R.I.P. - Paula Haigh

Sad for us, but happy for Paula Haigh, that she passed away very peacefully on October 22, 2015, around 3:00a.m.  A few hours before, Paula announced to the nursing staff that she was going to die and she requested the Last Rites.  Immediately her priests were called and Father Joseph Pfeiffer, her long-time special friend, came to her assistance.  After Fr. Pfeiffer left her, in a very restful state, Paula asked to be put in a wheelchair and she traveled around the nursing home to say good-bye to all the friends she had made in her four-year stay at the Life Care Center.  She informed them that she was going to die very soon, which she did.  They loved and admired Paula, who was so caring and child-like even at the age of 89. 

Paula had pre-planned an immediate burial because she had no family and no money to plan for more.  The Sisters of Charity, at Nazareth, Ky., were special friends of Paula and they were most diligent in carrying out Paula's wishes even though they did not share her Traditional views.  Paula lived at Nazareth Retirement Village for over 20 years before she had to go to the nursing home due to severe congestive heart failure.  Paula is buried in the Sister's cemetery among many hundreds of holy nuns, a few clergy and lay people.  Father Pfeiffer was permitted to offer the Traditional Tridentine Requeim High Mass for her on the grounds near her burial place. 

It was a very beautiful burial day and it appeared that all the Elements which Paula constantly wrote about wanted to participate in her special day.  Paula was seriously ill, even gravely ill many times and we anticipated a very difficult and painful death.  But this was not the case.  God in His Love and Mercy for Paula provided the opposite.  He provided His Best Rewards for her faithfulness to His Truth.  A more detailed account of Paula's life and career will be provided in the future and all of her Creation Research is being recorded and preserved.  Her latest and most comprehensive work on Creation will be published in a few months -- God willing. 

May she rest now because she labored unceasingly, amid great sufferings while she was alive.

Karl Keating - Part 2

Having read carefully all 355 pages of The New Geocentrists, I feel competent enough to answer the question put to me:  What is good about the book?

 

At the end of page 355, I am forced to conclude that there is nothing really positive, i.e., good about the book.  Whenever a compliment or agreement on some truth seems imminent, it is cancelled out with a “not so”, or “it is wrong.”  This amounts to a pattern and can be seen in the title to the third subsection of Part I:  “Convincing but False” (Wow! How can it be?)  This is the stylistic habit of Karl Keating.  Very jolting on the mind.  And its main disadvantage is that it leaves the reader with nothing but negatives, quite hopeless. 

 

Modern science, according to Keating, is essentially agnostic.  I cannot find the page now, but somewhere, you describe the methodology of modern science in such a way that it can never arrive at a truth worthy of absolute certitude.  And this, I would say, is absolutely true:  the incertitude of modern scientific theories is due to their inductive method.  However, and so:  This is the reason why Divine Revelation is absolutely necessary.  And if it is absolutely necessary, then, that Divine Revelation must give us the absolute certitude we require for salvation.  And this certitude is found in Sacra Doctrina.  In the time of St. Thomas, the trio, Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium were not yet separated.  In fact, as an aside, your book is an example of the extreme fragmentation so typical of all things today.  As John Donne said of the Copernican theory, writing his poetry in the 1600’s – “all coherence gone” the center lost…..If he felt it so soon after (1543) , but then he was a poet!

 

Back to the man who was not a poet, but the best example of scientific discourse ever – St. Thomas Aquinas.  For St. Thomas, Sacra Doctrina was the teaching of Divine Revelation gleaned from Scripture and the Fathers and interpreted/endorsed by the teaching Church which was mainly theologians.  Remember the case of Pope John the XXIII, who taught there was no particular judgment, and how he was quickly corrected by the theologians of the Univ. of Paris?  That was Sacra Doctrina in action and so much needed today!  Also, your book seems built on the premise, although you never state it – that Divine Revelation can state or teach one thing, such as an earth-centered cosmos – and all of the natural sciences could hold and teach something quite different, with no consequential effects in the world at large.  I would put it perhaps this way:  you probably would not accept my term Divine Revelation, but substitute whatever.  How can there be a dis-unity in basic doctrine such as cosmology, and not have dire consequences?

