Excerpts:
"...it turns out, philosophically speaking, that the physical stands to the corporeal as potency to act. The physical proves thus to be a sub-corporeal domain,24 which is to say that measurement entails an ontological transition: a passage from potency to act."
...
"This too Hawking explains: “We shall, following Bondi, call this assumption the Copernican principle,” he goes on to say. Here we have it: what stands at issue, once again, is a repudiation of “geocentrism” in the wide sense of a cosmic architecture reflective of intelligence-of intelligent design, that is-and thus of an intelligent or “personal” Creator.
Think of it: here Hawking himself is telling us that this repudiation or denial of design on a cosmic scale is not in fact a scientific discovery-a reasoned conclusion based upon observable facts-but constitutes “an admixture of ideology”!
Highly recommended!
For more info on the first quote (besides what his footnotes cite here), see From Schrödinger's Cat to Thomistic Ontology by Wolfgang Smith and Thomism and the Quantum Enigma by William A. Wallace, O.P..
ReplyDeleteThank you Alan. Wolfgang Smith is the most remarkable thinker I have encountered in a very long time, and he has accomplished what I thought remained to be done; that is, to construct a cogent defense of Catholic metaphysics as the only possibly avenue of rescue of physics from its reduction to "a positivistic discipline, or, in Whitehead's words, to "a kind of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe."(3)
ReplyDeleteI am shocked to have never encountered him before.
"Quantum paradox, it appears, is Nature's way of repudiating a spurious philosophy."
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to believe sometimes, but I used to be mired in theistic evolution. Until I read Smith's book on the subject (then published by TAN). I haven't looked back-it's been an amazing ride!
ReplyDeleteI really liked Smith's "The Plague of Scientistic Belief."
ReplyDeleteIf it is OK with Rick I wanted to share this information with the readers of this blogsite. Dr. Robert Sungenis sent an email to me some time ago with an attachment of a letter he had received from Dr. Wolfgang Smith. Dr. Sungenis in his email to me had this to say: "Also, I made contact with Dr. Wolfgang Smith, noted traditional Catholic and former professor of math and physics at MIT and UCLA. He was profuse with adulation over GWW [Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right] and said it was the best book of its kind ever written on the topic.I am attaching the letter he wrote to me for your perusal."
ReplyDeleteI wonder why the 2013 edition of GWW lacks the quotation of Dr. Smith's praise that the 2010 edition had; here it is:
DeleteDear Dr. Sungenis,
Since writing to you two days ago to thank you for your letter and the gift of your two-volume treatise, I have had a chance to peruse this work (mainly chapters 10 & 16), and feel compelled to congratulate you and Dr. Bennett on this outstanding achievement! Thought I am not usually at a loss for words, I find it hard to express my admiration for this masterpiece, which has no peer and constitutes without doubt the definitive work on the subject of geocentrism. Considering, moreover, that the question at issue is absolutely fundamental in the sphere of cosmology, what can I say?
You are to be congratulated not only on your erudition and command of an incredibly vast subject matter, but also on the logical clarity of your presentation and lucidity of style. At your hands this subject of virtually unimaginable complexity becomes “almost” simple, and certainly understandable (up to a point) to nonspecialists.
Let me now swell this letter; perhaps I will get back to you on some specific points. Today I just wanted to express my admiration for your book, which strikes me as epochal in its implications.
With best regards to you and Dr. Bennett,
Yours sincerely in Christ,
Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D.
Mathematics
Academic Bio on Wolfgang Smith:
Wolfgang Smith graduated at age 18 from Cornell University with a B.A. in mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Two years later he took an M.S. in theoretical physics at Purdue University, following which he joined the aerodynamics group at Bell Aircraft Corporation. He was the first to investigate the effect of a foreign gas on aerodynamic heating, and his papers on the effect of diffusion fields provided the key to the solution of the re-entry problem for space flight. After receiving a Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University, Dr. Smith held professorial positions at M.I.T., U.C.L.A., and Oregon State University till his retirement in 1992. He has published extensively on mathematical topics relating to algebraic and differential topology.
From the start, however, Smith has evinced a dominant interest in metaphysics and theology. Early in life he acquired a taste for Plato and the Neoplatonists, and sojourned in India to gain acquaintance with the Vedantic tradition. Later he devoted himself to the study of theology, and began his career as a Catholic metaphysical author. Besides contributing numerous articles to scholarly journals, Dr. Smith has authored three books: Cosmos and Transcendence (1984), Teilhardism and the New Religion (1988), and The Quantum Enigma (1995).
