One on One: Faith in hierarchy ("the universe is hierarchical, with creation at the top")

Jarusalem Post ^ | June 20, 2007 | Ruthie Blum

[GodGunsGuts]

George Gilder has been famous in the United States for more than three decades. Well, infamous would be a more accurate adjective - considering the political-cultural climate in which he emerged and to which he has devoted his life's research and writings.

In America in the 1970s, one couldn't publish anti-feminist books such as Sexual Suicide, Naked Nomads, and Men and Marriage and come away unscathed, after all. Nor could one turn against welfare and Keynesian economics without arousing the wrath of liberals none too fond of the philosophies of individual responsibility and creativity - though Gilder's best-selling Wealth and Poverty (1981) did just that.

Dozens of books, hundreds of articles, an influential newsletter and a think-tank later (the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which he cofounded with Bruce Chapman, who accompanied him on a trip to Israel earlier this month), the 68-year-old current expert in microchips is raising more eyebrows than ever. Being a techno-scientist who opposes Darwin's theory of evolution will do that.

Gilder, whose lengthy and diverse resume includes his having been a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard (from where he graduated), serving as a speechwriter for Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon and receiving the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence from president Ronald Reagan, says that everything he has examined points to the same "top-down" model.

"The universe is hierarchical," says Gilder, with the intensity of someone racing to keep up with a mind constantly in overdrive. "And hierarchy points to a summit. The summit remains enclosed in fog, but this doesn't exclude the possibility that behind the fog is a divinity that we, through our faith, might worship."

It is this view that led the churchgoing, married, father of four from Massachusetts...to espouse the "intelligent design" movement....

[bubman]

bump

[RightWhale]

"The universe is hierarchical," says Gilder, with the intensity of someone racing to keep up with a mind constantly in overdrive.

Previously posted in 3 AD by Plotinus.

[JSDude1]

PING

[GodGunsGuts]

==Previously posted in 3 AD by Plotinus.

Man’s recognition of God’s creation has a very, very long pedigree...from the dawn of recorded history all the way to the present. Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, is a much more recent phenomenon, and yet it has managed to stay ETERNALLY out of date.

[rickdylan]

Evolution has BEEN exposed, for a long time. The fact that anybody would have gone on with it after the unambiguous results of the fruit fly experiments in the early 1900s indicates that evolution is a religion or a philosophical doctrine of some sort, and not anything which anybody could call science.

[GodGunsGuts]

You’ll get no arguments from me. Very well said.

[Malesherbes]

Great post. Thanks.

[GodGunsGuts]

My pleasure. I just read the article a second time, and it hit me with even more force than the first time around.

[RightWhale]

Plotinus was merely translating Plato into Latin, and that went way back before the dawn of recorded history. There are 35,000 years to account for and only about 6000 of that is written record. Oral tradition has to cover the rest.

[gcruse]

“George Gilder has been famous in the United States for more than three decades. ‘

Another famous person I’ve never heard of. And for thirty years, too. Gee, you’d think you’d hear of a famous person over a span that long.

[gcruse]

” this doesn’t exclude the possibility that behind the fog is a divinity that we, through our faith, might worship.’

Yes, that’s the first thing that comes to me when I see a fog — do you suppose there’s something back there for me to worship? LOL

[RightWhale]

everything he has examined points to the same "top-down" model.

I never heard of him, but then Nixon's speeches weren't so hot either. Top-down means that's the model you fit everything to, not the other way around like this scholar syas.

[CarrotAndStick]

Heh heh heh!

[GodGunsGuts]

==Yes, that’s the first thing that comes to me when I see a fog — do you suppose there’s something back there for me to worship? LOL

That’s what you do every time you bow down and worship your natural selection god.

[gcruse]

Ah, you’re right, I was just funnin’ ya. We both know the probability as opposed to the possibility of there being a flying spaghetti monster back there, or anything else, is miniscule.

[mjolnir]

”This doesn’t exclude the possibility that behind the fog is a divinity that we, through our faith, might worship.’ Yes, that’s the first thing that comes to me when I see a fog — do you suppose there’s something back there for me to worship? LOL

Taking things a bit literally, aren't we? Gilder is actually using what's called a metaphor.

Here's how C.S. Lewis made Gilder's point:

"You cannot go on seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. . . . If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see.”

P.S. Lewis is not really talking about X-Ray vision--- he is also using a metaphor.

Hope this helps!

[GodGunsGuts]

==Ah, you’re right, I was just funnin’ ya. We both know the probability as opposed to the possibility of there being a flying spaghetti monster back there, or anything else, is miniscule.

Thus your neo-pagan nature worship.

[gcruse]

But you see, when the sun comes out, ie, the light of empirical understanding, it pierces the fog revealing no object of worship at all, reminding us that throwing up our hands in the face of things we don’t presently understand and crying, “God did it!” leads to gods of gaps and the early truncation of inquiries that might have actually led to something worthwhile.

[gcruse]

Various Neopagan traditions:

	Asatru (Norse Paganism) *
	Druidism
	Goddess Worship
	Wicca and Witchcraft   Nope, sorry. Not into any of those.