Berlinski Strikes Again!

Because he says it so well, I merely link to it.

Classic bit of Berlinski excerpted below:

If the revolution is either far away or long ago, there is always God. The discovery of the Higgs Boson does nothing to confirm his existence, Krauss argued, therefore it must do everything to diminish his relevance. And so it does. The Higgs Boson, he wrote, brings "science closer to dispensing with the need for any supernatural shenanigans all the way back to the beginning of the universe -- and perhaps even before the beginning, if there was a before."

About this declaration, since it countenances a before before a beginning or a beginning before a before, all that one can say is that Krauss has covered his bases.

Vatican Digs In After Gay Marriage Gains

http://www.centurylink.net/news/read.php?rip_id=%3CDA2F8A7O0%40news.ap.org%3E&ps=915&page=2

It is good to see this.

We can no longer afford to negotiate with this insane, rapidly collapsing civilization.

Dialogue and negotiation are tactics of politicians, not of the shepherds of the Holy Catholic Church.

Proclamation of the Truth is the only irreplaceable function of the Church in times such as these.

No human being can be held in contempt by a Catholic; not even the contemptible.

May I say that the incredibly disoriented, intellectually and morally weak voters of Maryland, of Washington, of Maine, and of Minnesota, have contemptibly surrendered their children to indoctrination in radical homosexualist propaganda.

Shame on you.

Disgraceful.

But it is done.

From this day forth electoral results are completely irrelevant; our civilization is prepared to vote against biology itself, and has lost even the basic moral foundation upon which to protect their own children from indoctrination in the lie that there exists no difference between a mother and father; in fact mothers are not necessarily female, and fathers are not necessarily male.

This form of mental illness; this form of child abuse, is now the law in the states where the contemptible voters have contemptibly voted to impose upon their own children, a lie of breathtaking evil.

From this day forth the Catholic is here to bear witness to the Truth as this civilization lawfully reaps the awful judgement it has so assiduously sown for itself.

I am thankful and proud that the Vatican will, at long last, fight.

The End of Neo-Catholicism

Tonight Barack Obama defeated the Republican Establishment, and go-along-to-get-along NeoCatholicism.

The Catholic Bishops of the NeoChurch have failed, and all that is left now is to decide whether one wishes to be accounted among the sheep of the flock of Newchurch, or whether one is prepared to suffer martyrdom for the Faith which is not confused, but instead is clear and unambiguous.

The Republican Party is finished in America.

Newchurch is finished, period.

Find a Traditional priest, and pray.

The Second Vatican Council has failed, and that miserably.

Response to Ethan Seigel on "How The Earth Moves"

Note 10/1:

 #4 below contains an error. The stars do not orbit along the plane of the ecliptic. Thanks to "CB" at Ethan's blog for pointing this out.


Ethan Seigel has posted a number of purported difficulties with the geocentric hypothesis in a very interesting piece here.

I respond:

I think all of the reported problems with the geocentric model can be resolved rather easily here, Ethan.

1. Consider the Earth at rest
2. The Moon orbits the Earth.
3. The planets and their moons orbit the Sun.
4. The Sun and stars orbit the Earth along the plane known locally as "the ecliptic".

I believe this resolves all reported difficulties for the geocentric model, and it seems to me it does more than this.

You correctly report the astonishing power and scientific fruitfulness of Newton’s theory of gravity.

It was this astonishing power which persuaded the Republic of letters to adopt the heliocentric model in the first place.

But this theory is wrong- catastrophically wrong- at cosmological scales.

Also, only the geocentric model predicts a cosmological significance to what is locally referred to as the ecliptic.

We now know that the so-called “Axis of Evil” aligns, on a cosmological scale, with this ecliptic.

Score one for Tycho Brahe.

If we suppose two things; a firmament or substance of space which rotates and carries bodies along with it, and a spherically propagating force of gravity, it appears to me we have the basis for explaining both the consistency of gravitational laws at local scales, and the inconsistency of gravitational laws at cosmological scales.