"... Geocentrism is the cosmology at which one arrives by way of cognitive sense perception, whereas Einsteinian acentrism corresponds to the way of knowing native to the physical sciences. There can be no conflict, no contradiction between the two: the respective worldviews simply correspond to different perspectives, different darshanas, as the Hindus would say. However, geocentrism is the higher of the two, even as the corporeal plane is ontologically higher than the physical. Cognitive sense perception, moreover, having access to essence, is able in principle to transcend the corporeal plane: to pass, in the words of St. Paul, from "the things that are made" to the "invisible things of God"- and beyond even these, to "His eternal power and Godhead." In a word, human perception opens in principle to the metacosmic realms (from whence it has descended), whereas the modus operandi of physical science confines us to a relational and indeed subcorporeal domain. Galilean heliocentrism, finally, is a bastard notion which spuriously confounds the two ways of knowing. ..." from "The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology" by Wolfgang Smith
ReplyDeleteAwesome quote.
DeleteMaybe you guys could shed some light on the discussion at Infowars mocking the one in four Americans who think the sun goes round the earth? I'm surprised they don't address the various problems with heliocentrism.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you could do an interview about the film with Alex Jones?
ReplyDeleteAmusing article here from NPR:
ReplyDelete1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/14/277058739/1-in-4-americans-think-the-sun-goes-around-the-earth-survey-says
So 1/4 of Americans know the correct cosmology! That's better than I would've thought : P. But NPR, however, doesn't like the sound of that... Gotta love how they just take for granted other 'facts' such as:
"In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that "The universe began with a huge explosion" and only 48 percent said "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."
It appears that these are all metaphysical, not scientific, questions.
DeleteIt seems the questionnaire is actually measuring the degree to which the New Scientistic Religion is encountering resistance even at this late stage of indoctrination.
Quite often NPR equals National Public Ridiculousness. And that's putting it rather kindly.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting post was also at infowars about what Bill Nye got wrong on the debate with Ken Ham. It certainly started a conversation there. Alex Jones is aware of the evolution debate, so I'm sure he'd be more than willing to check out 'The Principle' and reasonably recommend it on its own merits. And I'm sure certain people will use any Alex Jones connection with the Principle to play up certain 'conspiracy/anti-semetic' related nonsense.
ReplyDeleteI just checked the film again.
DeleteNothing about the Jews, or the Holocaust.
It is true we have a sequence where Father Abraham looks up to count the stars, but that's it.
Hi Rick,
ReplyDeleteI just watched again, you and Robert Sungenis on Michael Voris. Would you explain more about what you said about the newest information that didn't make it into your film. “The paradigm shifter”; something to do with the cosmological alignments with our equinoxes.
Thank You
Michael
Michael:
DeleteThe new information concerns the dipole. At the time we were filming
"The Principle", the dipole was considered to be attributable to the motion of the local system wrt the CMB. Because of this, we focus mostly in "The Principle" on the quadrupole and octupole alignments.
Recently, a number of studies have shown that the dipole *cannot* be attributed solely to this supposed local motion wrt the CMB.
This is devastating.
If the dipole- which is 1,000 times more prominent than the quadrupole and octupole- is *intrinsic*- well, that's game over.
The whole universe is arranged around us.
I cover this in several blog posts:
http://magisterialfundies.blogspot.com/2013/05/another-day-another-anti-copernican.html
Excerpt:
"What is intriguing even further is why such anisotropies should lie about a great circle decided purely by the orientation of earth’s rotation axis and/or the axis of its revolution around the sun? It looks as if these axes have a preferential placement in the larger scheme of things, implying an apparent breakdown of the Copernican principle"
http://magisterialfundies.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-paper-in-astronomy-and-astrophysics.html
Excerpt:
"we can exclude that the estimated radio dipole is just due to our proper motion and amplitude bias at 99.6% CL. This is actually very puzzling, as the direction of the radio dipole agrees with the direction of the CMB dipole within the measurement error."
Is it not possible at this late stage to perhaps add a little text summary at the end of the film before the credits? Some documentaries do this just as a late post-update to their subject if something significant comes about once production is more or less complete. Well, there's always the DVD/blu-ray release?
DeleteWe are considering possibly including a brief narration concerning the dipole developments, but "The Principle" is one of those movies that williterally never be finished unless we simply say *this is it*.
ReplyDeleteThe science is moving so fast on this, we want to start the conversation, not end it.
Hey Rick,
ReplyDeleteI've contacted a couple of churches challenging them to strongly consider the evidence from the Bible and cosmology concerning geocentrism.