 

Grace builds on nature.  And if the nature is full of errors, it is the task of Grace to heal them with Truth.  And the Catholic Faith is a synthesis of truths – both of reason and of faith.  Modernism, as Pope St. Pius X defined it, is a synthesis of all heresies.  It is what I have defined as the Copernican-Darwinian worldview.  Yes, St. Pius X did not include Copernicanism in his synthesis of heresies.  That is a mystery.  The only answer must be that he, too, or the man who wrote Pascendi, was also deceived by the false science stemming from Copernicus.  There is so much that is true in modern science.  I have tried to build a cosmology on it, especially the physics and chemistry of the elements.  I think this is what we must be doing.  We must be building the Catholic , i.e., true synthesis of all truths, both of reason and of faith.  I have been trying to do this during these last 20 or so years. 

 

However, I find more and more difficulty, even though the wonderful principles are and remain clear.  I cannot figure why Sungenis entitled his movie The Principle.  What principle of reason or of faith was it?  You should have told us since he did not! 

 

In conclusion, please let me urge you to read and study the 1^st question of the Summa.  It is absolutely the key to all these problems.  I fault Sungenis for failing to take his stand on St. Thomas’ guidelines for Scripture:  the literal is the basis of all other senses of Scripture.  When Our Lord compared Himself to the Door, it is necessary to know what a door is:  the opening, entrance to a house.  This literal meaning is absolutely necessary for an understanding of His comparison.  The same with all such references.  All figurative significations require an understanding of the literal.  And this literal is always true, it cannot lie.  Because it is based on Reality, the Reality God created in the beginning.  Here go on to Epistemology.  (I once wrote a paper called The Cognitive Loop.)  Very important to be a realist.  Please read my later writings.  I would love to communicate. 

Karl Keating

Dear Mr. Karl Keating:

 

It all comes down to this:

 

Whom do you choose to be the one Father and Head of the human race:

 

1.       A hominid evolved from a population of ape-like creatures; or

2.      The Adam described in Genesis 1-2-3 ?

 

It must be one or the other.

 

It seems to me the basic assumption of all your honorably courteous discussion with us Geocentrists is that you have chosen #1 in the above options.  Because, if you had chosen #2 ….

 

Well, let me take a most obvious consequence, that of language based, also, on the dominion passage (Gen.1:27-28) and Genesis 2:19-20, wherein Adam names all the animals and birds.  In your book, The New Geocentrists, page 174, you ask of Dr. Bouw:  “Does he (Bouw) remove all instrumentality from men, giving them no liberty to form their own language over time?”  You have done a good deal of the necessary homework for this book, Dr. Keating, but you have not done so on this particular point.  It has been experimentally verified that language MUST be LEARNED and that by more than one “teacher”.  Children, for example, learn their native tongue from the family group……..a possible exception was Tarzan who taught himself from books found in his parents’ cabin.  But he had no way to hear the sounds.  And the examples of feral children demonstrate their virtual inability to speak at all given the absence of this teaching group.  I did extensive research on this subject years ago and reported it somewhere. 

 

The conclusion, quite demonstrably proven (excuse the awkward phrasing).  The fact is that language MUST be given to the first man and Scripture implies that Adam (and then Eve) HAD been GIVEN a language.  Adam named all the animals!  That says volumes, not only for Adam’s vocabulary, but also for his infused knowledge of the nature (i.e., substantial form) of each creature created during the first Six Days of the World.  (I have written extensively on these necessary Six literal days.)

 

This may not seem conclusive proof to you that the evidence for language greatly favors the Biblical Adam as our “first parent” – but there are many other considerations also which I haven’t the energy or mental synapses to pursue here.  But all are crucial because the Biblical Adam is a prototype of Christ, Our Lord, in ways that an evolved hominid could never be.  Rather, the hominid choice, as you must see, is a colossal insult to Our Divine Lord and His Immaculate Mother, and this is just what Lucifer, the great counterfeiter and liar, intends!

