This is a good article but it didn’t devote enough content to irreducible complexity which is the main argument against macroevolution. I actually find this post a bit disingenuous because of that. I know it’s not intended to be a scientific refutation but that doesn’t make it any less incomplete.
Also, Christianity cannot reconcile itself with science. This makes no sense. You cannot believe a man rose from the dead after rotting for 3 days then ascended into Heaven without implicitly accepting Flat Earth Theory. Maybe by “reconcile” you meant “don’t worry about the logical contradictions”?
The point of this wasn't really to deal with specific arguments, as there's plenty of people making plenty of content against things like IC already. I'm dealing more with the general idea of macroevolution (the pejorative) here.
I don't agree that IC is the main argument against it anyways, because baraminology rarely differentiates its "kinds" based on IC, but reproductive barriers. I don't think Meyer would propose a string of IC proteins so separate cats from dogs - he's more worried about bacteria. Again, plenty of content there already.
By reconcile I mean explain. There are plenty of people who try to use science to explain miracles (see Turin Shroud "radioactive blast"). That very subversion of the order Christianity sought to maintain between it and science is really the point of this article.
Okay, I get it now that you explained what you meant by “reconcile”.
Like I said, this was a good article. It doesn’t treat Creationists like retards or subhumans. They sometimes put “real” scientists to shame. Maybe you’ve heard of Jack Horner, who made a fool of himself on a radio show by proving he cares more about not helping Creationists than doing actual science.
I believe the current main argument against macroevolution is time - any proposed mechanism has tested to be magnitudes too slow to reflect any agreed upon timeline. As in any mutation fixation rate as proposed by neodarwinists would take 100x the time that anyone even supposes the earth was around for.
Secondly I think reconciling Christendom with science is easy. I believe human technology is just barely beginning to approach the things Christ did, which he said would happen. Simple cataract surgery can restore sight to the blind and current developments for sensors for the never-sighted are sound. Restoring rotted flesh is gonna be just a few jumps in paradigms away. And so on.
Dr Gariaev proved with ferns and amphibians that DNA is subject to biophotons and that evolution is an expression of the geomagnetic field altering over time. Then they killed him in 2020 when he said this discovery would allow his technology to cure any disease...
Making the problem worse is that the whole idea of Genesis seems to have been inspired by Plato’s Timaeus. In other word, a human creation inspired by a Greek philosophy.
I find that the general subtext of “science says what religion is…” to be appalling, irrelevant of whether or not creationism is a tenable or likely explanation for the origin of life. To say such a thing is basically a concession to materialism or some kind of dishonest “pantheism”, the same philosophies that were more or less instrumental in the exiling of tradition. Treating science or “nature” as a criteria for determining religion is deluded because its entirely consistent of descriptions for phenomena, outside of a more nuanced or philosophized definition of “nature”(which would just be the content of some such thing), nature has almost no normative power in determining what is transcendental or how to reach it. Spirituality and religion are concerned with the subtle elements of human existence, not the visceral. One contextualizes the other and I think you have it backwards. I think that it will always be a fools gambit to try and synthesize religion and science, and or to make metaphysics and science integrated in some holistic fashion, and this is because metaphysical inquiries always go beyond the limits of perception or descriptions of particulars. If you really believe this type of stuff, what grounds do you have to separate yourself from organized evil such as freemasonry or any of the other strange perennial deists and whatnot that feed upon the corpse of modern Christianity?
Sure, you can make this theological distinction between observation and meaning if you'd like, even though Christianity itself hinged solely upon such observations for a time (ie the empty tomb). The problem comes when we assume our observations of phenomena are consistent with the meanings we have developed for ourselves over the centuries, when in fact they do not. A good example mentioned here is the distinction of man from nature by kind rather than degree - this was central to the sense of meaning that propelled Faustian culture, but it just isn't true, and it was natural sciences that informed us of this, not a theologian. Even for St. Francis of Assisi, the best he could do was demand a wolf become a city-dwelling dog.