America

We are exiting the stage of history, of course.
'
You know this.

No civilization which mass-murders its own children can survive.

You know this.

This civilization cannot be saved.

It is dying, and God help us as it falls.

Now.

What are we to do, in the face of the absolutely certain collapse of America?

We are to fight, and to witness.

History is more important than we are.

Generations yet to come will read of America; of the hundreds of millions of abortions, of the gay fascist movement, of the incredible cowardice of the Catholic bishops.

Will they read of you?

Will they read that you stood as a witness against child murder, against gay fascism?

Stand.

Fight.

God will not be mocked.

The Council has failed, and the hierarchy cannot say this.

Very well.'

Let the hierarchy answer to God for the Council.

Let us- you and me- make a good witness.

Let us put our faith in God and not in man.

Let us truthfully inform the advocates of mass child slaughter and gay fascism that we oppose you, we will oppose you, even though our bishops fail us and our fellows implement the tools of our demise.

The only important thing is the judgement God will render in eternity.

I resist Obama, abortion, gay marriage, and the criminals called bankers who have destroyed us through usury.

I do not fear the abortioniists, the homosexualists, or the neocon warmongers.

I "fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him."

Newest Evidence Shows Earth At the Center of the Observable Universe

What "observations" show the Earth at the center of the observable universe?

All observations show this, beginning with one going outside, looking up, and noticing that the heavens revolve above us, in a regular and repeating pattern.

This is consistent with us being motionless at the center of a revolving cosmos (firmament).

It is also consistent with an Earth which revolves once per day on its own axis.

It is the second proposition which involves the Copernican Principle (i.e., Earth is in no special location, generalized as the "cosmological principle"- that there are no special locations or directions in the cosmos).

If the Copernican Principle is true, then we should expect nothing at all unusual or special about our local system's ecliptic.

If geocentrism is true, we should expect the whole Universe to be related in its largest scale structure to this system's ecliptic- indeed, it would *have to be*, were geocentrism true.

The most recent, advanced, largest-scale observations of the cosmos ever undertaken by humanity, show that geocentrism's prediction in this respect has been affirmed, and that the Copernican Principle is false.

It is now established that the plane of the ecliptic is cosmological:

1. The dipole, quadrupole, octupole, and higher poles of the CMB are aligned with the ecliptic, forming a cosmological so-called "Axis of Evil"- see Copi, Huterer et al 2010:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1004.5602v2.pdf

Relevant excerpt:

"The study of alignments in the low-l CMB has found a number of peculiarities. We have shown that the alignment of the quadrupole and octopole planes is inconsistent with Gaussian, statistically isotropic skies at least at the 99% confidence level. Further a number of (possibly related) alignments occur at 95% confidence levels or greater. Put together these provide a strong indication that the full sky CMB WMAP maps are inconsistent with the standard cosmological model at large angles. Even more peculiar is the alignment of the quadrupole and octopole with solar system features (the ecliptic plane and the dipole)."


2. The "Axis of Evil" has been independently shown to be aligned with a preferred axis of galaxy spin-rotation directionality ("handedness") (Longo, 2007 et sequelae):

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0703325

Relevant excerpt:

"In this article I study the distribution of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate whether the universe has an overall handedness. A preference for spiral galaxies in one sector of the sky to be left-handed or right-handed spirals would indicate a preferred handedness. The SDSS data show a strong signal for such an asymmetry with a probability of occurring by chance ~3.0 x 10-4. The asymmetry axis is at (RA,Dec) ~(202d,25d) with an uncertainty ~15d. The axis appears to be correlated with that of the quadrupole and octopole moments in the WMAP microwave sky survey, an unlikely alignment that has been dubbed "the axis of evil". Our Galaxy is aligned with its spin axis within 8.4d of this spiral axis."

3. Longo has since expanded his survey to include 15,158 clearly rotating spiral galaxies, the farthest 1.2 billion light years away (New Scientist, Oct 2011):

http://www.andyross.net/spin.htm

Relevant excerpts:

"The universe might be spinning. Michael Longo at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor thinks so. At the heart of the story is conservation of parity: the universe does not tell left from right.......

