Gab@StFerdinandIII - https://unstabbinated.substack.com/
Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
Scientism is the use of technology and ‘science’, much of it apocryphal and fraudulent to completely manage humans across all the functions of social and civilised life. Scientism echoes Mussolini’s rule that nothing lies outside the state. In this regard Scientism and totalitarian-technologism has nothing to do with the artificial divides of political ideology, the ‘left vs right’ chimera, the various ‘parties’ who offer uni-party nostrums, nor between Communism and Capitalism in their pure states. The Corona fascism and the ‘Great Reset’, to ‘Build Back Better’, makes all of this rather obvious. All parties, all ideologues, from across the entire spectrum of human political-sociological beliefs, were mostly united in their support, much of it continuing, for complete civilisational lockdown, imprisonment, camps for the supposed ill or unstabbed, endless programmes of stabbinations with poisons from a criminal industry, face nappies, distancing and endless societal destruction and dystopia. The Rona technocratic-Scientism was fully supported across the entire array of political beliefs.
An elaboration of ‘The Science’ issues from the Communist Henri Saint-Simon, who in the 18th century proposed that ‘men of science’ (women were excluded), should rule the world. Simon’s belief was that the ‘men of science’ using the ‘scientific method’, models, experiments and factual inductive and deductive reasoning could predict the future, whilst resolving current issues afflicting society. He was an early proponent of ‘scientist’ as the uber-intelligent, objective, truth teller, dedicated to honest inquiry and ‘progress’. How his Communist beliefs would support such a fantastical implementation of ‘The Science’ and remain uncorrupted by political and social theology, nor how it would acquire the wealth and leisure to pursue these noble goals, is never explained by Simon. But Simon was late in his assessment. The philosophy of machines and mechanics is found in Francis Bacon, Descartes and Isaac Newton. In their theologies, gone is the intricate God-created handiwork of human nature and composition. God was simply a clock maker who made his machines and walked away. Mechanical physics was the new ‘natural law’, supplanting God-created natural law rights, with robotic processes. The ‘Enlightenment’ and its endless propaganda of ‘progress’ initiated the move away from human-centricity to machine automation, proposing through Darwin and others that humans are not unique, but merely hairless apes and worse than a cancer for Gaia. The Free Masons and others took up this battle cry, forming associations and closed groups dedicated to the eradication of Christianity, and the imposition of ‘reason’ as the only governing force in human affairs. The French Revolution, a colossal disaster in every sense, was a volcanic eruption of atheist-‘rationalist’ theology against the medieval-early modern Christian world. Its vast destructive effects echoed in the philosophies found in Marx, Lenin, Stalin and even the National Socialists of Germany. The state and its experts would be uber-alles. There was no room for the spiritual, immaterial or faithful.
Supporters of Scientism show no allegiance to a single flag of socio-theological belief. Capitalists like William Hearst (media), Henry Ford, the Rockefeller family, Bill Gates, members of the World Economic Forum, members of the Trilateral Commission including the Clintons and Al Gore, captains in Finance, Energy and Transportation and a plethora of billionaires at Davos, the Club of Rome, or Bilderberg meetings, ostensibly ‘free market’ in their views, are in fact, apostles of Scientism, as espoused by the various powerful groups they support and participate in. All of the aforementioned entities demand a ‘Scientocracy’ or rule by an elite using technology to control the vast human mass. The non-science of Corona was an attempt or pilot project at just such a construct.
At the supposed other end of the philosophical line, we have Communist China which has erected a social-credit-system based on resource consumption, socially accepted views mapped to behaviour and compliance to state wishes. A high score permits some mobility, travel, and access to good education and jobs. A low score constrains the individual, reduces opportunities, and demands more state surveillance of that person’s daily activities. The CCP is just slightly ahead of Western countries in the usage of technology to impose totalitarian governance, much of it based on the ‘science’ of resource usage and management. Managing ‘health’ is also a path to full societal control and is already being married to ‘climate change’ and other apocryphal ‘concerns’ over Gaia or the planet. The end goal is resource control and reduction of activity. Controlling energy and resources has always been a key platform plank for Scientism, espoused as long ago as 1932 in the USA, and developed as programme blueprint in 1934 by Technology Inc who was the first to come up with a social credit system based on energy consumption and resource usage, along with compliance to ‘expert’ demands and ‘new’ social norms and expectations.