It's not difficult to find other examples where "visceral", evolutionary realities have always informed meaning and not the other way around, so I don't agree with this at all. Sexual roles/relationships and "pair bonding", kin selection, altruism, aggression, etc. A better argument would be that they are two sides of the same coin, which is the take you see the most in our culture downstream of the Anglo-American tradition. I'm really not even sure if Heidegger would agree with this, as Dasein concerns itself with visceral experiences.
It is as I feared then. The amalgamation of monistic mystics is what brought modernity to the scene. Rather confused by this article. It talks about this ontology not being a kind of pretty or glorified atheism, but it reduces mind to physical elements, denies things like volition, and supposes no liberation from the world, no real ethical reality aside from serving the will of “nature”(?).
It’s also odd that you mention non-duality, buddhism and platonism when these philosophies by and large qualify reality as immaterial and abstract, materiality or matter being a property or illusionary capacity of the spirit or ethereal. They are saying that the world is actually exclusively supernatural, and that nature is a reflective or accidental element. That is a radical departure from saying the world is material and that there is a kind of vital life force to things which is still inanimate, and that there’s no capacity for transcendence or victory over the world.
I think that this is rather confusing because I don’t see classical theism and atheism, or materialism and theism synthesized, more like materialism given enchantment. I have no idea how this will be a formative element of the new world religions or paganism considering that this sort of thing is already status quo for the intellectual powers that be, and has been for some time. Is there any kind of soteriological elements to this philosophy? And kind of proper view about what one is to do? I’m just not sure what a bunch of material facts have to do with religion, even if they’re considered eternal or are afforded an infinite return.
The things you're asking for are almost exclusively Christian in nature. Paganism is phenomenological. It is as it appears to a specific people, or rather a specific ecology. So no, it's not going to have soteriology or "liberation" - there's nothing to be saved from. There's no universal code of conduct - its not a universalist worldview.
Generally you seem to believe that meaning, "religion" has to be a set of metaphysical constructions, independent and superlative of nature. I'm saying that this distinction isn't necessary, and that the ordering is wrong. Observation precedes any and all rationalization. You have to first see red before you can internalize some emotional understanding of what red means. Again, you already DO this for virtually all of your sensibilities. Values of marriage, family, etc are all fundamentally rooted in nature, not because of a tandem orderly-reasoned-divine-nature, but because these things are quite literally intrinsic to our biological existence.
Paganism is, additionally, an experiential religion. As opposed to Revelation. It takes in its immediate surroundings, its conditions, and its relationships and develops its rituals, pantheons, and myths from here. You are correct in stating that the order is reversed, but only in relationship to Christianity. It's not paganism that is the inversion of the natural religiosity of man, it's not monism that has brought "modernity".
I feel like a lot of what is being said is not in any way exclusive to transcendental “universalism” as you call it. Firstly, Mazdaism, various kinds of Hinduism, Platonism and the instrumental bedrock for Platonism, Orphism, all involved a world transcending or “world correcting” teachings. This is not even going into something like Buddhism, but I’ll exclude it and Christianity considering that they would epitomize what you’ve enemized or otherwise come to reject. Even though it is notable that the populations that encountered these religions became immediately infatuated with them and interwove them into their existing cultural ethos and worldview.
More or less I’m not confused about the kind of exclusionary animism you’re adopting, but how it relates to metaphysics. You say that this worldview is phenomenological yet deny that mind is chief of things, that somehow we are not interacting with mental states exclusively and studying mental states exclusively. Thats what would qualify a “spiritual” disposition, mental, ethereal, spiritual, these are all synonyms for the unqualified and indeterminate “consciousness”, its just that you think that really its not independent from denser manifestations or examples(materiality). Monism doesn’t qualify anything spiritual or ethereal, unless designated particularly as “monistic idealism”. Materialism is a kind of monism metaphysically but it suggests that whats ultimately real is inanimate or dead. In that way I actually think the opposite, that its what science cant reach and likely will never reach that serves as a foundation for a new superstition or religion.