 

And of course, languages have changed over time, even as all the varieties of dogs, cats, cows and horses also have.  But can you guess what is the analogy with language?  I never could have until I took Father Charles Hart’s course in Thomistic Metaphysics.  While I was studying at Catholic University in the 1950’s, there was a war going on between Father Hart and Fr. McAlister, who taught the course in Logic.  Fr. McAlister believed that Metaphysics was really Logic.  But I have come to see that Metaphysics, the highest of all the sciences, insofar as it descends at all, is much closer to grammar than to the propositions of Aristotelian formal logic of propositions. (Please excuse the redundancy.)

 

In all languages, there is this unchanging contrast:  all languages have nouns and verbs and modifiers.  These realities reflect the substance and accidents of Metaphysics.  And, of course, the nouns presuppose existence.  As do all things presuppose Creation – thus its absolute importance!

 

Thank you for devoting a whole chapter to my work promoting geocentricity.  And perhaps, most of all, for the real honor of linking me with my great friend and mentor, Solange Hertz.  She is, indeed, the Grande Dame of the traditionalist movement – or what remains of it?  Please be assured of my prayers and best wishes that, as St. Thomas More said, “May we merrily meet in Heaven!”  - to his executioner! 

 

PS…I am just on page 174, but if you have not, please look up Redmond O’Hanlon.     

Grammar and Metaphysics - The Catholic Answer to Evolutionary Relativism

History proves that some things never change.  God gave language to Adam.  There are many evidences of this in the second Chapter of Genesis.  But, the most striking of these, is Adam’s naming of the animals. (Gen. 2: 19-20)

 

History has proven that the noun as a part of speech, exists in every language developed since Adam.  All the principles of Metaphysics are found realized in Grammar:  nouns, verbs and all their modifiers are but the names of the things that exist – that have essential natures, that move and that are known to us by their quantities, qualities, relations, time, place, clothing, posture, agency and receptivity.  It is by the nouns, verbs and their modifiers that we record, orally or in writing, the intelligibility of things, and it is by seeking out and describing their causes – Efficient, Final, Material and Formal that we analyze the reality that surrounds us.  Metaphysics is grammar in action.

 

But Logic is something else.  Logic is Reason on the Rational Reflective Mind of man, imposing its own innate or created Order upon the given language.  Not until Aristotle was there even such a thing as the “science”, or better, the art of right reasoning in language.  Aristotle’s” Organon” gave to the world the only true art of reasoning.  And notice that the subject and the verb correspond, not so much to the Metaphysical Substantial Form, but more properly to the subject of the logical proposition or sentence.  It is because Aristotle himself went on to develop the Science of First Principles or the Metaphysics that this latter science of Being, as such, escaped being overwhelmed by the Logic of Propositions or Right Reasoning in and by means of the grammatical, proportional sentence.  The fact remains, however, that the historical record of all languages however much the philologists and linguistic love to emphasize the changes – the historical record clearly demonstrates the absolute stability, the unchanging fact that nouns signify real things in the real world, (unless it is clearly indicated that the references are fictional), that verbs signify actions or motion, and that all modifiers correspond to the nine categories of Accidents, by which the mind knows the Substantial Form or the Genesis kind specified in Genesis One. 

 

All of Reality, in its diverse structures and forms, manifests this stability and immutability of certain forms, not only the bara min., created kinds of Genesis One, but certain natural laws, such as those inscribed in the human conscience and codified in the 10 Commandments;  but also those supernatural laws that are so marvelously spelled out in the Prophecies of the Old Testament. 