"Longo looked at the southern sky, which is not covered by the SDSS. Stretching off as far as the telescope could see, along the same axis in the southern sky, he saw an excess of right-handed spirals. It was the opposite view of the same effect.

Longo says that if the asymmetry is real, the universe has a net angular momentum and was born in a spin."

3. Edwin Hubble reported a periodic, concentric distribution of galaxy redshifts with Earth at the center ("Observational Approach to Cosmology", 1937).

Relevant excerpt:

"Thus the density of the nebulae distribution increases outwards, symmetrically in all directions, leaving the observer in a unique position. Such a favoured position, of course, is intolerable; moreover, it represents a discrepancy with the theory, because the theory postulates homogeneity. Therefore, in order to restore homogeneity, and to escape the horror of a unique position, the departures from uniformity, which are introduced by the recession factors, must be compensated by the second term representing effects of spatial curvature."

4. The "spatial curvature" mentioned above is, exactly, the Copernican universe, the Friedman "expanding balloon" universe of the modern cosmological consensus. No such preferred directionality can exist in an FLRW universe, which is "expanding at every point".

5. Therefore the universe is not Copernican, or FLRW.

6. This concentric, periodic (non-random) distribution of galaxy redshifts with Earth at the center has been shown to be cosmological. This observationally falsifies the space-time curvature prediction (requirement) of homogeneity in the FLRW "consensus" cosmology- see Hirano Phys Rev D Nov 2010, abstract at:

http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v82/i10/e103513

Relevant excerpt from full paper:

“A widespread idea in cosmology is that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic above a certain scale. This hypothesis, usually called the cosmological principle (e.g., [1]), is thought to be a generalization of the Copernican principle that “the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position”. The assumption is that any observer at any place at the same epoch would see essentially the same picture of the large scale distribution of galaxies in the universe.

"However, according to a Fourier analysis by Hartnett & Hirano [2], the galaxy number count N from redshift z data (N–z relation) indicates that galaxies have preferred periodic redshift spacings.........A natural interpretation is that concentric spherical shells of higher galaxy number densities surround us, with their individual centers situated at our location.”

7. There is additional evidence of a polarization of quasar photons along the same "Axis of Evil":

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/81301/1/london_mar07.pdf

Relevant excerpt:

"• Evidence for large-scale angular correlations of quasar polarization vectors (in regions of ~ 1 Gpc size at z ~ 1)
• The mean polarization angle changes with redshift
• The effect is statistically significant (> 99.9%) in a sample of 355
quasars
• Instrumental and interstellar polarization cannot produce a redshift dependent effect
• The effect seems stronger along an axis close to the CMB dipole and the “axis of evil”

This is some of the observational evidence that Earth is at or near the center of the observable universe.

How I Became A Hate Group

Once in a while I come across something so good it seems best to get out of the way and link to it.

This is the most deliciously hilarious demolition of that ugly hate group Southern Poverty Lie Center I have ever read (and I've read some good ones!).

Enjoy!

Why I Will Not Vote For Mitt Romney

I live in California.

Romney has no chance here.

I honestly do not know what I would do if I lived in a swing state.

But Mitt Romney is a disgraceful, dishonest, weak, compromised, flip-flopping empty suit.

He is of course infinitely better than the alternative.

But Mitt Romney, in his epic cowardice, is the Father of Gay Marriage.

Let us at last be honest enough to admit it.

UPDATE 8/28: Mitt Romney supports abortion on demand.
It would be impossible for me to vote for this man under any circumstances whatsoever.

How Civil Unions Destroyed Marriage In America

On this blog today I found an excellent article which exemplifies for me the "Wake Up Call" that seems to be rapidly spreading through Catholic circles concerning the fascist nature and tactics of the same sex pseudo-marriage movement, in the wake of L'Affair Chik-Fil-A.


UPDATE 8.16.12: The terrorist attack on Family Research Center yesterday serves to make the above point in an entirely new and chilling way.