Its not that a religion has to preclude noesis for it to be “legit”, its just that it has to satisfactorily answer both metaphysical and existential questions. Otherwise it’s a report about phenomena. The phenomenology of death or something like suffering is entirely impotent without anything to do about it, any kind of right perception or right recognition about it. Considering that this experience of dissatisfaction is the most consistent and ubiquitous for sentient beings, a kind of descriptive account of the cosmos given enchantment or aesthetic enfranchisement seems to not satisfy as a criteria for a new worldview. You had one time written something about axial age religions, but a key element that I noted with that, was that you had ignored the emergent conditions that sowed the seeds for their “life denying” or “universalist” tendencies.
Which is that the early urbanization of previous nomadic people with verb based languages into sedentary people with commerce and abstractive noun-based languages, lead to this kind of “universalism”. Seeing as the suffering was so intense then, and has remained so for millennia, it’s not coincidental then that by and large the most common religious attitude would be in the vein of solving or explaining away the most common experience. I had told my buddy who’s a religious scholar of Hinduism that his interests in revitalizing a pre-puranic and pre-buddhist Aryan worldview would require an entirely new set of material conditions, ones that are nomadic, ones that are totally mythopoetic. The only concession I can afford you whatsoever is that it’s obvious that a psychology and mode of living precedes a philosophy. I think thats science, industrialism and both metaphysical and commercial materialism have done an excellent job of de-literalizing the mythopoetic consciousness of every ancient worldview. In that capacity, I see science as an antagonistic and demystifying force, and it further confuses me as to how you can consider it a criteria or determining factor for religion. When I say that “monism” or this kind of immanent view is responsible for ushering in modernity, I’m talking about the general decay from mundanity with clearly defined superstitions, to mundanity with enchantment. For example, the pastoral existence that the fascists promised the world, one that would come at the cost of legendary bloodshed, was maintained almost exclusively by varieties of theism for millennia. Whether lay polytheism or the monotheism of Christianity, the collective consciousness actually and seriously believed in personalities, founding myths and super-worldly narratives. Whereas modernity is signified by a radical reinterpretation or doing away with these. Even something like the second world war being a major conflict between Hegelians, as I’ve heard it summarized before, is evidential of this. An ontology which moves God from his pedestal and throne to a more immanent and worldly depiction, a crass minded nuance wherein there is “no-thing” beyond the world. Its also to be said that this kind of eclectic immanent “perennialism” is maintained by the visionary luciferian types such as the royal society, freemasons, roriscurians, cambridge club, phi delta phi, club of rome, RAND corp, etc, they actually seriously believe this stuff and have acted as enemies to monarchies and “select niches” of people as you outline or mention here. Spinzoism, Hegelianism, various kinds of deism and naturalistic “monism”, while not outright materialism metaphysically, surely move in that direction and are instrumental in the development of the world we have now. In that way I hardly see this as a solution to modernity, things like nihilism, or the collapse of Christianity and old world Polytheism respectively.
Too much to reply to concisely at this point. Will bullet point what I can.
By "universalism", I'm using Robert Bellah's framework and definition of "world-rejecting religiosity". Buddhism is very clearly in this category (as well as some near-eastern & Greek philosophies), but neither actually influences you or I to the degree Christianity does. More of that here: https://gildhelm.substack.com/p/returning-to-a-world-accepting-religiosity
I'm not really gunning for idealism here, or any other system of "mental states" or problems of consciousness. I am simply stating how, quite literally, the brain works. I don't see any need to pull it into some metaphysical packaging - this is fine enough on its own.
The benefit, or point, of things like Haeckel's Monist League isn't to "respond" to modernity. To me that implies it's a result of mistakes and not just the consequences of our "bargain" - two subtly different things. Ultimately, there is no putting it back in the box for a number of reasons, civilization is not going to revert 2500 years because it suddenly considers that science isn't able to make metaphysical claims. The point is therefore to survive it, and things like monism, paganism, pantheism, etc are the only ones capable of doing it, because their basis is in nature itself. Inquiry into nature therefore only informs those worldviews.
Very good!
This is a good article but it didn’t devote enough content to irreducible complexity which is the main argument against macroevolution. I actually find this post a bit disingenuous because of that. I know it’s not intended to be a scientific refutation but that doesn’t make it any less incomplete.
Also, Christianity cannot reconcile itself with science. This makes no sense. You cannot believe a man rose from the dead after rotting for 3 days then ascended into Heaven without implicitly accepting Flat Earth Theory. Maybe by “reconcile” you meant “don’t worry about the logical contradictions”?
