Was listening to a short talk online about Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was interesting at first; a little bit of history, some claims about the apparition being an answer to the Enlightenment, and then...the usual stuff I hear about Genesis when someone who doesn't understand Genesis or his interlocutor's opinion of it blindly tries to disprove everything in it.
This makes me sad. As Catholics, we have nothing to fear from the truth, no matter its apparent source, no matter its apparent meaning.
The priest giving the talk went on about how the Renaissance may have uncovered a few good things that ancient pagans had come up with that had fallen into obscurity with Rome's political might, but it ended up glorifying a lot of garbage also, like humanocentric philosophy.
All right; seemed a bit of a stretch from "mankind is the pinnacle of creation and what God made He saw and proclaimed was good," but the seeds of modern evils were clearly germinating, so it didn't seem fitting to debate the point.
Then he takes on Copernicus. A Catholic in good standing who had apparently come up on his own with an idea the ancient pagans had considered: Earth went around the sun and did not have pride of place in the universe.
At least Galileo was a jerk about the idea, but how are you going to pull at this thread without unraveling all the bishops and philosophers who weren't suckered by you're-not-specialism but still recognizes that the different senses of scripture didn't have to agree even while they were consonant?
He (the priest giving the talk, again; not Galileo) took a crack at relativity, conflating it with relativism, and then went to quote some modern atheistic astrophysicist-types (one of whose quotes referred to Darwin, so we get a dig at evolution too) who liked to talk about how humble a home we have.
To be fair to the priest, these scientists do have jobs that lead them to face the wonder of creation on a daily basis, so while perhaps we should give them a little bit of slack for waxing philosophical, we should also keep in mind that they are not philosophers, and that the holes in their lives left by the forsaking of religion will tend to let idols of a sort rush in to fill the vacuum.
Before I say what's wrong with all this, I want to say again: We have nothing to fear from the truth.
So if it looks like we are clever apes who had slime for grandparents and occupy an obscure planet orbiting a disregarded yellow sun swinging around the unfashionable arm of some galaxy, then there is nothing wrong with saying "Yep, it sure looks like that."
Because it does look like that, regardless of whatever it actually happens to be. Spiral galaxies are not rare. The sun is not large--neither are we compared to the nearest tree, a man once said, but so what?
It is not wrong to say "Epidemiology is a branch of applied evolutionary biology that allows us to get vaccines for the right strain of influenza most of the time," because that happens to be true, whether we were made from clay directly or via trillions of transitional states.
If we're honest and not fearful, we can say "Sure, the state of the biological arts suggests that modern organisms exist because of the variety of selection pressures on disparate populations of organisms, but if a flat reading of Genesis 1 is true, we should eventually find a way to reconcile them."
Insulting the intelligence or impugning the integrity of people who happen to specialize in the fields you don't is not charitable, honest, or helpful.
An honest scientist will admit that all theories based on empirical data (or completely whiteboard-and-imagination theories; I'm talking loop quantum gravity rather than Pythagoras, here) are conditional, that they describe reality to a degree of accuracy but cannot be proven true in a lab the way the square root of 2 can be proven to be irrational or the way God can be proven to necessarily exist. But he may deserve an explanation from you for how, if he's so wrong, everything based on his work hangs together like he's really not wrong.
GPS units work. Flu shots work. Does God mess with the orbit of Mercury to maintain the appearance of gravitational time dilation? Did God give man and ape similar DNA because He wanted us to think we came from the same place, and apes didn't just come from the earth in Genesis 1:25 in much the same way as we did in Genesis 2:7?
That last part may be an important theological matter. In the Incarnation, Jesus became man via a woman, not just to fully share in our human experience, but so He would actually be one of us in kind. This is getting outside of my wheelhouse, but philosophers in the past have posited that it would not have been sufficient or appropriate for the Son to simply construct a human body directly from clay again or straight from nothing and hypostatically unite with that; much like how each angel, having been created directly by God, is its own species.
But back to my point: beware your own preconceptions when you have to fall back on the "whom are you going to believe, me or your own lyin' eyes?" argument. That way lie reversed Jack Chick tracts when impressionable believers of immature faith find out that some scientists are atheists but in their day jobs generally are not talking at all about the same things you are even if they're looking for excuses to shore up their unbelief, and at their first crisis of faith reject everything you taught them, bathwater, baby, and all.
