Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Repost: Consilience- Welcome To The Post Scientific World

I repost this in order to take advantage of recent increased traffic on the blog.

It is one of the things I have discovered that will be most relevant in the examination of both the Copernican Principle, and the closely related principle of evolution via mutation and selection.

Our first film, "The Principle", deals with the former.

Our second, with the latter.


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.

Monday, February 25, 2013

"The Principle" Update

Those of you who have supported us with your prayers, please redouble them, as we are on the verge of almost incomprehensibly big things :-)

Those of you who have harbored bitter and vicious notions of impeding or discrediting "The Principle"- well, very few of you seem to pray so I really don;t know what to suggest to you other than that you buckle your seatbelts.

Next couple of weeks should settle it.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

A Tale of Two Masses

At 9:00 am, in a little parish church in a working class neighborhood, the pews are packed, chairs set up in the back of the church likewise.

At the front of the church, classes of confirmandi; boys to one side, girls to the other. I am surprised at how many- probably 60-70 teenagers in all.

The Latin Mass (Low Mass) is offered reverently, the homily is a reflection on the Gospel reading of the Transfiguration.

The prayers after Low Mass are recited by the whole congregation, and at least half the church remains behind afterward, to pray.

At 5:30 pm, in a parish church built in the form of an hyperbola in one of the richest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the pews are three quarters empty.

The band, consisting in guitar, electric bass, drums, and piano, rehearses right up to the moment that the priest enters.

The Novus Ordo Mass is offered reverently, the homily is a reflection on the "resignation" of the Pope (he is just too old, and has found out that he wasn't really in charge after all- he is referred to repeatedly as "Ratzinger").

The priest reads a letter "from a friend" describing the kind of Pope he hopes will be elected (one who "wears pants" instead of "ridiculous regalia").

The Church is empty within two minutes of the end of Mass.


Catholic Catechism Test #1- Name That Heresy

Following are words of the teachers of two different religions.

One is Catholic.

The other is an heretic.

Can you name the authors?

First, the Catholic:

"I believe in my heart and openly profess that the bread and wine placed upon the altar are, by the mystery of the sacred prayer and the words of the Redeemer, substantially changed into the true and life-giving flesh and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord, and that after the consecration there is present the true body of Christ which was born of the Virgin and offered up for the salvation of the world, hung on the cross and now sits at the right hand of the Father, and that there is present the true blood of Christ which flowed from His side. They are present not only by means of a sign and of the efficacy of the sacrament, but also in the very reality and truth of their nature and substance."

Then, the heretic:


In reality, body and blood of Christ does not signify the physical parts of the man Jesus during his life or in his glorified body. Body and blood here signifies specifically the presence of Christ in the symbolism of bread and wine. … 

We now have communion with Jesus Christ, through the eating and drinking of the bread and wine. Just as in an interpersonal relationship, a letter can show the friendship between persons and illustrate the affection of the sender for the recipient.” ... 

“The nature of these gifts can be clarified only in their relation to man.The essence of the bread and the wine, therefore, must be defined in an anthropological way. The natural character of these offerings [bread and wine] as a fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, as units of natural and cultural products, is to strengthen and nourish man and the human community in the character of a common meal. … This natural essence of the bread and wine is transformed by God in the sense that this nature of bread and wine now shows and achieves salvific communion with God.” 

Thursday, February 21, 2013

The Hermeneutic of Homosexuality?

The grotesque truth behind the abdication of the Pope begins to emerge.

Let the full extent of the perversion, of the satanic destruction of the Catholic Faith by the "magic circle" of homosexualist priests, bishops, and cardinals, finally be brought into the light of day.

Mother of God, intercede for us, that we may have a strong Catholic Pope!

http://www.businessinsider.com/pope-resignation-linked-to-gay-lobby-2013-2