwinism is the Big Lie that allows ruling class barbarians to conceptually dehumanize the Country Class, look down upon them in utter contempt and resentment, and run roughshod over them. Without their realizing it, the Country Class has been reduced to tax slaves to feed the insatiable appetites of the Ruling Class.
To destroy the power of Darwinism is to literally knock the pinnacle out from under ruling class barbarians, thereby casting them down to earth from atop their imagined lofty heights. Suddenly they will be just like the Country Class — fallible, sinful men made in the spiritual likeness of God the Father Almighty and subject to His moral laws. This is the true equality envisioned by the Founders.
However, before we can be effective warriors for truth cautions Solzhenitsyn, we must first cast out our own lies and other sins through confession and repentance. For only with a clean conscience can we be effective warriors for truth.
Resources:
The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It, Angelo M. Codevilla
Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America, Hilmar von Campe
Related Reading:
Darwinism: Devilish Gnostic Myth Dressed Up As Science
In the Shadow of Leviathan: America's Arising Fear-Based Society
THX for the ping.
Have a blessed weekend and Christmass and New Year!
Your own faith, that the Pope just wouldn't say such a thing, seems impervious to evidence to the contrary!
So acceptance of the evolution of man from pre living material is now just acceptance of “micro” evolution?
I mean a 2% genetic change between us and a chimpanzee is a pretty “micro” change, and I am sure there are greater genetic differences among animals you deem to be the same “kind” - but really.
Are you actually going with your assertion that when the Pope talks of the creation of man from pre living material, he is speaking of “micro” evolution?
Really?
The Pope isn't talking about "the creation of man from pre-living material."
Rather, see Genesis 2:7:
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground [your "pre-living material?], and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and [then] man became a living soul. [I.e., entered the world as a living being.]Looks like a "special creation" to me, using whatever materials the LORD God saw fit to use for this purpose. I.e., the "dust of the ground," purely stupid, non-living, inert matter....
Also consider the other "special creations" the LORD God made:
And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew....IOW, the LORD God created everything there is, before anything was materialized as a living creature. [See Genesis 1.] This means that creatures do not arise "from matter," but from the will and mind of God. After they were so created, then they were "embodied" as material, natural forms.
My point about macro- vs. micro-evolution is that there is evidence for the latter, based on observation and experiment, but not for the former. The former is merely an "intuitive" story that cannot, in principle, be tested by means of the scientific method (.e., direct observation, replicable experiments, leading to verification and prediction).
Well put.Thx for the ping.
You first denied they were talking about biological evolution at all, then when that position became untenable, you retreated to claiming that they were only accepting micro evolution. Now you are retreating even from that claim when you see how LUDICROUS it is to claim that the creation of man from pre-living material is merely “micro” evolution.
The common descent of species is a predictive theory. I predict that any ERV sequences found in common with orangutans and humans will ALSO be present in chimps and gorillas and will be more degraded from an original viral sequence than one found ONLY in humans and chimps.
What you don't see is that it does not necessarily follow therefrom that the viral sequences observed are the evolutionary products of a random development from "pre-living material" — a/k/a, "matter in its motions."
It is widely understood, even in science (especially among physicists working this problem), that "life comes only from life." So how does non-living — pre-existent — matter bootstrap itself into life, and subsequently into mind?
You simply take it for granted that this is what happened. And you are unwilling to consider any other explanation.
On your analysis, the difference between man and orangutans, chimps, and gorillas is merely a difference in some quantitative measure (comparative ERV sequences), not a difference of kind. But I would argue that the difference between humans and apes is qualitative: Humans and apes are two entirely different orders of being, regardless of their similarities or dissimilarities WRT ERV sequences.
But Darwinism evidently denies this — it sees man as simply part of a more or less isomorphic continuum — in the face of simple observation and common sense. That is to say, there is nothing particularly remarkable about man: He's just a more sophisticated kind of ape. And presumably a newer and better kind of ape will "evolve" from here....
If Darwinism predicts anything at all, it predicts THAT.
Interesting insight, r9etb!
If we need a definition of what faith is, then I think Hebrews 11:1 gives us the very best one:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.I'm not sure mathematics falls into the category of faith. For it seems not to be either of these things: We "believe" in it not because it deals with things hoped for, or evidences things not seen. Ever since Pythagoras (and surely further back than he), we "believe" in it because the world appears to be structured by mathematics. Or to put it another way, the order of the universe has a mathematical basis. Which probably explains "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" (as mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner puts it).