The point of this wasn't really to deal with specific arguments, as there's plenty of people making plenty of content against things like IC already. I'm dealing more with the general idea of macroevolution (the pejorative) here.
I don't agree that IC is the main argument against it anyways, because baraminology rarely differentiates its "kinds" based on IC, but reproductive barriers. I don't think Meyer would propose a string of IC proteins so separate cats from dogs - he's more worried about bacteria. Again, plenty of content there already.
By reconcile I mean explain. There are plenty of people who try to use science to explain miracles (see Turin Shroud "radioactive blast"). That very subversion of the order Christianity sought to maintain between it and science is really the point of this article.
Okay, I get it now that you explained what you meant by “reconcile”.
Like I said, this was a good article. It doesn’t treat Creationists like retards or subhumans. They sometimes put “real” scientists to shame. Maybe you’ve heard of Jack Horner, who made a fool of himself on a radio show by proving he cares more about not helping Creationists than doing actual science.
Dawg nobody thinks Jack Horner is some kind of “fool”
I believe the current main argument against macroevolution is time - any proposed mechanism has tested to be magnitudes too slow to reflect any agreed upon timeline. As in any mutation fixation rate as proposed by neodarwinists would take 100x the time that anyone even supposes the earth was around for.
Secondly I think reconciling Christendom with science is easy. I believe human technology is just barely beginning to approach the things Christ did, which he said would happen. Simple cataract surgery can restore sight to the blind and current developments for sensors for the never-sighted are sound. Restoring rotted flesh is gonna be just a few jumps in paradigms away. And so on.
The time problem as you've described is mentioned at the tail end of the article. Hidden away somewhat, but I did go over Behe/Snoke and Lynch's reply
You’re making the author’s point with this reasoning.
Dr Gariaev proved with ferns and amphibians that DNA is subject to biophotons and that evolution is an expression of the geomagnetic field altering over time. Then they killed him in 2020 when he said this discovery would allow his technology to cure any disease...
No idea who that is or what "biophotons" means but I would've killed him too
Or do you mean the last part as a theory of mind about the jews?
Well you're either evil or stupid or both. That's why.
Interesting. You might like this article.
https://open.substack.com/pub/biofield/p/living-organisms-stop-emitting-light?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=15lwnu
Making the problem worse is that the whole idea of Genesis seems to have been inspired by Plato’s Timaeus. In other word, a human creation inspired by a Greek philosophy.
https://vridar.org/series-index/plato-and-the-biblical-creation-accounts-gmirkin/
I find that the general subtext of “science says what religion is…” to be appalling, irrelevant of whether or not creationism is a tenable or likely explanation for the origin of life. To say such a thing is basically a concession to materialism or some kind of dishonest “pantheism”, the same philosophies that were more or less instrumental in the exiling of tradition. Treating science or “nature” as a criteria for determining religion is deluded because its entirely consistent of descriptions for phenomena, outside of a more nuanced or philosophized definition of “nature”(which would just be the content of some such thing), nature has almost no normative power in determining what is transcendental or how to reach it. Spirituality and religion are concerned with the subtle elements of human existence, not the visceral. One contextualizes the other and I think you have it backwards. I think that it will always be a fools gambit to try and synthesize religion and science, and or to make metaphysics and science integrated in some holistic fashion, and this is because metaphysical inquiries always go beyond the limits of perception or descriptions of particulars. If you really believe this type of stuff, what grounds do you have to separate yourself from organized evil such as freemasonry or any of the other strange perennial deists and whatnot that feed upon the corpse of modern Christianity?
Sure, you can make this theological distinction between observation and meaning if you'd like, even though Christianity itself hinged solely upon such observations for a time (ie the empty tomb). The problem comes when we assume our observations of phenomena are consistent with the meanings we have developed for ourselves over the centuries, when in fact they do not. A good example mentioned here is the distinction of man from nature by kind rather than degree - this was central to the sense of meaning that propelled Faustian culture, but it just isn't true, and it was natural sciences that informed us of this, not a theologian. Even for St. Francis of Assisi, the best he could do was demand a wolf become a city-dwelling dog.
