Saturday, February 27, 2010

What is Man that the Genome is Mindful of Him?

Well, time for one more post before I take off. Don't tell the new readers that it's a repost from last year...

In Wolfgang Smith's The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology, he discusses the distinction between the corporeal world -- i.e., the real human world that we can see, touch, hear, and taste -- vs. the merely physical world that is abstracted from the former.



Take, for example, the subatomic world: is it composed of waves or particles? It all depends upon how we look at it, or the questions we ask. Science is a systematic way to interrogate nature, so nature, like any good witness, will give its answers in conformity to the question.

Or, you could say that a scientific theory is like a net that we cast out over the ocean of being. It will catch certain facts, while others will either slip through the net or tear it to shreds. And others facts are swimming so deep below the surface, that the net can't extend that far (to say nothing of the winged facts that soar and glide in the atmansphere above).



Timelessness doesn't permit me a full evasion this morning, but Polanyi beautifully explains how scientific progress is only possible because of the human ability to simultaneously discover and create the world.

It sounds paradoxical, but it really isn't. Our scientific abstractions are analogous to the cane of a blind man, which he uses to "probe the dark" and construct a model of his surroundings. In so doing, where is the reality: in the solid matter touched by the cane, or the model he tacitly constructs in his head? Obviously it's a kind of dialectic, an ongoing interaction between the two. But the blind man obviously doesn't pay conscious attention the bare sensation of the cane against his hand. Rather, those sensations become (subsidiary) support for the (focal) interior map he creates.

Does this mean there are two worlds, or that our corporeal world is somehow an "effect" of the physical world? Think about it. Physicists describe a subatomic world that is shockingly different than the corporeal world, so much so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how they relate. To cite one obvious example, the simple act of willing my hand to make a fist has causes all the subatomic particles that supposedly constitute my hand to alter their courses, in such a way that the relatively crude model of physics is powerless to account for how it happens.






Friday, February 26, 2010

The Cosmically Infrahuman Agenda of the Proglodyte Left

This is kind of a longish post -- gosh! -- but that's on purpose, since it may have to hold you bobbleheads for awhile. I'll be indisposed for a few days for a memorial for my recently departed father-in-law. It's what he wouldn't have wanted -- he was a passionate atheist -- but we're doing it anyway just to spite him. Carrying out his actual wishes was just too impractical: pouring his ashes into the gearbox of the Popemobile.

This is also a repost, since I'm pressed for time. But it's full of fine insultainment, so it should provoke the anonymi into their usual fits of lashing out at truth and reality.... Plus it has the usual editing to weed out heresies and bring it up to current standards of metaphysical comedy.

Another universal trinity as it pertains to man's vertical development is that of purification --> realization --> union (even though it is not exactly a linear process, since each is holographically in the others; in other words, purification is a kind of realization and union, etc.).

Perhaps these three phases can also tell us something about our collective history, which -- let's face it -- is either a process that is leading somewhere, or just horizontal randomness onto which we superimpose fanciful patterns.

Obviously I believe the former is true; and in fact, one of man's prerogatives -- one of the things that defines him as Man -- is the ability to think historically. In other words, prior to this or that particular history is the intuition of absolute history itself. We could not understand any history if we weren't embedded in this total cosmic-historical drama.

Speaking of which, Dupree alerted me to the most appallingly fatuous piece of scientistic gobbledygook on dailykos the other day. If anyone wants to know why I so despise the secular left -- why it is the mortal enemy of the Coon way of life -- perusing this infrahuman dispatch from the bowels of metaphysical ignorance and tenure would serve as well as any, for it reveals the ultimate premise and goal of the left in all its hideously naked barbarity, which is to turn man into a beast. Entitled Science Friday: You Are Not That Special, it reads,


There, you see? This ignoramus looks at the vast panorama of creation and concludes that one of the seven wonders of the world is indistinguishible from a hungry monkey cracking open a nut. By this logic, Kos himself is nothing more than a grubby chimp poking his little joystick into a cyberhole to satisfy his animal impulses. Which, of course, is entirely true, but that's beside the point.

The beast in question then asks,







Let's de-deconstruct this confused and vacuous elegy to nothingness for just a moment, since it does such a fine job of articulating the satanic agenda of the left, and presents such a perfect mirror image of reality, so that everything is precisely backwards and upside down.

According to Valentin Tomberg, all evolutionary progress in the vertical is accompanied by a sort of shadow version in the lower vertical. (Catholics know full well, for example, that the shadow of evil unavoidably entered the church with its inception; or one could go back to Genesis, in which man's very self-awareness co-arises with knowledge of Death, as it must.)



(This is a topic for a different post, but it is possible to provoke an influx of spiritual energy before one is prepared -- i.e., to have realization prior to sufficient purification -- which can severely unbalance the personality, because it's as if everything gets infused with the Force, mind parasites included. Hence all of the warnings against jumping onto the path unprepared or without guidance. Nor do I mean to single out Watts, for one could cite dozens of examples.)


In his context, David is as great a man as any who has ever lived. Who knows, perhaps even Mohammed can be better understood in this context, since his task involved the evolution of the nomadic animal-men of the Arab world into Phase I. Islam began moving toward Phase II some 700 years ago, but then pulled back for a variety of reasons. And now they wish to re-impose Phase I on the rest of the world, completely halting its evolutionary progress.

Back to leftism. It is not not just a fixation, a regression, or an arrested mode of development. Rather, it is in every respect a parallel, or "shadow" of principial truth. Let us review the sinister faith of the bipedal kosmonkey referenced above:



3) Emotion and language -- or heart and head, meaning and truth -- cannot actually exist in any intrinsically human sense. My dog knowing where to poop or when it's time for a walk is fundamentally no different than the theory of relativity.


5) Cluelessly ironic though it may be for a "progressive" to say, there is actually no direction in history, no objective standard of measurement, no better or worse. Our unique Western values have nothing whatsoever to do with our extraordinary "success" as a culture. As that other fourteen-karat boob, Jared Diamond, has argued, it's just a matter of geography, disease, and fortuitous placement of natural resources.

6) There is no intrinsic meaning in the cosmos, much less in your life -- which is simply a tale told by a tenured idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying a cushy lifetime gig at taxpayer's expense.




No, we're not done, because once the leftist has annihilated the vertical -- which is Job One for the left -- he performs a bait and switch, inserting the horizontal values of the left into the hole he has created with his clumsy monkey stick. This is where the "ape of God" comes into play. Some leftists are more slick and clever than others -- i.e., Obama or the Clintons -- but the kosmonkey is not subtle, to say the least. In one sentence he declares,

1) No, you are not that special.