Wake up, Catholics.

Wake up, people of good faith.

This is a terrorist movement we are dealing with.

We are waking up.

My prayer is that we are not waking up too late.

I reproduce my response below,  from the comments section, to a decent, compassionate, Christian commentator "Anonymous", whose comments provide an insight into why it is that we now stand on the very knife's edge of surrendering the power to rewrite the marriage laws into the hands of a very dark, very violent, very fascist movement determined to use those laws to indoctrinate children into homosexualist anti-values in public schools, without the slightest ability on the part of the children or the parents to do a single thing about it.

The tactic is an old one.

Ask the Trojans.

About the Horse.

****************************************

"I think much of the support for redefining marriage comes from a sense of compassion for the rights of others."

>> Exactly. It was framed as a civil rights issue from the beginning, by very smart and committed people who understand how to push the right buttons in an electorate (as well as a Catholic Church) which has a long and proud history of responding to civil rights issues.

Of course, it never was a civil rights issue at all. I will prove it in a moment.

A: "However, truth matters as well,"

>> Truth can never be opposed to truth. If it were ever the case that a civil right was being denied SSA individuals, then truth would be on the side of the same sex marriage movement.

Truth has never been on the side of the SSM movement, because there was never a civil rights issue involved in the first place.

I will prove it in a moment.

A: "and the truth is that the sexual union of a man and a woman potentially can produce a child. There is a level of responsibility that exists in this particular type of relationship that is unique because of that. The commitment made by a man and a woman in marriage provides the best situation for raising the children produced by their sexual union in a stable and loving relationship."

>> Now *that* is the truth. Every syllable.

A: "On the other hand, there are rights that should be available to those in loving and committed relationships, but I would like to suggest that these relationships extend to a broader group than those in sexually active relationships. There are widows who live together after the deaths of their husbands, adult siblings who form a household, divorced mothers who support each other in raising their children together who just as much as same sex couple would benefit from many of the rights given to married couples."

>> Sigh.

There it is.

This is why we now stand at the very precipice of handing the power to rewrite the marriage laws to a movement that is implacably determined to employ those laws as the basis for sophisticated indoctrination of every public school pupil in America in homosexualist anti-values, *values which are profoundly in opposition to both Faith, and reason.*

The SSM movement insists that, somehow, the rights society has always extended to married couples,, *ought to be extended to ____________ (fill in whatever category you are sympathetic to, it doesn't matter which)........once the idea that marriage *rights* ought to be given to *non-married* people, the list will have no end. It cannot possibly have an end, because the foundational assumption of SSM has been implicitly granted, and that point is this:

There is no such thing as marriage!

Marriage is simply another word for Federal Friendship Benefits. Or widow benefits. Or  couples benefits. Or any other kind of Federal benefits.

Marriage is simply a word that refers to (for now) two *people* who want to *commit* to each other (until they don't).

*Having bought into this, defeat is utterly certain*.

The SSM movement *always knew it, it was their strategy from the beginning to manipulate the compassion of people of Faith so they would surrender their religious liberty, and their children as well, before finally waking up to the scam- too late.

Here we get to the point where I can demonstrate the proof I promised earlier, that SSM was *never in any way about civil rights*.

A: "That does not mean we should redefine marriage to include all these loving and committed relationships, but perhaps we do need to find a way to extend rights without diminishing the importance of marriage for the stability and future of our children and our society."

>> God bless you and your Christian heart, Anonymous. You have been duped, effortlessly.

*All of those rights were specifically granted, in the form of civil unions, and the very next morning the lawsuit challenging marriage on 14th Amendment grounds was filed*.

*It was always planned that way*.

Because, you see, if the law limits marriage to gender-complementary couples *for good reason*- the very reasons you outline above!- then there *is no civil rights question involved for same sex couples concerning marriage!

*But*- and please admire the true sophistication and ferocious intelligence behind this ploy- *but* as soon as the principle has been established, in law, of the entitlement of same sex couples to the *rights and privileges previously extended by society only to married couples*.........