It's not difficult to find other examples where "visceral", evolutionary realities have always informed meaning and not the other way around, so I don't agree with this at all. Sexual roles/relationships and "pair bonding", kin selection, altruism, aggression, etc. A better argument would be that they are two sides of the same coin, which is the take you see the most in our culture downstream of the Anglo-American tradition. I'm really not even sure if Heidegger would agree with this, as Dasein concerns itself with visceral experiences.
Moreover, is your millenarian religion just a kind of biocentric fascism/social darwinism?
https://gildhelm.substack.com/p/ernst-haeckels-religion-of-evolution
It is as I feared then. The amalgamation of monistic mystics is what brought modernity to the scene. Rather confused by this article. It talks about this ontology not being a kind of pretty or glorified atheism, but it reduces mind to physical elements, denies things like volition, and supposes no liberation from the world, no real ethical reality aside from serving the will of “nature”(?).
It’s also odd that you mention non-duality, buddhism and platonism when these philosophies by and large qualify reality as immaterial and abstract, materiality or matter being a property or illusionary capacity of the spirit or ethereal. They are saying that the world is actually exclusively supernatural, and that nature is a reflective or accidental element. That is a radical departure from saying the world is material and that there is a kind of vital life force to things which is still inanimate, and that there’s no capacity for transcendence or victory over the world.
I think that this is rather confusing because I don’t see classical theism and atheism, or materialism and theism synthesized, more like materialism given enchantment. I have no idea how this will be a formative element of the new world religions or paganism considering that this sort of thing is already status quo for the intellectual powers that be, and has been for some time. Is there any kind of soteriological elements to this philosophy? And kind of proper view about what one is to do? I’m just not sure what a bunch of material facts have to do with religion, even if they’re considered eternal or are afforded an infinite return.
The things you're asking for are almost exclusively Christian in nature. Paganism is phenomenological. It is as it appears to a specific people, or rather a specific ecology. So no, it's not going to have soteriology or "liberation" - there's nothing to be saved from. There's no universal code of conduct - its not a universalist worldview.
Generally you seem to believe that meaning, "religion" has to be a set of metaphysical constructions, independent and superlative of nature. I'm saying that this distinction isn't necessary, and that the ordering is wrong. Observation precedes any and all rationalization. You have to first see red before you can internalize some emotional understanding of what red means. Again, you already DO this for virtually all of your sensibilities. Values of marriage, family, etc are all fundamentally rooted in nature, not because of a tandem orderly-reasoned-divine-nature, but because these things are quite literally intrinsic to our biological existence.
Paganism is, additionally, an experiential religion. As opposed to Revelation. It takes in its immediate surroundings, its conditions, and its relationships and develops its rituals, pantheons, and myths from here. You are correct in stating that the order is reversed, but only in relationship to Christianity. It's not paganism that is the inversion of the natural religiosity of man, it's not monism that has brought "modernity".
I feel like a lot of what is being said is not in any way exclusive to transcendental “universalism” as you call it. Firstly, Mazdaism, various kinds of Hinduism, Platonism and the instrumental bedrock for Platonism, Orphism, all involved a world transcending or “world correcting” teachings. This is not even going into something like Buddhism, but I’ll exclude it and Christianity considering that they would epitomize what you’ve enemized or otherwise come to reject. Even though it is notable that the populations that encountered these religions became immediately infatuated with them and interwove them into their existing cultural ethos and worldview.
More or less I’m not confused about the kind of exclusionary animism you’re adopting, but how it relates to metaphysics. You say that this worldview is phenomenological yet deny that mind is chief of things, that somehow we are not interacting with mental states exclusively and studying mental states exclusively. Thats what would qualify a “spiritual” disposition, mental, ethereal, spiritual, these are all synonyms for the unqualified and indeterminate “consciousness”, its just that you think that really its not independent from denser manifestations or examples(materiality). Monism doesn’t qualify anything spiritual or ethereal, unless designated particularly as “monistic idealism”. Materialism is a kind of monism metaphysically but it suggests that whats ultimately real is inanimate or dead. In that way I actually think the opposite, that its what science cant reach and likely will never reach that serves as a foundation for a new superstition or religion.