As Wigner points out, "the laws of nature must have been formulated in the language of mathematics to be an object for the use of applied mathematics"; i.e., of the natural sciences generally (possibly excluding biology, which shows little interest in mathematical formalization).
I'm not sure mathematics per se qualifies as an act of faith, for there is amazing empirical evidence that the universe has a mathematical foundation. Plus mathematics is "rigorous" in a way that faith expressions rarely are. It is reasonable and logical: It is the universal language of the natural sciences.
This is not to say that faith itself is necessarily unreasonable or illogical. It is just to suggest that matters of "faith" — including the meaning of "nonsensory modes of human experience [which address] dimensions of human existence superior in rank and worth" [Ellis Sandoz] than those to which sensory perception can give us access — are not reducible to mathematics. Little things like "experiences of the good, beautiful, and just, of love, friendship, and truth, of all human virtue and vice, and of divine reality." [ibid.]
On the other hand, there is a sense in which your statement that science takes mathematics on faith seems eminently correct to me. We trace this back to the great mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), whose insights so deeply affected Isaac Newton (1642–1727) that he carried them forward in his own theoretical work.
In effect, Descartes "bifurcates" the world (Alfred North Whitehead's term) into primary and secondary qualities: the primary qualities are those given "objectively" to sense perception. The secondary qualities are "private" or "subjective" apperceptions (e.g., "redness," or "hotness", or "qualia" in general) that have no real or "objective" existence, and therefore have no place within the physical universe that science describes.
As Wolfgang Smith notes (in Cosmos and Transcendence, 1984), the upshot is
Logically speaking, the bifurcation is tantamount to the identification of the so-called physical world (the world as conceived by the physicist) with the real world per se, through the device of relegating all else (all that does not fit this conception) to an ontological limbo, situated outside the world of objectively existent things. The postulate thus eliminates at one stroke precisely those aspects of the world which prove recalcitrant to mathematical description: all elements, that is, which cannot be reduced to extension and number. This leaves an inherently mathematical universe, the very thing which a science based on measurement and calculation could hope to master. In other words, it leaves what we have called the physical universe, not as a mere abstraction or a useful model, but as the objective reality itself. Right or wrong, let it be said at once that this reduction of the world to the categories of [mathematical] physics is not a scientific discovery (as many believe), but a metaphysical assumption that has been built into the theory from the outset. [emphasis added.](Thus let it not be said that science has "abolished" metaphysics!)
As my friend the astrophysicist puts it, "While scientific laws are tools of our mind, laws of Nature act in Nature. They are not to be confused. The difference is that of map and reality."
Having reduced the "real" universe to its mathematical description (by excluding its "secondary qualities"), and then identifying the former with the latter, the next upshot is, as Edmund A. Burtt has observed [as quoted by Smith, ibid.],
Wherever was taught as truth the universal formula of gravitation, there was also insinuated as a nimbus of surrounding belief that man is but a puny and local spectator, nay irrelevant product of an infinite self-moving engine, which existed eternally before him and will be eternally after him, enshrining the rigour of mathematical relationships while banishing into impotence all ideal imaginations; an engine which consists of raw masses wandering to no purpose in an undiscoverable time and space, and is in general wholly devoid of any qualities that might spell satisfaction for the major interests of human nature, save solely the central aim of the mathematical physicist.It is perhaps needless to say that this Cartesian/Newtonian "reduction" has been fully incorporated into Darwin's theory....
After all, Darwin's theory is nineteenth-century science and, thus "mechanistic" in its outlook and expectations....
To me, this is such a fascinating question, dear r9etb. I am so very grateful for your interest — and your insights!
Thank you!
Speak for yourself. And take care as to the breadth of the brush which you, in your ignorance, paint...
(See new tagline -- created in your honor...)
Thank you so very much, dear Dan, for the wonderful excerpt from Planck!
You have nothing to "apologize for" on that score!
I'm thinking through a response.... might be a while.
Oh please don't do that, r9etb! It's just that this very subject is something I've been working on for a while....
Thank you ever so much for your kind words. Truly I'm looking forward to your response, whenever it comes!
I tend not to think so. A thought proceeds from a thinker. It seems to me they cannot be the same thing. But then, on the other hand, the very idea of "proceeding" involves what you call linear time. But God is timeless. So in the end, all I can really say is: I don't know. God is not subject to "our" rules....
RE: "I would affirm the belief that a thought from God of something He wants to exist in spacetime is as guaranteed to come to pass as if it already exists" — the Holy Scriptures tell us that God uses His spoken WORD to effect His Will. So it seems to me it is the spoken WORD that carries the creative divine thought into efficacy, not the divine thought per se.