An honest scientist can even say "Well, we can't disprove a mathematically consistent model of the universe, but it leads to distasteful questions I want to avoid," although maybe he's leaning over the line there, but if you add enough layers of epicycles, you can't really disprove that all heavenly bodies have perfectly circular orbits of a sort, either, and is that really where we want to go? Insisting that your pet theory can't be disproven even though it's so complicated it looks almost exactly like something else we're already using to great effect? At what point did you stop saying "as scientists get more data and construct better models, the truths of Canaanite cosmology and Hebrew biology will become obvious" and start saying "Nothing is holding up the edifice of their errors but a superstructure of lies?"
I can accept that modern science is wrong in some ways, that its conditional "truths" are less accurate than they seem. There have even been times (albeit few; I am not sure if that is good or bad) I have had to hold my beliefs up against doctrine that was new to me and say "Well, I don't see how I could be wrong, but I know that it happens sometimes, and this is clearly an argument that I am," and I've had to change my position. But I am not going to discard the fruits of reason and take up gratuitous assertions that serve my day to day life more poorly while also not helping me spiritually. The "Axis of Evil" in the cosmic microwave background could be evidence that the universe is...well, probably not orbiting a static Earth, but oriented relative to it in some way that is meaningful like how finding a 6000 year old body of a man with no navel would be meaningful; but it might also be a coincidence, or an artifact, or an error in analysis. But what it's not is a smoking gun, and it's not the preponderant straw of evidence that broke the camel's back, either.
These guys aren't just making shit up to fool their consciences while they lure people into hell. These guys are taking what you decry and building your airplanes and skyscrapers and smart phones, they're designing your artificial joints and your suspension bridges. Can you even tell me where the line between here and there is? Have you tried exorcising any of your devices to see if demons have trouble keeping up the charade?
Back off my tangent, relativity is not relativism. Relativity makes your GPS work and can be demonstrated in a high school science lab. Relativism just happened to come along around the same time and pretends to be, ahem, related in order to steal its legitimacy. By perpetuating this confusion, you are doing their propaganda for them.
Jesus was born to humble means in an obscure backwater. Even the Bible tells us people sometimes scoffed at how prosaic He seemed, so there's no sense in debating the point. Why, then, should we reject the possibility that He not only embraced humility all the way down, but also that He embraced it all the way up? Maybe Earth is special like the ancient pagans and Christians and Jews (yes, pagans too! Where's your reluctance to agree with them now?) thought, but just in ways that aren't obvious to us through current technology.
Finally, it helps no one to get the ancient cosmologies mixed up. Pagans tended to think of the Earth as the center of the universe because everything in the sky looked like it was going around the Earth--well, over, but the sun and moon were pretty recognizable, and the planets had patterns of appearance that were pretty predictable even when they didn't have distinctive colors like Mars, so closed loops instead of arcs seemed reasonable. The ancient Jews, on the other hand, viewed Earth as being at the bottom of creation, not even as part of a sphere, with the only thing lower than Earth being hell. So if you're going to go all flat-Earth on us, you have to give up pride of place in exchange for an ignoble configuration that demands things that neither the Bible nor science has room for but can be disproven by two people and a shovel.
And after all that, nothing in the talk was about Mary correcting the empirical errors of contemporary science. Plenty about the miracles surrounding the tilma, some interesting symbolism in the pattern of stars on her mantle, but nothing particularly combating the idea that humanity is meaningless and not just humble. So now I'm sad twice.
And lest we get too prideful in brushing off yet more hordes of squabbling ultracrepidarians, I want to close with a word of warning regarding a comment left on the web site criticizing someone who was defending Copernicus and more modern scientists.
The comment said a few things about the foolishness of listening to modern scientists who basically paint themselves into a corner trying to gin up evidence against God, and then said of Copernicus' defender, "You are not of God."
Someone else chimed in to warn him against judging the fellow, and he responded with "I don't judge, but when someone is wrong, I correct."
No, jerk, you judged, and your smugness may have lost a soul this day. "You put too much stock in the worldly 'wisdom' of men, and not enough in God" is a correction, of sorts. "You are not of God" is a judgment. You can condemn his actions, his words, maybe his thoughts if your'e circumspect about it, but not his person.