I've so far encountered much resistance. I put up one such discussion, that I'm currently engaged in with a creation ministry, on my blog:
pbranefreeze.blogspot.com
Check it out. It's 3 emails. Mine, theirs and mine. It's only been a couple of days since I emailed the last one; haven't heard back from them yet.
Here's a bit of irony.
DeleteThe creationsists that don't believe in geocentrism, accuse evolutionists of believing in (macro evolution: change from one kind of animal into another kind of animal), something that we DO NOT OBSERVE in nature.
And, at the same time, accuse geocentrists of believing in what IS OBSERVED, (the heavens rotate around a fixed earth), THEY NOW believe in the UNOBSERVABLE!
Thanks for the excellent and interesting link, Michael.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to the battle ;-)
It is true that the position of the Creationist Ministry is laughably illogical, a ridiculous case of special pleading and selective interpretation of the Scriptures.
If one is going to believe the Scriptures as they were believed for a millennium and a half, then one is not going to adopt the position of the Creationist Ministry (which is, by the way, the position of essentially every YEC biblical "literalist").
Isn't this a strange case, though?
Isn't it remarkable how this one simple question seems to lie at the very foundation of the greatest scientific and religious controversies of the Christian and post-Christian world?
Now that you see the stakes, and now that you see how profoundly illogical the answers of your Creation Ministry are, consider this:
Our film is called "The Principle", because the key brick in the wall of rejection of geocentrism is the Copernican Principle; that is, in order to explain away all the evidence that shows Earth in a special position in the cosmos, as well as a special position in the eyes of the Creator (after all, He sent His Son to suffer and die for us *here*), one must adopt a Copernican Principle *a priori*- all data will be interpreted through a lens that insists we are nothing special.
To accept this Principle is to deny the Scriptures completely, and also to abandon the Christian cosmos, centered upon the place of the Incarnation of the Son of God.
No wonder we end up as an insignificant dust mote floating in a backwater galaxy.
*But even that is no longer enough*.
The fine tunings of the physical constants of our universe; the evidence for non-Copernican, Earth-centered structure in the galaxy distributions; the astonishing Axis in the CMB pointing out a special direction in the cosmos, related to the ecliptic and equinox; the evidence of alignments in quasar polarization vectors, radio sky dipole, Type 1a Supernovae dipole, etc……….this evidence requires not just a Copernican Principle related to this universe.
This evidence requires a multiverse, so that the astonishing geocentric implications of this one can be explained away as the "winning lottery ticket" in an infinity of universes.
The degree of deep mental conditioning against geocentrism is one of the more interesting psychological phenomena I have ever encountered.
One might almost be tempted to suggest that the defeat of the geocentric cosmos was the greatest victory ever attained by the Adversary, the one which truly cracked the foundations of Christian belief, and this ground will never be surrendered without the most ridiculously absurd over the top savagery (as anyone who has followed the internet battles over "The Principle" can see, the opposition is truly demonic).
As Herman Wouk had his character Sloat say to Natalie, in his novel "The Winds of War":
"Christianity is dead and rotting since Galileo slit its throat".
No wonder you are encountering the strange, deep mental conditioning.
It is exactly what confirms me in my thesis that this issue……is for all the marbles.
This one gets under your skin and just won't let go.
God be with you!
http://canepancakegravy.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-axis-of-evil-and-geocentrism.html
ReplyDeleteGeorge:
ReplyDeleteWelcome to my blog, I am very happy to publish your link. It is a very welcome sign that our film has required excellent thinking from the adversaries of the Catholic cosmos.
Your link will be (because it deserves to be) the subject of my next post.
Thank you!
There are some who are thinkibg things through- how happy am I to notice!
Thanks, George. I found your article very interesting !
ReplyDeleteAlthough it is not salient to your piece, I would just like to comment on your last point:
"It's worth noting, though, that the possible violation of isotropy is NOT being buried by scientists. Scientists are the ones who found the Axis of Evil, and scientists are the only ones talking about it. Scientists are the ones testing the hypothesis and the ones coming up with possible explanations for it. The idea that the Axis of Evil "is being assiduously avoided for obvious reasons" is so untrue as to be borderline dishonest. If it were really being avoided, the public would never have heard of it."
I fully agree that the 'axis' is not being buried, and that we have scientists to thank for its discovery. On the other hand, it is not dishonest to say that in some quarters it is being "assiduously avoided". In other cases (eg the way that ESA presents the Planck data to the public), it's just being downplayed. This is not surprising, given the implications. I agree that we should not paint all scientists with the same "scientism" brush, but we should also acknowledge how the human dimension plays out amongst scientists when there is potential for a scientific revolution.
I am very thankful to the excellent scientific work which has discovered the Axis and its associated anomalies.