Critics of scientism also come from across the vast spectrum of political ideology. They range from beliefs around the communal to the individual, from Mary Shelley and John Maynard Keynes to F. A. Hayek, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. F. Kennedy and physicist Michael Polanyi. Free market enthusiasts mingle with Communists such as HG Wells in their warnings against the technology-totalitarian ‘expert-led’ state. Huxley and Orwell, along with many others wrote that technology would be used to dehumanise, manage, and eliminate human individuality and then eventually, homo sapiens itself. The World Economic Forum openly discusses ending the human species and replacing it with transhumanist cyborgs, collectively managed by implanted chips connected to high-speed networks and ‘smart cities’, where every movement and thought is tracked, traced and analysed. You will own nothing, and you will rent or service the usage of everything and your life will be determined by a social credit score and your compliance. Private property and private associations outside the control of the technocratic elite will not be permitted.
This looming catastrophe was on full display during the Corona Fascism, itself a pilot project for more and similar endeavours, many of them undoubtedly to mix health or ‘virus’ scamdemics, with the howling against plant-food and ‘climate change’. The technocratic elite found in the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, the Club of Rome and other billionaire gatherings, operate as a shadow government, using their power and leverage to impose their Scientism views on unsuspecting and largely oblivious citizens. Countries and their laws matter little. Various UN declarations have destroyed border control and reach into cities regardless of national laws, in areas such as ‘sustainable development’ or ‘asylum rights’. International fora and their endless array of agreements have destroyed the nation state. A small group of uber billionaires and their closed ‘Masonic lodges’ or similar, control much of the media, trade and finance in the world.
As the Americans are wont to say, a ‘New World Order’ premised on Scientism and Scientocracy, is upon the globe. This is a spiritual and religious battle as much as a material and physical confrontation. Unless people engage in faith, spiritual exercises, and gain strength from prayer and the immaterial it is difficult to see how a Scientocratic enslavement can be avoided. It has long been in the planning, at least a hundred years, and can date its antecedents back to the Free Masons, and their still very active lodges and groups dedicated to the destruction of Christianity and freedom.
Corona should have shaken many of the slumbering awake. But as we all know, memories are short, the full-throated roar of terror, based on a fraudulent panic and the end of the world propaganda and the relentless programming by the state and those in power, usher in more demands for governments, ‘The Science’. ‘the experts’, and the UN to ‘do something’. Such whimpers and cries for help will be heard again in the not-so-distant future.
This is not a book about the Five Ways to prove God’s existence as developed by Saint Thomas Aquinas. There is a similarity in the methods involved by Feser, a well-known Christian philosopher who hearkens back to the truths and validity of Scholasticism, summarised and canonised by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Two of the proofs are found in Aquinas and three are related but not explicitly given by the great Catholic theologian and philosopher. These arguments used by Feser are inspired and discussed by Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas and Leibniz. Feser accepts the Aristotleian proof of God’s existence but does not use Aristotle’s own defence but elaborates using Aristotelian logic to develop a related but deeper proof of God’s existence. He does something similar with the aforementioned five philosophers.
Feser uses these five philosophers, devoting a chapter to each. He presents the informal statement of an argument in two phases, arguing initially for the existence of something defined concretely such as ‘an uncaused cause of the existence of things’ and a second phase ascribing the description to key divine attributes, including unity, eternity, immateriality and omnipotence. Feser attempts to avoid unnecessary technical detail and vague digressions.
An example is Chapter 1 on Aristotle. This begins with the fact that there is real change in the world. Change is the actualisation of change. No potential would be actualised unless there is something which can actualise the change, without itself being actualised. This means there must be a pure ‘actualizer’ an unmoved mover, as Aristotle stated about God. Aristotle discusses this logic in book 8 of his Physics and book 12 of his Metaphysics. Later Aristotelians such as Aquinas developed their own versions including the Saint’s own ‘5 ways’ to summarise the key arguments using somewhat archaic ancient notions about the movement of heavenly spheres. Feser utilises the modern conceptions of motion and energy to defend Aristotle’s system.
Each chapter supports the 5 proofs of God’s existence by looking at Neo-Platonism (the One, divine simplicity and perfection in the divine mind), Augustinianism universals (humanness, rejection of Plato’s third realm of forms, a systemic presentation based on Leibniz), Thomistic proof of God’s existence (distinction between essence or what the thing is, or its existence the fact it exists), elaborating Aquinas’ ‘On Being and Essence’ the paradigmatic argument for God’s existence. Feser’s last chapter is the rationalistic proof of God’s existence using the principle of sufficient reason. The last two chapters deal with the rationality of conservation in which the world could not exist without God sustaining it; and the addressing of various criticism of natural theology.
The book is the most comprehensive modern defence, reaching back through Neo-Scholasticism to medieval scholasticism and pagan philosophers and scientists. Since the age of the poorly named ‘Enlightenment’ these proofs, arguments and science are simply ignored. The poverty of modern philosophy is that there is no debate with the truths and proofs from the past. They are simply ignored or debased and dismissed. There is much to admire in the line of Neo-Scholasticism and the recrudescence of ancient verities and knowledge. This is probably the best one volume demonstration of God’s existence using millennia of knowledge.
A brilliant book which provides a first-class education to any who want to understand the complexity of Christian reasoning in proving or providing the ‘proofs’ of God’s existence. Many great, but certainly not all, Christian philosophers and their detractors are covered (21 in total). Levering covers the Patristic era, the Reformation and ‘Enlightenment’ eras, along with the 19th and 20th centuries. In so doing he competently and arrestingly manages the key doctrines, figures, and proofs of those who demonstrate in various ways the existence of God, and those who oppose the very idea of God, or declare that such proofs do not exist.
Once striking fact in the modern world, made very clear by Levering, is the almost complete ignorance of modern ‘philosophers’, scientists, atheists or deists, on the construction and logic, indeed complexity and detail of the actual arguments made by Christian theologians and metaphysicians, who merged various strands of pagan Greek-Romano beliefs, science, naturalism and rationalism, with Christian dogma and revelation, to scaffold various, and at times quite different ‘proofs’ of God’s existence. When you read a modern atheist’s dismissal of God’s existence and their sloppy, ignorant and often times intentionally deceitful ‘interpretations’ of what Christian philosophers and scientists actually said, it is clear that there is no engagement of a priori arguments by the moderns about God’s existence. There is just cleavage and avoidance of the topic altogether, an impoverishment of education and learning, further highlighting the tawdry culture of our modern world, the lack of philosophical rigour, and the determination not to know truth or any reality outside of the physical.
Before endeavouring to engage with the actual men from Tertullian, through Calvin and to Barth, Levering devotes some insight and energy into describing ‘scientism’, or the cult of ‘science’. Levering: “When Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow claim that God’s existence is no longer plausible because all things could have come forth from the quantum law of gravity, they fail to recognise, as Hart says, that the issue is ‘the very possibility of existence as such, not only of this universe but of all the laws and physical conditions that produced it.’ Indeed. The existence of anything is the point. There should be nothing. Hawking chatters about spontaneous generation creating all life. Abiogenesis and spontaneous generation are proven to be impossible and about as ‘anti science’ a position as it is possible to attain. The complexity of just one protein cannot be explained by chance and is mathematically impossible to have occurred in nature by random events.
Levering mentions Richard Dawkins, who utterly fails to grasp, either on purpose or through ignorance and mental sloth, the a priori, detailed, and variegated proofs of God’s existence. Dawkins tries to rubbish St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century intellect who synthesised Church theology, Neo-Platonism, and Aristotelian naturalism) without even bothering to understand the basic ideas of Thomism (p. 210). A core premise of Thomism is the ‘Pure Act’ which acts on all objects but is itself unmovable and infinite. He is not arguing or proposing a finite Deistic God who stands in the natural order of things as wrongly envisioned by Dawkins. Rather the real crux of Thomism is to account for motion/change in beings in which there is an evident mix of potency and act, for which reason they cannot account for their own actuality. The Pure Act is not put into motion by any other as imagined by Dawkins.
The ignorance of Dawkins and Hawking provides an excuse for many not to believe in God. Rituals, prayers, reading, understanding the corpus of the Catechism is hard work. Few want to invest in it when they can point to the lack of proof of God’s existence as evinced by ‘popular science’ and popular culture. Levering quote and footnotes the notable philosopher Roger Scruton (Face of God) (p. 216), who states that the main question which is unanswered by modern science is ‘the topic of contingent being’, or the ‘being qua being’. As David Hume recognised it is unbelief which is irrational, ‘it makes sense to believe in reason and God, and it may make a kind of nonsensical sense to believe in neither, but it is ultimately contradictory to believe in one but not the other.’ Unlike atheist claims there is no physical or biological evidence to rule out God, quite the opposite. Complexity, order, the biological world, a mind, a conscience, a heart, a brain, DNA, the stars, the Sun….all point to a creator of a Pure Act, removed from a first cause, but omnipotent in design, natural laws, scientific and mathematical laws, and imparting the creation of something. As Levering proves, there is no rigorous thinking in Atheism.