Now there *IS* a civil rights issue!

If they are entitled to the same rights and privileges, *there can be no basis at law to deny them the title MARRAIGE, since marriage has been defined out of existence in the very act of extending its benefits to non-married couples!

Of course these lawsuits succeeded.

It was always intended to dupe softhearted and compassionate and decent Catholics (and others) like you, Anonymous- into proposing the very solution which would doom marriage altogether.

It is my sad duty to have to tell you this.

It is my even sadder duty to tell you that in a better age, Catholic Bishops- REAL CATHOLIC BISHOPS- would have seen this coming ten miles off (that is what a Shepherd does- he sees the wolf before the flock does).......

Instead our bishops were completely blind.

As blind as you.

But it is not your fault.

It is, however, their fault.

May God, through the merciful intercession of His angels and saints, sealed with the irresistible plea of the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, protect us now.

A Question Concerning Salvation

Let us imagine a man, perhaps a man on a deserted island, brought there by parents after shipwreck while still a baby, raised until ago eight or so, and then orphaned.

Never heard the gospel.

Never got baptized.

Let us imagine the man grows up as a good man, following his own lights as best he can, convinced as he looks up at the sky at night that Someone must have been responsible for the order and beauty he perceives in creation.

Here is my question:

Given exactly the information we have above, and no more, and given exactly the testimony of Scripture, Tradition, and the *defined dogmas* of the Catholic Church concerning salvation (and no more).........

Is this man saved?

I propose an answer below, and sincerely encourage contrary proposals.

My answer is that this man is not saved, absent some supernatural intervention by God, concerning which we could never have any evidence at all, ever, this side of eternity.

I support this conclusion by reference to Scripture, Tradition, and dogmatic definition.

First, Scripture: 

"Jesus answered: Amen, amen, I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." Jn 3:5

Second, Tradition:


"I have heard, sir," said I, "from some teachers, that there is no other repentance except that which took place when we went down into the water and obtained the remission of our former sins." He said to me, "You have heard rightly, for so it is. They had need [the Shepherd said] to come up through the water, so that they might be made alive; for they could not otherwise enter into the kingdom of God, except by putting away the mortality of their former life. These also, then, who had fallen asleep, received the seal of the Son of God, and entered into the kingdom of God. For, [he said,] before a man bears the name of the Son of God, he is dead. But when he receives the seal, he puts mortality aside and again receives life. The seal, therefore, is the water. They go down into the water dead [in sin], and come out of it alive."------The Shepherd of Hermas, c. 140 AD 4:3:1-2

Third, dogmatic definition:

"......the Justification of the impious is indicated, as being a translation, from that state wherein man is born a child of the first Adam, to the state of grace, and of the adoption of the sons of God, through the second Adam, Jesus Christ, our Saviour. And this translation, since the promulgation of the Gospel, cannot be effected, without the laver of regeneration, or the desire thereof, as it is written; unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God."-- Council of Trent, Session VI, Chapter IV

It has been objected that new teaching in the Catechism, based on the Council, provides exceptions to this.

I answer this cannot possibly be true, since the Church is protected by heaven itself against contradicting any defined dogma of the Faith in Her teaching.

It has been objected that the man on the island would be saved in ways unknown to us, by God.

I answer that it is legitimate to hope for this, since God is certainly capable of acting in some way, unknown to us, to save such and so a person under such and so circumstance.

But since such a thing can never be known to us, it necessarily follows that we will never have knowledge of any such case actually occurring, and hence we will have no knowledge of any specific person saved in such a way.

Since we will never have any such knowledge, it follows that the certain, infallible, Scriptural and Apostolic teaching of the Church concerning the absolute necessity of baptism for salvation has been drastically undermined by means of substituting a permitted theological speculation- that God might save in ways unknown to us- for a thrice-defined dogma of the Faith:

1. “There is but one universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved.” (Pope Innocent III, Fourth Lateran Council, 1215.)
2. “We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” (Pope Boniface VIII, the Bull Unam Sanctam, 1302.)
3. “The most Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into the eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgivings, their other works of Christian piety and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the Name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.” (Pope Eugene IV, the Bull Cantate Domino, 1441.)