But here your troubles have only just begun, because -- to paraphase someone -- hell is the place where logic is rendered null and void, as in a Kafka novel, or the Keith Olbermann show. I will just end with something I wrote a while back, and let you draw your own conclusions:

"As Scott summarizes him, Michael Polanyi pointed out that what distinguishes leftist thought in all its forms is the dangerous combination of a ruthless contempt for traditional moral values with an unbounded moral passion for utopian perfection.



"What results is a moral hatred of existing society and the resultant alienation of the postmodern leftist intellectual. Having condemned the distinction between good and evil as dishonest, such an individual can at least find pride in the unblinking 'honesty' of their condemnation. Since ordinary decent behavior can never be safe against suspicion of sheer conformity or downright hypocrisy, only an amoral meaningless act can assure complete authenticity. This is why, to a leftist, the worst thing you can call someone is a hypocrite, whereas authentic depravity is celebrated in art, music, film, and literature. It is why, for example, leftist leaders all over the world were eager to embrace a nihilistic mass murderer such as Yasser Arafat, or why they so adore the anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-capitalist thug Hugo Chavez."

Let us stipulate that we are engaged in a cosmic struggle between human beings and monkeys with sticks, newspapers, academy awards, Supreme Court seats, UN resolutions, suicide bombs, tenure, and more. Choose sides wisely. It's up to you, but my advice is to choose the side for which the possiblity of genuine spiritual wisdom exists, and to steer clear of the side that ecstatically thrashes it to dust with its primitive tools.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

On Economic, Intellectual, Spiritual and Political Bubbles

We all know that there are economic bubbles that inevitably burst and punish investors for their irrational exuberance and willing suspension of disbelief about the laws of economics.

In fact, it seems that these bubbles are not so much built into the free market system as built into man, since we have more or less averaged about one per generation over the past two or three centuries. Thus, the "law of the economic bubble" is a painful lesson that each generation must learn anew.

I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that a bubble occurs when price outruns value, and it bursts when price returns to value, i.e., its actual worth. In 2006, the price of my house was absurdly higher than its value. In fact, even now its price is too high, but that's California for you.

But this is not a post about economics; or perhaps we could say that it is about "psycho-spiritual economics," for what I would like to suggest is that what occurs in economics reflects a deeper principle, and that there also exist intellectual and spiritual bubbles that eventually burst and send their investors hurtling to the ground.

To cite the most recent dramatic example, the climate change industry has been revealed to be a classic intellectual bubble. As with economic bubbles, its worth as a scientific theory became absurdly overvalued, to the point that more and more outrageous claims were required to prop it up. People were willing to pay the price, so long as the illusion of value was maintained. But since the bubble has burst, intellectuals who invested heavily in it are left holding penny stocks that even then no one will buy, for they are essentially worthless.

Most people are not scientists, just as they are not economists. Therefore, they rely on economic advisors to tell them how and where to invest, and they rely on science to tell them "what to believe," i.e., where to invest their credence. But science itself becomes a classic bubble when it morphs into scientism, because it pretends to know things it not only cannot know, but can never know in principle. And because man is everywhere man, this is when science begins taking on all of the trappings of a primitive and poorly thought out, ad hoc religion.

Darwinism is another example of a classic bubble. Obviously the theory of natural selection has some genuine value -- it is hardly worthless -- but nor is it remotely as valuable as its fundamentalist adherents make it out to be, for it is way out in front of its headlights. For the Darwinian faithful, the theory is virtually "priceless," since it explains "everything." It is a totalistic worldview into which the Darwinian invests all of his cognitive and spiritual funds.

But one of the first rules of investment is diversification. You want to invest in a variety of instruments with differing timelines of maturity, depending upon one's stage of life.

In my case, for example, I have some safe, short term investments in science, and some liquidity in the form of common sense and practical wisdom, but the bulk of my longer term investments are in religion, which is unaffected by transient intellectual bubbles (excluding, of course, heretical "manias" that predict the Second Coming, or a new caliphate, or a messiah in the White House, etc.; you might even say that false religions are always spiritual bubbles).

We all understand why it would have been a mistake to ask a man who had all of his holdings in real estate about the health of the real estate market in 2006. Even if he had his doubts, it would be very unlikely that he would broadcast them and place his economic position in peril.

Just so the global warmists. Even before the rest of us, they well understood that their theory -- and their intellectual fortune -- was in peril, so they needed to essentially engage in the sort of thing Enron did -- insist to all of its investors that their money was entirely safe and that the theory was "sound as a dollar." In order to do this, they had to "borrow" truth that did not yet exist. In other words, they used the collateral of their present knowledge to take out loans on future certainty. They assumed that the science would eventually pay off and confirm their intuitions despite the contrary findings.

But they cooked the scientific books in order to take out those intellectual loans, and now that the loans are due, they are in a position of intellectual bankruptcy. In 1995 they assured their creditors that 15 years hence, the planet would be dramatically warmer. This was good enough for the investors. But unfortunately for them, the planet did not cooperate, since there has been no appreciable warming since 1995. This is analogous to a business borrowing millions of dollars based on an economic forecast of a certain amount of profit and growth which fails to materialize.

At that point, the only option is bankruptcy and dissolution. Or a government takeover, which is what is occurring with the warmists. Their theory -- and their industry -- is simply "too big to fail," so now we are in the absurd position of the government not only owning failed automobile companies and banks, but non-viable scientific theories. But a non-viable scientific theory is in many ways indistinguishable from a religion, so the state is in the position of propping up and favoring an established religion, the religion of "radical environmentalism."

Science, just like the free market, is supposed to reward success and punish failure. Thus, under normal circumstances, there are built-in mechanisms of "progress" and "conservation" in both, the former promoting risk, creativity, and leaps of imagination, the latter promoting caution, consolidation, and extraordinary proof for extraordinary claims.

Thus, just as investors should have been skeptical of the extraordinary financial claims of a Bernie Madoff, people should have been far more skeptical of the extraordinary scientific claims of the warmists before investing in the theory. It might have passed as a decent intellectual hedge fund, but certainly not one's core investment.

President Obama is another example of a classic bubble. Why did otherwise sane people invest so much in this cipher? Indeed, why did they ignore all of the evidence that he was absurdly overvalued?


Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Evolving Under the Banyan Tree with the Holy Spirit Dangling Down

Man is himself "made in the image of God": only man is such a direct image, in the sense that his form is an "axial" and “ascendant” perfection and his content a totality. Man by his theomorphism is at the same time a work of art and also an artist; a work of art because he is an “image,” and an artist because this image is that of the Divine Artist. Man alone among earthly beings can think, speak and produce works; only he can contemplate and realize the Infinite. --F. Schuon

Some commenters failed to understand my point about Man, -- not this or that man, but Man as Such -- that he cannot evolve further, because he is the end of evolution. As Northern Bandit put it in a comment, we are adequate to the Absolute, and that is as far as you can go -- unless you think you can "be" the Absolute, which is an absurdity on the way to a crime.

Of course this does not preclude such categories as improvement, learning, purification, illumination, union, etc. Again, we are not the Absolute; we only know it. Nor are we (yet) the likeness of God, only the image. I accept the Orthodox view that our own personal evolution, as it were, takes place between image and likeness, or potential and actualization. To put it another way, all men are born with the potential of becoming the likeness, but few people make it all the way. We call them saints, or starets, or mystics.

A few readers will no doubt wonder how this squares with Sri Aurobindo's cosmic evolutionary scheme, but I don't think his views can be wrenched from their Hindu context. We're talking mostly about Christianity here, in which the "descent of the Supermind" has already occurred; we call it the Incarnation, which is the bridge between God and man that assures us that our own little ladder goes all the way to the top floor. In the absence of the descent, we could only ascend so high from the doubthouse to the repenthouse.

I have said before that in my view Aurobindo was (without knowing it) very much "Christianizing" Vedanta, no doubt because of his western education at Cambridge, in which he absorbed not only Christianity and evolutionism (which was all the rage at the time -- and not just the Darwinian kind), but the whole Western canon.

Other methods of yoga are purely "ascending" paths, like, say Plotinus in the West. Only Aurobindo's is a descending, this-worldly path, the goal of which is to "divinize" oneself and creation -- very much analogous to the Christian goal of personal theosis and of redeeming the world. This is not to immamentize the eschaton, in which the distinction between transcendence and immanence is obliterated and man is made God. Rather, it is to live in the dynamic space between them.

And I fully accept Aurobindo's thesis that in order for there to have been an evolution, there must have been a prior involution. This idea is concordant with hermetic Christianity and Kabbalah, and basically means that God is both the ladder and the goal.

Just yesterday I was reading a very clear expression of these ideas in Kallistos Ware's The Orthodox Church, in which he describes the point at which "Christianity" really began. Was it with the Incarnation? The Transfiguration? The Resurrection? No, not exactly. Those were all cosmically necessary, but not quite humanly sufficient causes. It was with Pentecost, which marks "the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles at Jerusalem.... On that same day through the preaching of St. Peter three thousand men and women were baptized, and the first Christian community at Jerusalem was formed" (emphasis mine).

The preaching that day that was so effective because it embodied a horizontal propagation of the vertical descent into Peter. Absent the descent, his words would have been mere pneumababble with no intrinsic power (or celestial mandate) to convert others.

Have you ever seen a banyan tree, like the ones in Florida, where I'll soon be visiting? It's a very strange tree, in that it sends down filaments from the branches, which descend to the ground and create what looks like another ascending trunk of a separate tree; it's as if the root system is above, not below. No wonder they're considered sacred symbols in India. You might think of the body of Christ as analogous to the banyan tree, which has all the individual "trunks" that are really just part of the single tree descending from above.

Elsewhere, Ware perfectly describes the (↓) (↑) symbols used in my book, as applied to Christianity. He quotes St. Paul's statement about Christ sharing "our poverty (↓) that we might share the riches of His divinity (↑)." This process of man's gradual divinization is called theosis:


And here is the money quote, from John 1:51: "Hereafter you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending (↑) and descending (↓) upon the Son of Man." And as Ware adds, "Not only angels use that ladder, but the human race." (Please note the critical point that when the Third Person of the Trinity Incarnated as a man, he also did so as mankind, otherwise we would have no access to the ladder.)

I think that Schuon was the quintessential humanist, in a way that a secular humanist can by definition never be, since the latter denies any genuine possibility of the (↓) and (↑) that are our lifeline and our salvation. Some of his observations about Man are luminously and beautifully accurate:

"Man is spirit incarnate; if he were only matter, he would be identified with the feet; if he were only spirit, he would be the head, that is, the Sky; he would be the Great Spirit. But the object of his existence is to be in the middle: it is to transcend matter while being situated there, and to realize the light, the Sky, starting from this intermediary level. It is true that the other creatures also participate in life, but man synthesizes them: he carries all life within himself and thus becomes the spokesman for all life, the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit. In all terrestrial creatures the cold inertia of matter becomes heat, but in man alone does heat become light."

"Man -- insofar as he is distinct from other creatures on earth -- is intelligence; and intelligence -- in its principle and its plenitude -- is knowledge of the Absolute; the Absolute is the fundamental content of the intelligence and determines its nature and functions. What distinguishes man from animals is not knowledge of a tree, but the concept -- whether explicit or implicit -- of the Absolute; it is from this that the whole hierarchy of values is derived, and hence all notion of a homogeneous world. God is the 'motionless mover' of every operation of the mind, even when man -- reason -- makes himself out to be the measure of God."

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Evolution Without Darwin

We had another troll last night arguing that free will doesn't exist. I won't get into his ridiculous arguments -- which he wasn't free to make anyway, nor am I free to accept -- but perhaps they illuminate a central reason why the left doesn't value liberty: it doesn't exist. And they have Darwinism to prove it!

In fact, the denial of free will is a kind of all-purpose dogma for the left, as it is the underpinning for so many of their cherished beliefs: poverty causes crime, America causes Islamist terror, Israel causes Palestinian savagery, etc.

But they never hold this dogma consistently, for they don't apply it to white collar crime; nor have I ever heard a leftist argue that Islamic terror is the cause of "American imperialism," or that Muslim Jew hatred is the cause of "Zionist expansion," or that provocatively dressed women are the cause of rape, or that blacks were the cause of their own lynching. It's always a one-way denial of free will that excuses the left's various mascots while robbing them of their dignity and humanity, i.e., their free will.

Oddly, only the enemies of the left have moral freedom. But they always exercise this freedom in an evil way, in order to exploit and harm their victims. This is what "hate crime" legislation is all about. Leftist mascots have no free will, so "hate" doesn't enter into their crimes (remember, they are passive pawns of "societal forces" and similar ghostly presences). But white European males do have the gift of free will, so they require an extra penalty for having willed their crimes in a hateful manner.

Conversely, the left never wills anything bad, despite the disastrous consequences of their policies. Millions of Africans dead from malaria due to the banning of DDT? We meant well! Destruction of the black family due to welfare and other perverse entitlement programs? Oops! Skyrocketing crime rate due to judicial leniency? Sorry! Hispanic children who are illiterate in two languages due to bilingual education? Lo siento! Real estate bubble due to government-mandated loans to unqualified people? D'oh!