DeleteI am fully aware that the scientists who have discovered these anomalies are philosophically incapable of understanding the implications.
That's where we come in.
Thank you, Rick for all that you are doing.
ReplyDeleteI came upon that Catholic physics professor's blog and have started asking him questions about geocentrism --- touching about all the stuff I've learned from you and Robert S. Anyway, that blog post that I posted above was his lasted reply. I was hoping that you might be interested in replying to him on his blog about the CMB and Axis of Evil. Thanks again for being a major part in this historic undertaking. May God reward you generously.
I will be happy to reply, in fact my reply to him will be my next post. It is an excellent indication that he is thinking this through moire deeply than most, and this is what I continually pray for.
DeleteIn order for the Church to fully come to grips with the last several hundred revolutionary years, She must address modern cosmology. Religion, today, is an abstract notion -- even for believers. It exists in our imaginations. We are programmed to see a giant, impassable chasm between the natural and the supernatural. This is probably the central bad fruit of modernity. Or as you say above the Adversary's greatest achievement. This is one of the greatest ways that "God is dead" today. He may live in our actions. He may live in our liturgy. But in a practical sense, in how we view our world, He is dead - even among Catholics. Fundamentally this comes down to cosmology. Modern cosmology (based on the Copernican Principle) is the foundational dogma by which the entire naturalist, atheist zeitgeist stands. Take away the Copernican Principle and all of a sudden Man is forced to address God again in all aspects of lfie. It's a central issue. This of course directly forces the concept of human dignity back into the discussion which has consequences for all the "Life" issues, as well as Catholic economics. Hopefully, once the interests of high Churchmen are piqued (even if they are not totally convinced) by "The Principle" -- they will be able to see these 2nd and 3rd order consequences of modern vs Catholic cosmology -- and because of their interests in human dignity, they will be able to trace themselves back into a proper understanding of cosmology. God willing!
ReplyDeleteGod will raise up for Himself even profoundly inadequate Catholics, if the profoundly adequate ones shirk the task.
DeleteHi Rick,
DeleteHave you ever wondered, if you could go straight up past our atmosphere and into outer space, whether or not you would be able to see the earth rotating?
Please check out: "Can you accelerate into a GEO SAT “parking” spot?" at: pbranefreeze.blogspot.com
Let me know what you think.
Thanks
Michael
I've recently been looking at a variety of things with concern to 'The Electric Universe' and even the predictions of Immanuel Velikovsky and others... and the implications are staggering to behold!
ReplyDeleteThe opening dialogue of the Principle trailer begins with "Everything we know about our Universe... is wrong!" But I hadn't considered just how wrong we could be... Absolutely everything must change! We must also completely rethink our ideas about the past and the ancients and what they saw and witnessed happening in our skies... It also changes how we might perceive many of the miraculous events in the Bible! Could also the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima also have been a fantastic display of manipulation of electromagnetic plasma that caused the skies and the Sun to spin and change colours and which also creates the fantastic formations we observe in the Universe? Is any of this symbolized within apparitions and Catholic theology of the Woman clothed with the Sun, with a crown of stars, with rings of light on her fingers through which the graces of God pour forth?
Rick Delano wasn't kidding... the science and thinking behind this is accelerating very fast once we throw out Einstein and Newton and all the old dogmas of the Standard Model! It also elegantly simplifies our universe in the most spectacular and frightening of ways!
Rick, please tell me you and Bob are working on some book or something that brings Geocentrism and these other findings together! I'm assuming that given you linked to a holo/electric science article on your facebook page that there you guys see some merit to these things? Is there some connection between the aether and the plasma that fills the universe? From what I understand, don't such electromagnetic occurrences require aether as a material medium to travel?
Are you okay? Have you stopped blogging?
ReplyDeleteI am wonderful, thank you!
DeleteI have found myself unable to blog lately since I am engaged in finalizing my film "The Principle" and negotiating the terms for its release.
Sorry for the delay in postings, but I promise you it will be more than made up for once the public debate over "The Principle" begins its next phase (which should, given the FASCINATING symmetries between our film and the initial episode of "Cosmos", be even more interesting and controversial than the first phase has been).
Deo gratias. I was beginning to fear you'd been silenced in some way, as so many orthodox Catholic bloggers are being intimidated into silence. I'm reading the first volume of Galileo was Wrong. As a person with only a very rudimentary grasp of physics or Maths physics, it takes some effort, but it has been written in such a perspicacious way that the critical points can be understood by the layman.
DeleteI'm glad you asked these questions; I was also wondering, what happened to Rick, but I figured that he was probably busy with the film.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete