Science, Thomism, and America First
Science, Thomism, and America First
By Professor G. Royper
I've recently discovered the very amusing content of Jon Zherka. Zherka enthusiastically defends a variety of theories in eccentric fashion, insisting that he'd stake his life and all his possessions on the Earth being flat. While Zherka makes for quality entertainment, I do think it's important to separate memes from reality. Some of Zherka's fans have claimed that acceptance of scientific theories is equivalent to the infamous conservative refrain that "Democrats are the real racists!" The implication is that anything short of a total rejection of scientific knowledge is essentially conceding to the scientific world view of the left, and just another way that conservatives will typically try to prove themselves to be more liberal than liberals.
The error in this line of thinking can be seen simply by looking at the history of the Church. It has never been held that a Catholic must reject the obviousness of physical differences between races or the natural preference we have for our own blood relations (St. Thomas affirmed the opposite in fact). This belief is genuinely one from the modern-Judaic worldview that rose to prominence with the New Left of the 1960's. When it comes to the natural sciences, however, there is a long and fruitful relationship with the Church. The patron saint of science doesn't come from the 20th century, it's St. Albert the Great, the mentor of St. Thomas, who wrote extensively on physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography and just about every field of study we would nowadays list under "science". He is credited with the discovery of arsenic and the photosensitivity of silver nitrate, which paved the way for photography. St. Thomas himself, in the very first question of the Summa, refers to the fact that both an astronomer and physicist can prove that the world is round. In his discussion of the creation story, St. Thomas repeatedly cites scientific discoveries to aid his analysis, which I will elaborate on later.
The main conflict seems to come from the fact that modernists consider science to be the only valid way to seek truth. Much has been written on how this is obviously false and that science is simply a means of understanding and appreciating God's creation. As St. Albert the Great says, "Every science and knowledge proceeds from God." To insist on simply taking the exact opposite view of whatever the left believes is how conservatives ended up worshipping the police after BLM, and is not an effective path to truth. So how should we reconcile science and faith? St. Thomas provides a guide when he quotes St. Augustine in saying that we should always hold scripture to be true, but it can be true in different ways, such as literally or metaphorically. We should not hold to an interpretation that can be proven false, both because it's false, but also because it makes believers looks ridiculous and hinders evangelization. Augustine expanded on this frustration during a commentary on Genesis:
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”
Augustine's words are remarkably prescient when considering the plan of Cass Sunstein, a high-level Obama official who in 2008 suggested that the government could combat the spread of conspiracies on the internet by infiltrating conspiracy websites and planting ridiculous theories to delegitimize and divert attention from the real ones. The swift arrival of Qanon after Pizzagate seems to be an example of this, and the rise of the Moon Landing Hoax theory, one of the few major ones that points no fingers at the Jews, is likely another. We should be wary of insisting that the Bible supports absurd theories that will have the effect on evangelization bemoaned by St. Augustine, and probably cheered by Sunstein.
On the Cosmos
"I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit..."
-John 5:15
This metaphorical language used by Jesus is one of many examples of metaphorical language used throughout the Bible. In the words of St. Thomas "It is befitting Holy Writ to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things." Taking a purely literal reading of Genesis is not something St. Thomas or St. Augustine did, and is primary associated with the heavily Jewish influenced Evangelical movement. Nonetheless, there is a strain of the America First movement that insists the firmament is referring to an impenetrable dome, stretched over a flat Earth. St. Thomas did not have access to satellites or space travel, but he did not need NASA to oppose this interpretation. In the Summa (1, Q68), St. Thomas analyzes the second day of creation, where it is written: "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters... And God called the firmament Heaven."
It is important to note that when people in Biblical times and the Middle Ages referred to "heaven", they were not always referring to the spiritual heaven where God resides. The Hebrew name for heaven is thought to be derived from a word meaning "on high." St. Thomas describes how there are multiple heavens (1, Q68, A4), one of which is the "empyrean heaven", the spiritual one that we think of, and another is the "starry heaven," a natural, material heaven, that we would call space. It is this starry heaven that St. Thomas points to as the firmament.