The problem with Darwinism is that it can (if we are generous) account for will, but not free will. For what is free will? It is conscious choice between two actions, including actions that may clearly be counter to our genetic interests. Remember, it only takes one black swan to prove that all swans aren't white, and it only takes one act of free will to undermine genetic determinism.

Another point that persistently eludes our trolls is that Darwinism does indeed reveal evolution, but that evolution undermines Darwinism. For the benefit of careless readers, I most definitely believe in evolution. What I do not believe is that natural selection alone can account for it. I believe that evolution is directional, whereas Darwinism insists that their kind of pseudo-evolution has no direction, meaning, or end.

I believe human beings are the end of evolution and all this implies, whereas for the Darwinian, every organism is transitional -- a means to some other genetic end. Which is why I believe that human beings are infinitely precious, because they are the "last word" of evolution, which is none other than the "image of God" -- and one cannot "evolve" higher than that.

Evolution cannot produce something "higher" than man as such, since man knows the absolute, and the absolute cannot be transcended, whether we are speaking in terms of truth, beauty, or virtue. To imagine that somewhere in the cosmos there is a writer superior to Shakespeare is pure fantasy, but it is also a failure to understand Shakespeare (and timeless and universal art in general).

Please bear in mind that there is nothing "anti-evolutionary" about Christianity. To the contrary, Genesis clearly reveals the workings of a God whose creation unfolds in time. Man does not enter the scene until after light, planets, stars, water, land, oceans, vegetation, and animals. Here is how Jaki describes it:

"What Darwin and the Darwinians failed to see -- and this is why Darwin's theory, though not his vision of evolution, failed -- was that time needed a womb, a purpose, if it was to issue ultimately in the most purposeful activity of science and not merely in its stillbirths. For evolution has a a direction marked by time's arrow, analogous to the one designed to mark direction, which through its very meaning serves as a pointer of purpose" (emphasis mine).

The only answer of the Darwinians is that the second law of thermodynamics does not preclude the possibility of local areas of negentropy. This is entirely true, but transcendental truth, beauty and virtue are not mere instances of local negentropy that will decay with time! It's not as if the radiant truth will eventually rust and decompose into a dusty pile of worthless lies.

Rather, truth is true forever, in this or in any other cosmos. Stephan Jay Gould famously said that natual selection was so random, that if we could unwind evolution and start it over, it would have taken an entirely different course that wouldn't have included human beings. I won't get into that argument, but I can say with absolute certainty that evolution would never have resulted in 2 + 2 equalling anything other than 4, or E equalling anything other than MC squared, or murder being anything other than wrong, or in slavery being preferable to freedom.

Unless you are a Darwinian living in an upside down cosmos. For example, as T.H. Huxley said, "the thief and murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist." Or as Darwin himself wrote -- and nothing could be more contrary to genuine evolution -- "A man who has no assured and no present belief in the existence of a personal God or a future existence with retribution and rewards, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones."

This is a recipe for destroying in a generation what it took eons of evolution to create. But enough about the left.

As Jaki observes, "a society which does not believe in angels cannot lay claim to policemen who behave like angels." Rather, like everyone else, they're just self-interested replicating machines following their impulses: Every cop is a criminal / and all the sinners saints.

But do not despair. Darwin was still an optimist: "Looking at the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world." For genocide is just doing what comes naturally.

Monday, February 22, 2010

The Myopia of the Darwinian Vision

Of the many philosophical problems of Darwinism, "the question of purpose is the most fundamental" (Jaki). As mentioned in my book, Darwin simply took the world as he found it, and did not trouble himself with the (very specific) kind of cosmos necessary for life -- or evolution -- to even exist in it. In short, he "never engaged in speculations about the nonliving world" (ibid).

This reminds me of what Thomas Sowell calls the fallacy of "one day at a time" rationalism, which involves the strict application of logic to an artificially constrained situation -- for example, treating wildfires as discrete crises instead of predictable outcomes of environmentalist policies that create overgrowth.

Sowell is mainly talking about intellectuals who ignore historical context and long term trends, but the same principle could equally apply to space as time; call it "one space at a time" rationalism, in which, for example, the evolutionist posits a narrow theory that ignores everything outside its little field of application. This ends in the absurdity of the Darwinist who devotes his life and career to the purpose of proving that purpose -- i.e., final causation -- does not exist. But instead of pretending that final causation doesn't exist, or that it is an illusion, why can't they at least be honest and just admit that they have no idea why final causation exists, since their theory by definition cannot account for it?

Darwinism begins with the assumption that life operates mechanistically. In reality, it is a way to find out what we can about the the biosphere by viewing it mechanistically. Which is fine. There is nothing wrong with the scientific method. It's only when one confuses method and ontology that problems arise. For example, I don't mind that my wife's doctor looks at her body as a machine. But if I were to do that, we'd have problems. (Come to think of it, we'd also have problems if he looked at her as I do.)

A method can easily transform into a vision, often without the person even realizing it. I certainly saw this in my psychoanalytic training. However, in my case, I didn't care for the vision that was emerging, which is why I never completed the training. I knew that it was somewhat like joining a religion, and that in order to be an effective psychoanalyst, I would have to go the whole hog and assimilate the entire vision. But in order to do that, one must exclude so much reality -- most especially, the realm of spirit -- that I knew I couldn't continue without doing violence to myself.

This happens with any vision, whether it is Marxism, or feminism, or environmentalism, whatever. Look at how feminists saw the Tim Tebow Superbowl ad. Instead of perceiving what was plainly there -- a loving and playful exchange with his mother -- they literally saw an act of violence toward women! But this is what their vision compels (and condemns) them to see. I give them credit for being honest, as tragically crazy as they are.

We also see it with global warming, which has long since transformed from theory to vision. Please note that a vision cannot be falsified, so that, for example, if there is a little less fog in the San Francisco Bay, it's a consequence of global warming, as is too much fog. Or, if the Great Lakes fail to freeze over, that's global warming. If they do freeze over, then that's global warming too.

Now, do traditionalists have overarching visions? Of course! The difference is, we call them by their name: visions. For example, we have a vision of limited government and a virtuous empire of liberty in which all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and duties. Can I prove this scientifically? No, of course not. These are values, not a scientific facts.

Conversely, the Darwinian believes that free will and purpose cannot exist because their theory cannot account for them. Thus, you can see that this is a caricature of true science, since science must at least begin with the facts, not just eliminate them through the magic of deductive thinking.

Deduction naturally has its place, but, as in the case of physics, it should lead to legitimate new discoveries, not just make unwanted facts go away. This is what occurred in the 19th century, just prior to Einstein's revolution. The mechanistic paradigm, pursued to its logical end, resulted in persistent anomalies for which mechanism could not account. Only with Einstein's breakthroughs was there the basis for a new paradigm that could account for the anomalies.