This makes me sad. As Catholics, we have nothing to fear from the truth, no matter its apparent source, no matter its apparent meaning.
The priest giving the talk went on about how the Renaissance may have uncovered a few good things that ancient pagans had come up with that had fallen into obscurity with Rome's political might, but it ended up glorifying a lot of garbage also, like humanocentric philosophy.
All right; seemed a bit of a stretch from "mankind is the pinnacle of creation and what God made He saw and proclaimed was good," but the seeds of modern evils were clearly germinating, so it didn't seem fitting to debate the point.
Then he takes on Copernicus. A Catholic in good standing who had apparently come up on his own with an idea the ancient pagans had considered: Earth went around the sun and did not have pride of place in the universe.
At least Galileo was a jerk about the idea, but how are you going to pull at this thread without unraveling all the bishops and philosophers who weren't suckered by you're-not-specialism but still recognizes that the different senses of scripture didn't have to agree even while they were consonant?
He (the priest giving the talk, again; not Galileo) took a crack at relativity, conflating it with relativism, and then went to quote some modern atheistic astrophysicist-types (one of whose quotes referred to Darwin, so we get a dig at evolution too) who liked to talk about how humble a home we have.
To be fair to the priest, these scientists do have jobs that lead them to face the wonder of creation on a daily basis, so while perhaps we should give them a little bit of slack for waxing philosophical, we should also keep in mind that they are not philosophers, and that the holes in their lives left by the forsaking of religion will tend to let idols of a sort rush in to fill the vacuum.
Before I say what's wrong with all this, I want to say again: We have nothing to fear from the truth.
So if it looks like we are clever apes who had slime for grandparents and occupy an obscure planet orbiting a disregarded yellow sun swinging around the unfashionable arm of some galaxy, then there is nothing wrong with saying "Yep, it sure looks like that."
Because it does look like that, regardless of whatever it actually happens to be. Spiral galaxies are not rare. The sun is not large--neither are we compared to the nearest tree, a man once said, but so what?
It is not wrong to say "Epidemiology is a branch of applied evolutionary biology that allows us to get vaccines for the right strain of influenza most of the time," because that happens to be true, whether we were made from clay directly or via trillions of transitional states.
If we're honest and not fearful, we can say "Sure, the state of the biological arts suggests that modern organisms exist because of the variety of selection pressures on disparate populations of organisms, but if a flat reading of Genesis 1 is true, we should eventually find a way to reconcile them."
Insulting the intelligence or impugning the integrity of people who happen to specialize in the fields you don't is not charitable, honest, or helpful.
An honest scientist will admit that all theories based on empirical data (or completely whiteboard-and-imagination theories; I'm talking loop quantum gravity rather than Pythagoras, here) are conditional, that they describe reality to a degree of accuracy but cannot be proven true in a lab the way the square root of 2 can be proven to be irrational or the way God can be proven to necessarily exist. But he may deserve an explanation from you for how, if he's so wrong, everything based on his work hangs together like he's really not wrong.
GPS units work. Flu shots work. Does God mess with the orbit of Mercury to maintain the appearance of gravitational time dilation? Did God give man and ape similar DNA because He wanted us to think we came from the same place, and apes didn't just come from the earth in Genesis 1:25 in much the same way as we did in Genesis 2:7?
That last part may be an important theological matter. In the Incarnation, Jesus became man via a woman, not just to fully share in our human experience, but so He would actually be one of us in kind. This is getting outside of my wheelhouse, but philosophers in the past have posited that it would not have been sufficient or appropriate for the Son to simply construct a human body directly from clay again or straight from nothing and hypostatically unite with that; much like how each angel, having been created directly by God, is its own species.
But back to my point: beware your own preconceptions when you have to fall back on the "whom are you going to believe, me or your own lyin' eyes?" argument. That way lie reversed Jack Chick tracts when impressionable believers of immature faith find out that some scientists are atheists but in their day jobs generally are not talking at all about the same things you are even if they're looking for excuses to shore up their unbelief, and at their first crisis of faith reject everything you taught them, bathwater, baby, and all.