Its not that a religion has to preclude noesis for it to be “legit”, its just that it has to satisfactorily answer both metaphysical and existential questions. Otherwise it’s a report about phenomena. The phenomenology of death or something like suffering is entirely impotent without anything to do about it, any kind of right perception or right recognition about it. Considering that this experience of dissatisfaction is the most consistent and ubiquitous for sentient beings, a kind of descriptive account of the cosmos given enchantment or aesthetic enfranchisement seems to not satisfy as a criteria for a new worldview. You had one time written something about axial age religions, but a key element that I noted with that, was that you had ignored the emergent conditions that sowed the seeds for their “life denying” or “universalist” tendencies.
Which is that the early urbanization of previous nomadic people with verb based languages into sedentary people with commerce and abstractive noun-based languages, lead to this kind of “universalism”. Seeing as the suffering was so intense then, and has remained so for millennia, it’s not coincidental then that by and large the most common religious attitude would be in the vein of solving or explaining away the most common experience. I had told my buddy who’s a religious scholar of Hinduism that his interests in revitalizing a pre-puranic and pre-buddhist Aryan worldview would require an entirely new set of material conditions, ones that are nomadic, ones that are totally mythopoetic. The only concession I can afford you whatsoever is that it’s obvious that a psychology and mode of living precedes a philosophy. I think thats science, industrialism and both metaphysical and commercial materialism have done an excellent job of de-literalizing the mythopoetic consciousness of every ancient worldview. In that capacity, I see science as an antagonistic and demystifying force, and it further confuses me as to how you can consider it a criteria or determining factor for religion. When I say that “monism” or this kind of immanent view is responsible for ushering in modernity, I’m talking about the general decay from mundanity with clearly defined superstitions, to mundanity with enchantment. For example, the pastoral existence that the fascists promised the world, one that would come at the cost of legendary bloodshed, was maintained almost exclusively by varieties of theism for millennia. Whether lay polytheism or the monotheism of Christianity, the collective consciousness actually and seriously believed in personalities, founding myths and super-worldly narratives. Whereas modernity is signified by a radical reinterpretation or doing away with these. Even something like the second world war being a major conflict between Hegelians, as I’ve heard it summarized before, is evidential of this. An ontology which moves God from his pedestal and throne to a more immanent and worldly depiction, a crass minded nuance wherein there is “no-thing” beyond the world. Its also to be said that this kind of eclectic immanent “perennialism” is maintained by the visionary luciferian types such as the royal society, freemasons, roriscurians, cambridge club, phi delta phi, club of rome, RAND corp, etc, they actually seriously believe this stuff and have acted as enemies to monarchies and “select niches” of people as you outline or mention here. Spinzoism, Hegelianism, various kinds of deism and naturalistic “monism”, while not outright materialism metaphysically, surely move in that direction and are instrumental in the development of the world we have now. In that way I hardly see this as a solution to modernity, things like nihilism, or the collapse of Christianity and old world Polytheism respectively.
Too much to reply to concisely at this point. Will bullet point what I can.
By "universalism", I'm using Robert Bellah's framework and definition of "world-rejecting religiosity". Buddhism is very clearly in this category (as well as some near-eastern & Greek philosophies), but neither actually influences you or I to the degree Christianity does. More of that here: https://gildhelm.substack.com/p/returning-to-a-world-accepting-religiosity
I'm not really gunning for idealism here, or any other system of "mental states" or problems of consciousness. I am simply stating how, quite literally, the brain works. I don't see any need to pull it into some metaphysical packaging - this is fine enough on its own.
The benefit, or point, of things like Haeckel's Monist League isn't to "respond" to modernity. To me that implies it's a result of mistakes and not just the consequences of our "bargain" - two subtly different things. Ultimately, there is no putting it back in the box for a number of reasons, civilization is not going to revert 2500 years because it suddenly considers that science isn't able to make metaphysical claims. The point is therefore to survive it, and things like monism, paganism, pantheism, etc are the only ones capable of doing it, because their basis is in nature itself. Inquiry into nature therefore only informs those worldviews.