If this is true of physics, why do Darwinians pretend it doesn't apply to biology -- i.e., that their paradigm generates anomalies for which it cannot account? There's no shame in that.

Again, look at contemporary physics. As sophisticated as it is, it still has no idea how quantum and relativity theories -- i.e., the subatomic/micro and the cosmological/macro -- relate. So what? The fun is in trying to discover how they do relate. Eventually some brilliant scientist is going to come along and make a breathtaking creative leap that unifies the two. I personally have faith in this, because I know -- or perhaps I should say that in my vision -- the cosmos really is one, i.e., a harmonious totality of objects and events. There cannot be two "fundamental" theories to account for it, for the same reason that there cannot be two Gods.

In other words, as incredibly accurate as their theories are, physicists nevertheless realize that they are "wrong" -- or incomplete -- in the ultimate sense. Why can't Darwinists acknowledge the same thing? Why pretend that today's knowledge is final? The irony is that in the Darwinian vision, nothing can be fixed and final. A human being is not the "end" of anything, just a genetic resting place on the way to something else that cannot be foreseen. Thus, how can the meaningless cognitive effluvia of an intrinsically changeable being ever know an unchangeable truth?

Again, to quote Darwin himself, "the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there were any convictions in such a mind?"

No, of course not. But that just highlights an instance of Darwin's "one space at a time" rationalism, which becomes self-refuting if mindlessly applied to a human space which self-evidently plays host to true convictions.


As you can see, there is a premise in the question, and if one accepts the premise -- that the mind of man is not fundamentally different from any other animal mind -- then one must either accept the conclusion or rethink the premise.

Or, put it this way: the radical skeptic can have no ontologically real mind with which to doubt. "Darwinism is, therefore I'm not."

Sunday, February 21, 2010

The One Cosmos Cult: Controlling Minds Since 2005

For today's Sunday morning repast, I decided to see what was cooking in the Cosmosphere three years ago. This one caught my attention. It has to do with the ins & outs of how I operate my cult to keep you people under my thumb.

Which I may need to reimagineer, since the cult has only grown smaller in the interim. Have I made mistakes? No, that's impossible. I was just so busy getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of me that I think I lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the Raccoon nation about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values. I realize this makes no sense, but that's what Petey put into the blogoprompter.

Perhaps I need to create more of a mystique around myself. I'll have Dupree work on that. Or maybe increase the annual dues, since people devalue what they get for free. Yeah, that's it. New policy: as of today, the initiation fee is increased from $1.50 to $1.75.

As a perceptive troll observed yesterday, "What we see in this post is a drift towards a 'cult' mentality. All cults require a dire threat from the outside in order to create an 'us against them' atmosphere. Without the external threat, a sufficient level of internal cohesion cannot be created.

D'oh! I hate it when trolls find out the truth about the Transdimensional Order of the Friendly Sons & Daughters of the Cosmic Raccoons.

But what took this genius so long to figure it out? Without an external threat, how can Dear Leader be expected to maintain internal cohesion and cult discipline -- as the left does by villifying George Bush and promulgating apocalyptic fantasies of global cooling.... er, nuclear winter.... ahh, global warming.... umm, climate change?

As you are about to see, I've been playing up this dire existential threat in order to create a "Coon-against-the-world" siege mentality ever since my very first post on October 5, 2005 (which we celebrate as "Metacosmic Coonday"). In what follows, I'll go through that post paragraph by paragraph and demonstrate how the left really is such a boon, I mean existential threat, to our sacred fundraising efforts on behalf of the cult:

1) "I don't think it's healthy to orient your life around politics 24/7, as does the secular left, for which politics (including radical environmentalism) is their substitute religion. Politics must aim at something that isn't politics, otherwise what's the point? Politics just becomes a cognitive system to articulate your existential unhappiness. Again, this is what leftists do -- everything for them is politicized."

This is axiomatic. In a famous remark that reflects one of the defining characteristics of modern conservatism, Eric Voegelin noted that the very basis of the leftist project is to "immamentize the eschaton," which, in plain language, means to horizontalize the vertical. Just as the Roman Empire collapsed partly as a result of "horizontal barbarians," leftism represents a kind of vertical barbarism for which nothing transcending the immediate senses is ontologically real.

Thus, for example, all truth is relative, free will is attenuated through the cult of victimology, envy (perhaps the greatest enemy of spiritual fulfillment) is promoted as a defining virtue, and transcendent moral obligations are reduced to an arbitrary cultural agreement.

Leftism is defined by an externalizing consciousness that locates the reason for unhappiness or failure outside the self. Conversely, one of the greatest gifts of a proper spiritual education is that it teaches one to locate the reasons for one's unhappiness within. Every leftist politician arrives with the perverse gospel that, "it's not your fault! You are a victim! Don't be responsible for your life! Liberty is a pernicious illusion anyway! Transfer your power to me, and I will rescue you!"


Here again, it goes without saying that this is a kind of talk that is unknown -- because unknowable -- on the left. Their project always involves the diminution of spiritual freedom in order to attain a purely worldly goal that third parties -- horizontal leftist elites -- deem worthwhile. Thus, a few days ago, Hillary Clinton promised that if she is president, she will confiscate the profits of legal corporations at the barrel of a gun and use them in the way she sees fit. Likewise, she will no doubt attempt to take health care out of our hands, and appropriate a substantial portion of the economy through government rationed healthcare.


This one almost goes without saying. The left does not value spiritual liberty but horizontal equality. Once you recognize this distinction, you will see how it animates nearly every one of their domestic policies. To the extent that they value freedom at all, it is only the shadow version of true liberty represented by license -- which is generally much closer to vice than it is to liberty. Just as our freedom to know is only meaningful if we use it to conform ourselves to truth, our liberty is only meaningful if we use it to conform to virtue.

4) "For example, when we say that politics must be grounded in something that isn't politics, we are simply reflecting the philosophy at the heart of the American revolution, that the sacred rights of mankind, as expressed by Alexander Hamilton, are written in human nature 'by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased by mortal power.' In short, human beings possess a 'spiritual blueprint' that is antecedent to politics, and which it is the task of politics to protect, preserve and nurture."

Here again, this idea is entirely foreign to leftism, which is a wholly materialistic philosophy. For them, the purpose of politics is hardly to preserve and protect our liberty, but to impose ideological conformity and to diminish freedom through government intervention. There is probably no place less intellectually -- let alone, vertically -- free than liberal academia, which eliminates dissent through political correctness and speech codes. As Dennis Prager says, "the larger the state, the smaller the citizen."