I suggest further that the collapse in the post-conciliar missionary outreach of the Church is related in an important way to this practical substitution of speculation for dogma.

Congrats to Rahm Emmanuel- Chicken Salesman of the Year!

Yesterday was an extraordinary day.

Yesterday America demonstrated in a ridiculously unpredictable (and hence very reliable) way, that all of the PR assaults, all of the politically correct bomfoggery, all of the shouts of "bigot" and "intolerant" of the marriage corruption movement, have been for nought.

Click here to see something extraordinary.

Most folks in this country are not nearly sophisticated enough to be hornswoggled by the pathetic, truly pathetic, "arguments" of the marriage corruption movement.

We just might win this thing yet.

We find out November 3.

Now I am not a huge fan of Mitt Romney, but he does have one profoundly important good point, which is that he is not Barack Obama.

Vote accordingly.

Lord Monckton on the Pseudo-Science of "Climate Change"

Recent posts have involved an examination of ways in which the meaning of the term "scientific method" has been changing in basic and disturbing ways.


While I have focused especially on the scandalous refusal of the Darwinian research program to C14 date soft-tissue-presenting Cretaceous fossils, I was grateful to come across, on William Briggs' blog, a wonderful new post from Lord Monckton, the redoubtable scourge of that pseudo-science formerly known as "Global Warming"(subsequently renamed "Climate Change", once it became clear that there has been no global warming at all for the last fifteen years).


Lord Monckton makes several cogent (and pungent) observations along some of the same lines as have been considered here, in posts on "Consilience"-as-substitute-for-falsification in the post-scientific method, as well as those on the truly scandalous, smoking-gun case of refusal to C14 date Mary's Bones.


Lord Monckton's whole treatment is well worth the read here: "Why Every Scientist Needs A Classical Training".


Relevant excerpt:

"The greatest error in the Berkeley team’s conclusion is in Dr. Müller’s assertion that the cause of all the warming since 1750 is Man. His stated reason for this conclusion is this: “Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.”

"No Classically trained scientist could ever have uttered such a lamentable sentence in good conscience. For Dr. Müller here perpetrates a spectacular instance of the ancient logical fallacy known as the argument from false cause — post hoc, ergo propter hoc. However closely the fluctuations in one dataset appear to follow the fluctuations in another, one cannot legitimately assume that either caused the other.

"Dr. Müller admits elsewhere in his editorial that mere correlation between one data series and another does not imply a causative link between them. Nor, one should add, does it tell us which caused which; nor whether all possible natural influences that might have driven both data series simultaneously have been allowed for.

In logic, though correlation does not necessarily imply causation, the absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. During the past 15 years, notwithstanding record increases in our CO2 emissions, there has been no global warming at all. The former, then, cannot have been the principal cause of the latter.......

"If Dr. Müller had had a Classical training, he would have been made familiar with the dozen logical fallacies first codified by Aristotle 2300 years ago. He would not have attempted to draw any firm scientific conclusions as to causality merely from a superficial and in any event inadequate and uncertain correlation; and still less from a monstrous argumentum ad ignorantiam. Perhaps it is time to ensure that every scientist receives a Classical training, as nearly all of them once did."

Bingo.

Consilience: Welcome to the Post-Scientific, Post-Catholic World

You believe that the Universe (the better informed among you believe that our Hubble bubble) originated in a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago.

You believe that the Earth is about 4 billion years old; that life has evolved from one or more primordial ancestors (most of you believe in abiogenesis as well, but are at pains to insist that you are not required to say so, since you cannot demonstrate this belief experimentally- but as we shall see, most of you think you have even better grounds upon which to believe it anyway).

You believe that random mutation and natural selection are completely adequate means by which to explain the observed biodiversity of our world.

The vast majority of you believe that man’s appearance is also explainable by these means. 