 

See The Preparation of the Incarnation by Henry James Coleridge – reprinted 2013 - originally published in 1885, and for the unmistakable distinctions of Grammar from both Logic and Metaphysics.  See Gwynne’s Grammar, by N.M. Gwynne Knopf. 2014

The Soul and Modern Science

There is an Aristotelian-Thomistic Principle that is so absolute, it has no exceptions, but applies to every corporeal creature.  It is the Principle of Hylemorphism that signifies the composite nature of every corporeal being composed of matter and form.  The union of matter and form is so complete, that even when a human being dies, the separation of body and soul is so unnatural that the immortal human soul is never completely happy until the General Resurrection when we get our bodies back!  We know from Theology that God never intended death for us.  Death is solely a punishment for the Original Sin of Adam. 

 

This principle of Hylemorphism extends even to the inanimate kingdom of the Elements.  St.Thomas has a very emphatic statement of this Principle in the First Part of the Summa in an article “Whether There Are Ideas of All Things That God Knows?”  In the Reply to Objection 3, St. Thomas says:  “Plato is said by some to have considered matter as not created; and therefore he postulated not an idea of matter, but a concause with matter.  Since, however, we hold matter to be created by God, though not apart from form, matter has its idea in God – but not apart from the idea of the composite:  for matter in itself can neither exist, nor be known.”

 

And yet, books and articles by the millions are written and presumably read whose main message is that matter is all that exists!  That only matter exists is the main doctrine of materialism, which is the philosophy of atheism and of most evolutionists.  St. Thomas says that not only can matter not exist of itself, that is, without form, but it cannot even be known!  What actually happens, then, is that all their myriads of books and articles are written as if form existed with the matter – because it is the form that is the actuality of the matter, which is only the principle of potency.  It is form that causes the matter to exist in the actuality of the form.  This is clearly demonstrated by a current article in Scientific American for February, 2013.  “Brain cells for Grandmother” by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga et alia, is a current update in the science of memory, in the larger field of neuroscience. 

 

The subtitle of the article reads:  Each concept – each person or thing in our everyday experience – may have a set of corresponding neurons assigned to it.

 

The term “concept”-  traditionally referred to the spiritual idea abstracted by the intellect from the data of sense, specifically from the phantasm, or image, formed by the sensus communis or synthesizing power of an internal sense.  And so we see here a transformation of the word concept from a purely spiritual meaning to something entirely physical or material.  The synthesizing power of the internal sensus communis is commonly referred to as an encoding process of the neurons.  The neurons, of course, are the completely material nerve cells.  Describing the dominant view of neuroscientists today:  “…the collaboration of very large populations of neurons creates meaning.”  Today’s neuroscientists would have us believe that a sufficient number of physical nerve cells by themselves “create meaning”.  Meaning, of course, is something quite spiritual.  It consists of ideas.  But today’s neuroscientists want us to believe that matter cannot only exist and be known, but can even “create meaning” – all by itself!

 

And yet, they get away with it because they write and work as if the soul-form were present.  The atheists do the very same thing.  They live and work and spew forth their venomous theories just as if the First Principles of all existence really did operate – which they do!  And yet, people continue to believe their lies!  Allow me to refer the reader to the landmark work of the late Dr. Erich Christian.  Dr. Christian was a professional communications engineer and he proved, by many experiments, the absolute necessity for a spiritual form we know as the human soul, in order for memories to be stored and recalled.  His work is entitled “Quo Nadis Scientia and was published by the Remnant Press some years ago.  It is true that this present article in Scientific American - documents a case wherein the removal of the hippocampus resulted in the consignment of short-term memories to oblivion.  Which only proves what we already know – that the intellect of man does rely upon sense data, which is physical, for the physical forms act in order to abstract from them the universal idea or concept, which is the sine qua non of all knowledge, and is a product of the spiritual power of the human spiritual soul, the intellect. 