5) "The founders, who were steeped in Judeo-Christian metaphysics, did not believe in mere license, which comes down to meaningless freedom on the horizontal plane. Rather, they believed that horizontal history had a beginning and was guided by a purpose, and that only through the unfolding of human liberty could that 'vertical' purpose be achieved. Our founders were progressive to the core, but unlike our contemporary reactionary and anti-evolutionary leftists, they measured progress in relation to permanent standards that lay outside time -- metaphorically speaking, an eschatological 'Kingdom of God,' or 'city on a hill,' drawing us toward it. Without this nonlocal telos, the cosmos can really have no frontiers, only edges.

A ubiquitous project of the left is to deny and undermine our unique Judeo-Christian heritage. As I have said before, they are callously destroying the vertical habitat in which the Raccoon -- and any other higher mammal -- actually lives.

6) "Liberty -- understood in its spiritual sense -- was the key idea of the founders. This cannot be overemphasized. According to Michael Novak, liberty was understood as the 'axis of the universe,' and history as 'the drama of human liberty.' Thomas Jefferson wrote that 'the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.' It was for this reason that Jefferson's original idea for the design of the seal of the United States was Moses leading the children of Israel out of the death-cult of Egypt, out of the horizontal wasteland of spiritual bondage, into the open circle of a higher life. America was quite consciously conceived as an opportunity to 're-launch' mankind after such an initial 100,000 years or so of disappointment, underachievement, and spiritual stagnation."

The left believes there is nothing special or exceptional about the United States -- unless it is exceptionally bad, as famous leftists such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Michael Moore never tire of telling us. Just the other day, John Kerry mentioned at an international conference that the United States is a pariah among nations. I give him credit for his honesty, as all lefists believe this, but, just like Yasser Arafat, never reveal their true feelings to the wrong audience.

7) "Although it may sound slightly heretical, without human liberty, the Creator is helpless (in a manner of speaking) to act in the horizontal (since his primary activity is vertical). This does not diminish the Creator but exalts him, for a moment's reflection reveals that an intimation of our spiritual freedom absolutely belies any mere material explanation found within the horizontal confines of history. For ours is an inwardly mobile cosmos, and as the philosopher of science Stanley Jaki writes, our free will brings us 'face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in midair unless suspended [vertically] from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator."

Again, true freedom can only involve aligning our will with the Creator, otherwise there can be no such thing as liberty -- just as there can be no such thing as knowledge unless it involves aligning ourselves with Truth.

8) "Tip O’Neill is evidently responsible for the cliché that 'All politics is local.' The greater truth is that all politics is nonlocal, meaning that outward political organization rests on a more fundamental, 'inner' ground that interacts with a hierarchy of perennial and timeless values. Arguments about the surface structure of mundane political organization really have to do with whose nonlocal values will prevail, and the local system that will be established in order to achieve those nonlocal values."

What leftist would ever say such a thing? Since a leftist is by definition a metaphysical yahoo, his only recourse is to ridicule that which he does not understand.


So that pretty much lays out the basis of our little cult in my very first post. The question is, do we really have an enemy -- i.e., is the left really opposed to the Raccoon platform -- or are we pretty much "on the same page" as our fellow Americans, with only minor quibbling at the margins?

I do not personally adhere to this sanguine view of our differences. I will speak only for myself. When you talk about the differences between me and a typical leftist, you might as well be talking about different species. The left, of course, is obsessed with trivial racial differences, but the differences between me and a white leftist are infinitely greater than any differences based on race, class or gender.

A Raccoon is a member of the same race as anyone who shares his values. Therefore, Tom Sowell and I are members of the same race, just as Margaret Thatcher and I are members of the same gender. On the other hand, the girlish John Edwards and I are the opposite sex, and Al Sharpton is from another planet altogether. "Race" hardly defines our differences in any meaningful manner, and yet, the racist left believes that it is All Important.

There is a reason why leftism is an ideology that appeals to victims, losers, misfits, the envious, the unhappy, the self-defeating, the educated-beyond-their intelligence, and the addle-brained young. It is not that leftism creates the demand. Rather, these people demand an ideology to cater to their various pathologies and deficits. In other words, it is a demand-side politics that arises from certain unfortunate but ubiquitous trends in human nature. However, once the ideology is created, then its central task becomes the creation of more lost souls who demand the ideology of leftism. Here again, this is one of the keys to understanding most any leftist policy, which fosters dependency, envy, narcissistic entitlement, and victimization.

So which is the real cult?

Saturday, February 20, 2010

On Redeeming the Historical Road Trip: Don't Make Me Come Down There!

Mrs. G. is out of town again, so it's all on me. No time to come up with a new post. Therefore, I've dug up one of the previous 1,383 posts from the arkive for a fresh re-exhumination...

Who can hope to obtain proper concepts of the present, without knowing the future? --Johann Georg Hamann

If we consider the historical form of Jesus, we see that he cannot be understood in isolation, unlike, say, Buddha or Shankara, who divulge a message of purely vertical metaphysics which stands outside time. In fact, the same could be said of the Koran, and we can see how this leads to certain inevitable problems, i.e., either the devaluation of the temporal realm (as in Buddhism), or else the attempt to cease it altogether, so that we might all live shabbily ever after in a 9th century caliphate worse than death.

But Jesus appears within a dense network of earlier truths, of which he is said to be the "fulfillment." Ultimately, as we shall see, his form is very much temporal as opposed to spatial.

As such, as I mentioned in the new testavus, apprehending his form is much more analogous to hearing a symphony, which must be listened to in its entirety before we can know what it was about. You might say that the "future" of the symphony illuminates its past, and reveals the necessity of various passages which can only be tied together and "resolved" within time. (cf. The Tristan Chord for the most extreme case.)

This is quite unique among the world's revelations, because it is so entangled with history, which means that it somehow renders history -- which would otherwise be purely horizontal -- an extension, or expression, of the vertical. You might say that at the center of Jesus' mission, as it were, is the verticalizing of the horizontal, whereas for Buddha or Shankara, it would be simply escape from the horizontal. Whereas Christianity is like a symphony in which there is a serial articulation of the whole, eastern approaches would be more like a great painting which one leaps through and follows the celestial radiation directly back to its source.

(This is not necessarily to criticize the latter, just to highlight the differences; also, the later Bodhisattva principle involves a certain horizontalizing impulse, in the sense that the liberated person forgoes the vertical for the horizontal in order to devote his life to saving the damned, those deluded souls who are marooned in the purely horizontal. Thus, the Bodhisattva is in the world, no longer of it.)