But then again, the Gospel of John tells us that in the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God. The key to solving our puzzle is to be found here.
You wrote, "... can we say that each species did not exist in some dimensional reality before becoming limited to our realm of spacetime?" On my reading of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, I would say that Genesis 1 refers to such a non-temporal (that is to say, "not yet in time") reality, wherein God created all things in heaven and on earth. But His earthly creatures are not instantiated as "physical" beings in the (dimensionally limited, from our point of view) "realm of our spacetime" until Genesis 2....
You wrote: "What if that which exists in our spacetime is actually less full in our spacetime than it would be in a more complex spacetime, or even a less complex spacetime?" This seems eminently possible to me.
The problem is, however, we do not know how many dimensions there are, particularly how many temporal dimensions.
I gather string theory takes a stab at ascertaining the number of dimensions there are. Last time I checked, string theorists were propounding something like 12 dimensions. But almost all of these "extra" dimensions are spatial, not temporal. And the extra spatial dimensions are seemingly rather bizarre, for they are thought to be "curled up" and of a size less than Planck length. So even if they can be "mathematically detected," it seems to me they would be utterly unobservable in principle; and so how to verify them experimentally is beyond me.
Personally, I think understanding the dimensionality of time may be more fruitful in solving the enigmas that bedevil science right now than positing more spatial dimensions.... But that's just a hunch.
And that's why, dear MHGinTN, I am so intrigued by your meditations regarding temporality: You posit time as having (at least) three dimensions — linear, planar, and volumetric. I believe you may be onto something here!
But again, that's just another hunch....
Just some thoughts, FWIW.
Thank you ever so much for your immensely thought-provocative essay/post!
ALL continuua are available to the Creator since His Spirit sustains them all as separate and balanced within the universe of His Creating.
That is not to say that God has used all dimensions to/woven into the universe of reality. But I am convinced that anything of a physical, soulish, or spiritual nature exists in a where/when, a realm of woven variables from at least dimensions Time and Space. I'm of the opinion that this agrees with soemthing profound taught by Rabbi Nahmanides, centuries before string theory was ever even imagined.
Details please!
I am struck by how often modern scientific developments have been anticipated/foreshadowed by ancient thinkers.
Your ideas are very interesting, dear MHGinTN. Are you writing?
Thank you so very much for your thought-provocative essay/post!
Nahmanides taught that although the days (the six days of creation) are 24 hours each, they contain "kol yemot ha-olam" - all the ages and all the secrets of the world. Nahmanides says that before the universe, there was nothing... but then suddenly the entire creation appeared as a minuscule speck. He gives a description for the speck: something very tiny, smaller than a grain of mustard. And he says that is the only physical creation. There was no other physical creation; all other creations were spiritual. The Nefesh (the soul of animal life, Genesis 1:21) and the Neshama (the soul of human life, Genesis 1:27) are spiritual creations.
. . .
Nahmanides further writes: "Misheyesh, yitfos bo zman" - from the moment that matter formed from this substance-less substance, time grabs hold. Time is created at the beginning. But time "grabs hold" when matter condenses from the substance-less substance of the big bang creation. When matter condenses, congeals, coalesces, out of this substance so thin it has no material substance, that's when the biblical clock starts.
It is my contention that every speck has a bit of time, a pinch of space and energy, woven to exist in continua expressions fabricated from variables of the dimensions, with some continua having more and some less variability. A photon travels the universe with a flick of present time (planar time) lacking a variable expression of space, so it travels a linear spatial pathway always in the present of it's emission. Time has taken hold of the photon only in so far as it is fixed in planar time.
With the addition of a spatial variable, the thing we call a photon takes on another characteristic of more substantial matter because it is then fixed in both time and space for its stability ... spacetime grabs hold of the energy packet. The quantum foam is the most fundamental form of the creation at least since the inflationary stage of creation.
Perhaps during the inflationary stage, realms of dimensional variables were created which have a very different manifestation of the fundamental dimensions. In fact, a dimension of spirit or a dimension of life may exist independent of volumetric space or linear time! We haven't a scientific clue --as yet-- for what combinatorics of dimensions exist right alongside our limits, which we cannot sense because of our more limited state of dimensional variables.
Of only this I am sure: God Created/Creates all that there is and all that ever will be. If beings exist in another realm of dimensional variables, it is God's Spirit Who holds these realms in balance alongside our own realm, all being taken together as 'the Universe of His Creation'.
If 'events' are occurring there, those realms have some variable of dimension time. And if 'things' exist there, those realms have some variable of dimension space.
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