An honest scientist can even say "Well, we can't disprove a mathematically consistent model of the universe, but it leads to distasteful questions I want to avoid," although maybe he's leaning over the line there, but if you add enough layers of epicycles, you can't really disprove that all heavenly bodies have perfectly circular orbits of a sort, either, and is that really where we want to go? Insisting that your pet theory can't be disproven even though it's so complicated it looks almost exactly like something else we're already using to great effect? At what point did you stop saying "as scientists get more data and construct better models, the truths of Canaanite cosmology and Hebrew biology will become obvious" and start saying "Nothing is holding up the edifice of their errors but a superstructure of lies?"
I can accept that modern science is wrong in some ways, that its conditional "truths" are less accurate than they seem. There have even been times (albeit few; I am not sure if that is good or bad) I have had to hold my beliefs up against doctrine that was new to me and say "Well, I don't see how I could be wrong, but I know that it happens sometimes, and this is clearly an argument that I am," and I've had to change my position. But I am not going to discard the fruits of reason and take up gratuitous assertions that serve my day to day life more poorly while also not helping me spiritually. The "Axis of Evil" in the cosmic microwave background could be evidence that the universe is...well, probably not orbiting a static Earth, but oriented relative to it in some way that is meaningful like how finding a 6000 year old body of a man with no navel would be meaningful; but it might also be a coincidence, or an artifact, or an error in analysis. But what it's not is a smoking gun, and it's not the preponderant straw of evidence that broke the camel's back, either.
These guys aren't just making shit up to fool their consciences while they lure people into hell. These guys are taking what you decry and building your airplanes and skyscrapers and smart phones, they're designing your artificial joints and your suspension bridges. Can you even tell me where the line between here and there is? Have you tried exorcising any of your devices to see if demons have trouble keeping up the charade?
Back off my tangent, relativity is not relativism. Relativity makes your GPS work and can be demonstrated in a high school science lab. Relativism just happened to come along around the same time and pretends to be, ahem, related in order to steal its legitimacy. By perpetuating this confusion, you are doing their propaganda for them.
Jesus was born to humble means in an obscure backwater. Even the Bible tells us people sometimes scoffed at how prosaic He seemed, so there's no sense in debating the point. Why, then, should we reject the possibility that He not only embraced humility all the way down, but also that He embraced it all the way up? Maybe Earth is special like the ancient pagans and Christians and Jews (yes, pagans too! Where's your reluctance to agree with them now?) thought, but just in ways that aren't obvious to us through current technology.
Finally, it helps no one to get the ancient cosmologies mixed up. Pagans tended to think of the Earth as the center of the universe because everything in the sky looked like it was going around the Earth--well, over, but the sun and moon were pretty recognizable, and the planets had patterns of appearance that were pretty predictable even when they didn't have distinctive colors like Mars, so closed loops instead of arcs seemed reasonable. The ancient Jews, on the other hand, viewed Earth as being at the bottom of creation, not even as part of a sphere, with the only thing lower than Earth being hell. So if you're going to go all flat-Earth on us, you have to give up pride of place in exchange for an ignoble configuration that demands things that neither the Bible nor science has room for but can be disproven by two people and a shovel.
And after all that, nothing in the talk was about Mary correcting the empirical errors of contemporary science. Plenty about the miracles surrounding the tilma, some interesting symbolism in the pattern of stars on her mantle, but nothing particularly combating the idea that humanity is meaningless and not just humble. So now I'm sad twice.
And lest we get too prideful in brushing off yet more hordes of squabbling ultracrepidarians, I want to close with a word of warning regarding a comment left on the web site criticizing someone who was defending Copernicus and more modern scientists.
The comment said a few things about the foolishness of listening to modern scientists who basically paint themselves into a corner trying to gin up evidence against God, and then said of Copernicus' defender, "You are not of God."
Someone else chimed in to warn him against judging the fellow, and he responded with "I don't judge, but when someone is wrong, I correct."
No, jerk, you judged, and your smugness may have lost a soul this day. "You put too much stock in the worldly 'wisdom' of men, and not enough in God" is a correction, of sorts. "You are not of God" is a judgment. You can condemn his actions, his words, maybe his thoughts if your'e circumspect about it, but not his person.