As Balthasar explains, Christ's form is embedded "within a context of events which partly condition Jesus' historical person and which are partly conditioned and prompted by it." This is a rather interesting observation, because it means that, in the Incarnation, there is a certain "random" element. In other words, if God is going to submit himself to man and cast his pearls before swine, it means going the whole hog and also submitting himself to time, to history, and even to the random element that inevitably intrudes in the herebelow.

Indeed, without submitting to this random element, one would not be truly submitting to the real conditions of mankind. As Balthasar writes in A Theology of History, "In order to become manifest, the absolute uniqueness of God, uniting itself with the humanity of Jesus, makes use of the relative uniqueness of a particular historical personality..."

This then leads to the interesting question of how one conveys intrinsic and unchanging Truth within the context of historical change? Think about it. It would be analogous to incarnating as a metaphysics professor in a liberal university, where the only truth is that truth does not exist. But that would be the one place that would be most aching for the appearance of Truth, would it not, even if it meant being crucified by the inquisitors of political correctness? Indeed, how else to teach these devils that the crucifixion of Truth is the central truth -- and therefore, lie -- of the left?

It gets even more complicated, because if we are to accept the totality of revelation, then Jesus is the Total Truth who appears in the historical context of his own "partial truths" that had to first lay the groundwork for his own reception. I see that Balthasar is on the same page with me thus far:

"A statue can be placed anywhere; a symphony can be performed in any concert hall; a poem of Goethe's can be understood and enjoyed without any knowledge of its biographical context." But the form of Jesus "cannot be detached from the place in space and time in which it stands. He is what he is only by fulfilling, on the one hand, all the promises that point to him, and, on the other, by himself making promises which he will at some time fulfill."

Again, this is a fascinating thing to contemplate. It reminds me of how you can trace your family tree back so that it looks as if you are the final cause, the meaning, the fulfillment, the "end point" of all of those previous generations.

At the same time, you could reverse the image, so that a family tree grows into the future from your single point of departure. Thus we have the image of a point in the present, with two trees growing from it, one into the past, the other into the future. Therefore, you are the cause of both your ancestors and descendants.

It is as if Jesus does the same thing, except with all of history and all of mankind. In other words, all of history leads to his "point," and then flows into the future from that point. But where is the point? Is it his birth? His life? His teachings? His resurrection? His return?

It is somehow all of these things, not to mention the fact that, once he enters history, his causal power is far from exhausted, as he continues to exert a profound effect on people and events. The "whole line of development in the history of salvation is ordered toward himself as its climax and subjected to himself as the meaning which fulfills it..."

In this regard, Jesus doesn't just give meaning to history, but somehow "is himself history," or "the living center of history itself." Again, think of how different this is from situating the center in a particular point in space, such as Mecca, or the Scientology Celebrity Centre International in Hollywood.

As I have mentioned before, Jesus is more like a vertical depth charge dropped from on high into history, which then causes a kind of temporal lao tsunami, so that the waves from the original impact continue to lap upon the shore of the present. And the waves will bear the "imprint" of the original event, just as we can trace the present background radiation to the "big bang" at the origin of the horizontal cosmos.

This is again only fitting, if "the Word becoming flesh" implies the timeless vertical becoming horizontal. For, as Balthasar explains, "To the horizontal power with which he encompasses all time and rules all space 'even to the ends of the earth,' centering world history on himself, there corresponds the vertical power with which he makes the Father visible and with which he makes present, in his witness concerning the Father, the Father's witness to him."

What a marvelous paradox! Just yesterday I was thinking how different Christianity would be if, instead of truly submitting to the world, Jesus tried to "conquer" the world, à llah Mohammed. Obviously it would no longer be Christianity, for central to it is this idea that the Word becomes flesh not to overpower the world in the horizontal sense, but to redeem it.

Mariani refers to "Christ's Great Sacrifice, the ramifications of his radical self-emptying and humility, not grasping after what was his by right, but returning everything to the Father in an act of total self-emptying, even unto a criminal's death on the cross." What a strange God! Who would ever invent such a counter-intuitive story?

For the man who is spiritually existent, who is directed upon the whole of reality, in other words, for the man who philosophizes, this question of the end of history is, quite naturally, more pressing than the question of "what actually happened." --Josef Pieper, The End of Time

Thursday, February 18, 2010

All Science is Cosmology, All Cosmology is Theology

For the benefit of those benighted trolls who imagine that the B'ob is somehow anti-science, let me remind them that, as always, they need to stop projecting and get a life.


As Jaki expresses it, "the understanding of science is in a sense the grasp of man's ability to reach beyond his own materiality, nay beyond matter" (emphasis mine). I mean, if we can't agree on this, then there is nothing we can agree on. For what kind of insane philosophy transcends matter in order to affirm that transcendence is impossible?

Lets talk about the cosmos, which no scientist will ever see, but is founded on his tacit faith in the unity of all being: "Man transcends all matter when he forms for himself a notion of the universe, or the totality of consistently interacting things, and he is assured by what is best in twentieth-century science that when he does so he is not the victim of a transcendental illusion."

Jaki's point is both subtle and yet obvious. No animal but man forms the idea of a cosmos -- which is not just everything, but a harmonious and internally related whole which is consistently lawful across all space and time. If that weren't the case, then we couldn't, for example, trace the background radiation back 13 billion years to the horizontal origin of the cosmos. Thus, "for the first time in history science has become a cosmology, a consistent discourse about the universe.... What makes scientific cosmology possible is the coherent singularity of the cosmos..." (Jaki).

In short, today, all science is cosmology, with cosmic implications. Please note how different this is from a merely logical construction of a cosmos, which is a kind of external model that is really more about man than the cosmos.

The whole point about a quantum/relativistic cosmos is that it is deeply entangled with itself in a way that defies scientistic fantasies of linearity and logical atomism. It is shot through with wholeness at every level -- which is why, by the way, there can be "whole" organisms for natural selection to operate upon, or why the billions of neuronal interactions in your head resolve into the simple whole of a stable identity. The wholeness is antecedent; it could never be a result of evolution, for evolution presupposes it.

And please bear in mind that "Since all science is cosmology, failure to make progress in cosmology meant failure to make vital advances in science" (Jaki). Again, this is why science was stillborn in every other culture: they did not posit a cosmology that could support science -- a science that then goes on to confirm its own assumptions about a transcendentally lawful and singular cosmos. (In other words, astrophysicists where quite shocked to discover that the universe really did come into being in a moment of time.)

For example, cosmology stalled in the 19th century due to its overly mechanistic and materialistic assumptions. It posited an infinite and eternal universe which it endeavored to map with a grid of Newtonian physics. The revolution in physics initiated by Einstein in 1903 was also a breakthrough in cosmology, in that it soon led to the conclusion that the cosmos was not infinite but created in time (indeed, that time came into existence with it), and not fundamentally divisible but whole -- again, a true cosmos.