 

That Catholic philosophers and scientists have allowed such treasures of our intellectual tradition as the entire science of Epistemology to fall into oblivion, to the great glee of Modernists – is surely something they will be called upon to answer for.  The Dominican theologian Guerard Des Lauriers. O.P., now deceased, is a particularly surprising example of the misuse of the hylemorphic distinction and composite.  Some years ago, he proposed that the Pope could be materially but not formally, the Pope.  How could this be?  St. Thomas says, in the same Article  (q.16 I, Reply to Objection 4) – that an accident of a subject, added after the completion of the subject, such as the painting on a house, which was not necessarily in the architect’s original idea of the form, could have its own form.  Such would be the case in all human works of art.  And it is true that the Grace of any Sacrament is an accidental form of the subject which is the human soul.  Perhaps this is the way, after all, to envision the charism of the Papal Office:  as a super added Grace of the Episcopacy!  Where are the Thomistic theologians willing and/or able to solve such problems? 

 

AFTERTHOUGHTS

 

History certainly proves that whatever degree of sanctity a man has attained when he receives the grace of the Papacy, that is the degree in which he will grow as he exercises his office.  In other words, barring a very special, super-added, efficacious, even miraculous Grace, the man elected to the papacy will continue to exercise his degree of virtue and especially will he continue in those intellectual virtues and doctrines he has cultivated all during his life.  The Papacy only gives him the unusual opportunity of putting his virtues and ideas into practice in the most influential public way possible, as Head of the entire Church and Vicar of Christ on Earth.  This is what we see most strikingly in Pope Benedict XVI.  All of his theological works written prior to his election as Pope, give clear evidence of a philosophy of Becoming – in contrast to the Traditional, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of Being.  Pope Benedict has set the Church in the evolutionary way of constant becoming – with as much care as possible to maintain at least the appearances of continuity with the past.       

A Challenge from Paula

The Six Days and Irreducible Complexity

 

The same “irreducible complexity” that applies to Michael Behe’s Mousetrap, and to Dr. Duane Gish and God’s Bombardier Beetle, also applies to the Literal 24-Hour Six Days of Genesis One. 

 

I challenge anyone, from any profession or lack of same, to disprove the challenge implied in the above title and following statement. 

 

The Evolutionists assert man’s absence of all necessity in the place he holds in the Darwinian Tree Of Life.  The latest opinion coming from the Darwinian School is that the Tree is better envisioned as a Bush.  In any case, mankind, according to Darwinian Natural Selection, was far from being any kind of necessity for the proper functioning of the Evolutionary Tree or Bush in the Darwinian Scenario for life on Earth. 

Historic Parallels

There is no more plain historical narrative and chronicle than the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, the foundational books of the history of the human race, especially the first three chapters of Genesis.  At the same time, there could be nothing more enigmatically symbolic than the Book of the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible.  This is the consensus of Tradition.  Also, at the same time, the experts are divided on the Scriptural interpretation of certain passages in St. Paul, concerning the time of the appearance and defeat of the Anti-Christ:  Whether he will come before, or after, the period of peace and restoration of the Church.  (See Father Charles Arminjon) - The End of the Present World, originally published in 1881 and newly translated in 2008 and published by Sophia Institute Press.  See pages 56-68.

 

When the experts disagree, who are we to dogmatize?  At the same time, what can be more striking than the Marian identity of the Woman in Genesis 3:15 and Apocalypse 12?  And finally, what can be more terrifying than the contrast of the man, Adam, made in the image and likeness of the infinitely good and gracious Creator-God and that image of the Beast into which the Second Beast breathes his own hellish life – in Satanic mockery of that divine life of sanctifying grace described in Genesis 1:26 and Genesis 2:7.  Apocalypse 12 and 13 tell us in deeply symbolical images, the last chapters of that eternal enmity between Lucifer and the Woman with Her Son set up in Genesis 3:15.  The battle lines are clearly drawn between the two camps.  Apostles of Truth in the Last Days will also be Apostles of Mary and Apostles of Creation.

 

How could it be otherwise, when the synthesis of all heresies, which is evolutionary modernism, is also the very head of the Serpent, which Our Lady will crush in Her Assigned Role as the Immaculate Heart, to rule alongside that of Her Divine Son.  And She knows all things in the knowledge of God, Her Divine Son.  So we can certainly confide all things to Her with perfect trust.