A (much smaller and understandably shrinking) subset of you believe that God must have intervened in the process at the point where man first appears.

The better informed among you are aware that none of these assertions has been demonstrated experimentally (that is, not one of these assertions is scientific, as that word has been understood by Einstein, by Popper, by every great discoverer of scientific principle in history.......until the advent of this post-scientific world).

But even (especially!) the better informed among you believe these things, and you believe them so strongly that you scorn any suggestion that experimental demonstration of these beliefs might reasonably be demanded.

You believe that you have something better than experimental demonstration, which confirms you in these beliefs.

That “something better” is consilience.

Consilience is the only persuasive argument that the post-scientific worldview (the worldview of inflation, of dark matter and dark energy, of the multiverse, of String Theory, of “Deep Time” neo-Darwinism) has ever advanced.

It has persuaded you, and it has persuaded (may God help us), even Princes of the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church now proposes consilience as relevant- in some vague but apparently real way- even for Catholics:

“.......new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.  It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge.  The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.”--

Pope John Paul II, Address to Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 1996

Here it is proposed that the note of scientific truth is found, not in experimental test with the intention of falsifying assumed knowledge, but in the “convergence, neither sought nor fabricated” among independent branches of research.

Consilience is also a key to understanding the Nouvelle Theologie: instead of the Traditional Catholic proclamation “outside the Church there is no salvation”, we are presented with a dialogue among mutual seekers of Truth, all of whom “tend to converge” upon some objective Truth which lies, perhaps, somewhere further down the road of the “convergence” (consilience).

In the scientific world, something was established by experiment, and always subjected to crucial experiment, ceaselessly, *with the intention of falsifying what we might think we know*.

In the post scientific world, experiment exists merely to resolve difficulties in the path of the consilience, of that which we *already have determined that we know*.

In the Traditional Church, salvation was something possessed by the Catholic Church in its fullness, and all dialogue was intended to assist the pagan, the Jew, the heretic, the schismatic, in coming to understand and accept this.

In the modern Church, salvation is, also, something dispensed in unknowable ways by God, to those who seek that consilience, that Truth, which lies somewhere, perhaps, down the road of the dialogue, closer to the convergence of the consilience among the truth-seekers.

Truth is objective, in Traditional Catholic teaching.

Scientific truth is the result of ceaseless experimental challenge, in the scientific world.

Truth is relative, evolving, and the mutual object of truth seekers more or less aligned with the consilience toward which they are “converging”, in the Nouvelle Theologie.

Scientific truth is the result of consilience between lines of investigation, in the post scientific world.

Welcome to the post scientific world.

Geocentrism and "Mathemagic", Part 2..."The War of the PhD's Over How To Do The Math"

A development with respect to the earlier post covering Yukio Tomozawa's remarkable paper, claiming a mathematical demonstration of the impossibility of the standard, Friedman "balloon" universe, in light of the observed dipole in the CMB.

My old interlocutor Paul Rimmer has, after a lengthy hiatus, posted a response to the Tomozawa paper here.



UPDATE 3/10: It is clear that Paul has no intention of restoring the link. Alas, in the absence of the link, it were impossible to allow his solution to be assessed.


The status quo ante remains in place.




UPDATE 3/5: Paul has pulled the link to this down...

In it, we see that Paul claims Tomozawa has made a "mistake".

But it has been pointed out that Paul's answer apparently ignores the fact that Tomozawa's paper treats the expansion- the accelerating expansion- of the CMB, while Paul's treatment apparently ignores this acceleration.

More comments are beginning to flow in, and the entire shebang will eventually be written up, in the interest of determining whether there exists any truly logical, self-consistent basis upon which to claim that one ought to "shut up and calculate", based on the assumption, of course, that everyone agrees what the calculations should represent (it appears very likely at this point that everyone does not agree about what the calculations represent).

As another PhD, whose doctoral thesis was on General Relativity, apparently prophetically indicated at the end of my initial treatment of this matter:

"The (Big Bang) models based on (General Relativity) are castles built on sand.