The cosmos forms a whole in both space and time, vertically and horizontally. But this wholeness can only be known by a being who intrinsically mirrors this wholeness, or who carries it within:

"Just as no man can live by bread alone, no cosmologist (a term which includes all genuine scientists) can live without a [transcendental] realist notion of the universe as the totality of interacting things." And equally important, "this very same science cannot be understood without recognizing the existence of a mind able to hold within its reach the wholeness of nature and be thereby superior to it..." (Jaki).

Do you see the critical point? Schuon put it well when he said that "All knowledge is by definition knowledge of absolute Reality; which is to say that Reality is the necessary, unique and essential object of all possible knowledge. While it is true that there are kinds of knowledge which seem to have other objects, this is not insofar as they are Knowledge but insofar as they are modalities or limitations of it; and if these objects seem not to be Reality, this is so not insofar as they are objects of Knowledge, but insofar as they are modalities or limitations of the One Object, which is God seen by God."

Which is why there is no intrinsic limit to what a man may know. Please note that when science attempts to place shackles on man's intellect, it transgresses its own proper bounds, and makes an absolute statement of how absolute truth is denied man. Yes, science has limits; but that doesn't mean that the human subject does. Ironically, one of the great dangers of a "limitless science" is the limits it arbitrarily sets on what a man may know. In so doing, it does violence to man, to the cosmos, and to God. It becomes "omnisciently ignorant," as it were.

The singularity of the universe is a gigantic springboard which can propel upward anyone ready to exploit its metaphysical resilience and catch thereby a glimpse of the Ultimate and Absolute... . --Stanley Jaki

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

What Must the World Be Like In Order that Man May Know It?

We begin with two questions; or really, one question put two ways: "What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all?" (Kuhn). More simply, "What must the world be like in order that man may know it?" (Jaki).

There are two kinds of people: the great majority of those who don't find these to be interesting questions; and a vanishingly small number of orthodox Raccoons who suspect that they hold the key to everything. As I've mentioned on a number of occasions, I am much more fascinated by how scientific knowledge is possible at all, rather than this or that scientific finding. And I am interested in two ways, one horizontal, the other vertical.

The horizontal has to do with how all of our diverse scientific knowledge fits together, say physics with biology, or neurobiology with developmental psychoanalysis.

As I mentioned in the Coonifesto, the cosmos doesn't brood over the mystery of how it is possible for matter to suddenly come alive, or how an erstwhile (mere) animal is able to begin hosting truth, beauty, and virtue. These things happen quite spontaneously, even if science not only cannot account for them, but has no idea how any strictly scientific theory ever could account for them (that is, without violently reducing them to something they are not). They don't even yet have a decent paradigm for a preliminary theory for a tentative hypothesis.

In other words, materialists don't even know how it would be possible to know these things, because knowing of any kind reverts back to question #2 above: what must the cosmos itself be like in order that man may know it? And their kneejerk strategy of reductionism or materialism results in a cosmos that cannot be known, period.

Yes, such a world can be perceived, but there would be no reason to believe that these perceptions correspond to the thing called "reality." In this approach, Kant would be absolutely correct: that there are the phenomena available to our species-bound ways of perceiving the world; and there is the noumenon, about which we can say precisely nothing.

In the Kantian view -- and I don't see how it is possible for the profane thinker to extricate himself from Kant's bifurcation -- there is reality and there is human thought, and never the twain shall meet; or, if they do occasionally meet, we would have no way of confirming it. How did Whitehead put it, Jeeves? "The present is all that you have; and unless in this present you can find general principles which interpret the present as including a representation of the whole community of existents, you cannot move a step beyond your little patch of immediacy."

No, not that one.


No, the other one -- you know, that crack about how the naive and unexamined metaphysics of science ends up with conjecture on one side and a dream on the other. So science ends in a kind of absurcular and tautologous dream interpretation -- for example, who survives? The fittest! Who are the fittest? Those that survive! Or, what is man? An animal! What is an animal? A concatenation of random accidents adapted to its environment! And just what can a random accident know of reality? Nothing! How do you know that? Shut up, creationist!

Speaking of which, I just don't believe that such a beautiful girl could result from random copying errors:

Can I prove this? Yes, certainly to my satisfaction. If Darwin is correct, animals are selected only for their adaptive fitness. If they possess this thing we call "beauty," it would only be a kind of optical illusion designed to get us to copulate. Now, I love my dog, but...

Sure, I can understand why the bee would convince itself that flowers are beautiful. But damned if I can understand why people think they are. And it's not just flowers. Rather, why is there so much beauty everywhere? Not just visual beauty, but aural beauty, poetic beauty, moral beauty, mathematical beauty. And why can beauty sometimes move a man to tears? What's that all about?

What must the world be like that man may weep tears of joy and gratitude over its celestial truth radiant beauty?

Here is the Christian answer, as expressed by Jaki: "the world [is] an objective and orderly entity investigable by the mind because the mind too [is] an orderly and objective product of the same rational, that is, perfectly consistent, Creator." This is why the Raccoon not only has no problem with science, but with art or religion either.

Note, for example, that the consistent Darwinian must reduce art to something less than it is -- as just another meaningless trick of the nervous system, with no bearing on transcendental or objective beauty, much less truth. Such an impoverished philosophy is not even interesting, let alone true. Like the epicycles of the pre-Copernican solar system, it saves the appearances of the theory, but at the cost of absurdity.

Or, like "climate science," no one could believe it except for someone who already believes it. Such science doesn't really "evolve"; rather, it merely comes up with more elaborate and tendentious schemes to patch up its holes and prop it up. Call it "Weekend at Bernie's" science. Just ignore that bloated and stinking corpseman over there at the IPCC.

The irony is that the same people who fundamentally eroded our trust in the mind's ability to know reality, are the ones who arrogantly insist that they are not only right, but cannot possibly be wrong. Again, from whence comes this misplaced faith in sham absolutes such as ideological Darwinism? For if Darwinism is the last word on man, it would call for the most abject humility about making absolute pronouncements of any kind whatsoever.

The humble theist knows that he is not worthy of the sublime truth that uniquely elevates him to cosmic worthiness. But the grandiose ideological Darwinian somehow believes that he is uniquely worthy of a universal truth that renders man unworthy of any truth at all. Strange.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Secular Subhumanists and the Ravages of Reductionism
















Monday, February 15, 2010

The New Science of Quantum Booty!












Oh wait. We do. Charles Johnson.







More on Deepak's Quantum Bullshit.