1)      The equality of relative velocities cannot be tested in the photon frame, as the scientific method requires.

2)      Light speed in its own co-moving frame must be zero, not c.

3)      The westbound (Speed of Light) > c.

An inconsistent theory – like relativity – is worse than being wrong.  It can show anything is true – or false.

No discussion is possible until 1 & 2 are made consistent with reality.

Why let MS choose a battleground based on contradictions?"

I have opened this discussion up to several physicists, inviting them to comment on Tomozawa's initial theorems, and Paul Rimmer's claims of a "mistake" in them.

I will be updating these responses as they come in, in order to determine whether or not there exists any consistent, logical basis upon which issues such as this one can be dealt with, under the premises of standard model, General Relativity mathematics.......

Or whether even PhD's can come up with diametrically opposite conclusions from the same observations, based on the application of the same mathematics.

Let the Math Wars begin!

Apologies for Long Hiatus

I have been pulled away by professional responsibilities which have (big surprise) turned out to be rather more involved than originally anticipated.

Please look for updates on several very interesting fronts starting tomorrow.

Mary's Bones IV: When Science Jumps The Fence

It is asserted that evolution is a scientific theory, in which case it could never be "proved", merely adopted as the best scientific (testable, experimentally falsifiable) explanation for observed phenomena.

Scientific theories have no requirement (no possibility) whatever to be metaphysically true, since they all must be falsifiable in order to be scientific.

Metaphysics cannot be falsifiable. Metaphysics can only be true, or false.

Any metaphysics without God is an appalling absurdity, which is where the difficulty lies.

If science "jumps the fence" and begins to assert its various hypotheses as metaphysical certainties, we notice that the resultant metaphysics will certainly be absurd and false.

"Something from nothing" is very big just now in cosmology as well as quantum physics, as in the "eternally inflating multiverse" proceeding from the "energy of empty space that isn't zero" (the nothing turns out to contain something= contradiction=metaphysical falsification).

Materialist, naturalist metaphysics are always absurd.

They have to be. No metaphysics can be true which denies the fundamental ground of being itself: God.

For example, quantum physics makes absurdly accurate measurements based on a scientific hypothesis, stated here by David Bohm:

"the world is assumed to be constituted of a set of separately existent, indivisible and unchangeable 'elementary particles', which are the fundamental 'building blocks' of the entire universe...."

This is fine, let science hypothesize its world of particles. I like cell phones. I like computers.

They work.

Usually.

But Bohm continues:

"...there seems to be an unshakable faith among physicists that either such particles, or some other kind yet to be discovered, will eventually make possible a complete and coherent explanation of everything".

Now we have metaphysics, not science. The key words above are "faith", and "complete and coherent explanation of everything".

There will never be a complete and coherent explanation of everything based on fundamental particles as the ground of being.

This is because such an idea is a metaphysical absurdity.

Metaphysics without God is an absurdity, always and everywhere.

So, what about evolution?

Once we see evolution ceasing to allow itself to be experimentally falsifiable- exactly as we do in fact see in the case of refusing to C14 date Mary's Bones- we know that it has ceased to be a scientific theory (if it ever was- I still can't tell for sure on that point yet) and has begun to proceed as a metaphysical research program.

As metaphysics, evolution is an absurdity.

So it is crucial to establish whether evolution claims for itself the status of science; that is, just the best collection of notions which can usefully yield predictions, always subject to experimental falsification- or whether it is metaphysics; that is, a claim about being as being.

I think the  thread linked here shows very strong evidence that evolution is now a metaphysical, not a scientific, research program.

It should be assessed on those grounds.

The assessment will not be kind, because the metaphysics will be absurd.

But that will be addressed in Mary's Bones Part V.


UPDATE 2/12: I have sifted through all of the counter-arguments to H1 and am presented with one that is strong. Read it here. 


UPDATE 2/12: I have answered the above argument here. I consider the refutation to be conclusive.




NOTE: "H1" in the linked post refers to my "Hypothesis #1":

H1: The Darwinian theory is a metaphysical, not a scientific, research program