St. Thomas goes on to discuss the waters around the firmament, and he believes that the word "water" is being used by Moses metaphorically, so that he can make himself understood by his scientifically ignorant audience. Water, in this case, is used to evoke the transparency of the actual substance. St. Thomas believed that the water above the firmament is the formless matter that Medieval’s believed was beyond the stars (this isn't far from our current view of what lies at the edge of or outside our universe), the water under the firmament is also formless matter, and it becomes our atmosphere and the seas on the third day. The "firmness" of the firmament refers to a firm boundary, and something material rather than simply abstract. Augustine held a similar view, but favored the explanation that the firmament was among the clouds, and the firmness was referring to the density of air.
In either view, there's no reason to think that the firmament is something that we cannot penetrate in any way. However, just because we can travel into the firmament, doesn't necessarily mean we should. The Russian Cosmist movement of the USSR, and notable rocket scientists such as Werner Von Braun, saw space travel as a way to search for philosophical answers. Attempting to leave Earth to find meaning in life, when God has given it to us already, is the Faustian pinnacle of man's hubris. This isn't to say that space travel does not have value from a scientific standpoint, however.
It would not be until roughly 300 years after St. Thomas's death that the Catholic Cleric, Nicholas Copernicus, would present his theory of Heliocentrism. While Thomas was not familiar with the theory, he did present some hints as to what he might've thought of it. While discussing how it can be true that the sun and moon are called the "two great lights" when astronomers have proved that there are stars larger than the moon, St. Thomas quotes Chrysostom in saying "The two lights are called great, not so much with regard to their dimensions as to their influence and power. For though the stars be of greater bulk than the moon, yet the influence of the moon is more perceptible to the senses in this lower world. Moreover, as far as the senses are concerned, its apparent size is greater." In response to those in the Church who opposed Heliocentrism on the grounds that Joshua is recorded to have "stopped the sun," St. Thomas may have given the answer that the sun was stopped according to Joshua's perception, even if it was the Earth stopped in actuality. We still say "the sun rose" or "the sun set" to this day, despite believing in an immobile sun.
From a symbolic perspective, I believe Heliocentrism would have more value as well. The sun has long represented God, and it's quite poetic to think that from our perspective, God revolves around us, but in actuality, we revolve around God. This can also apply to the order of creation. It's been remarked before how the order of creation aligns almost exactly with our modern understanding. First comes light (big bang), then space and stars, water and planets, plants (simple organisms), the sun and moon, fish, birds, mammals, and finally humans. The only part of this that seems out of order is simple life coming before the sun. However, we now know that the sun was far less luminous to the Earth when life began, so much so that it seems Earth should have been frozen. So from the perspective of life on Earth, the sun did not exist yet.
I should add something about the half-serious/half-trolling claim that the Earth is flat. This is pretty self-evidently inaccurate just based on the fact that all of our navigational maps are based on the world being round, and ships and planes would run into massive number of issues if they were attempting to navigate a disc with globe-based maps. Anyone with even a sailboat and an odometer can verify that the distance between London and New York is roughly the same as between South Africa and Argentina, as our globe maps say. On the flat Earth map though, the Southern Hemisphere trip would be almost three times the distance because you'd be traveling around the edge of the disc, rather than the center (map below).
The fact that everyone in the Southern Hemisphere can look directly south and see the stars rotating around the South Pole poses a massive issue as well. South on a flat Earth would not be a single pole, but rather 360 degrees around the edge of the disc, so someone looking due south in Australia would be looking in an entirely different direction as someone looking due south in Argentina or South Africa.
The Ancient Greeks weren't even aware of the southern hemisphere, but still figured out the world was round based on basic phenomenon. Along with the impossibility, believing in this would reduce God's creation from an unfathomably vast universe into an oversized snow globe, that seems to function exactly as we'd expect a round earth to, but actually only appears that way due to a variety of convoluted mechanisms.
On Modern Science
Another major question is in regard to the motives of scientists. While we can assume that the Heliocentrism of the Catholic Clergyman, Copernicus, or the genetic science of the Augustinian Friar, Mendel, were not created for the purpose of attacking or undermining faith, this is less certain when it comes to modern theories. We can see with the Holocaust, that historical "fact" can certainly be manipulated for political reasons. Could the same happen with scientific theories? It certainly could, but we should not reflexively dismiss all modern science, lest we fall into the trap that Augustine warned of clinging to a theory that may one day be proven false.
Evaluating them critically is the best path forward. If scientists have put forward a lot of evidence for a theory, we have to evaluate the likelihood that it's all been faked in a grand conspiracy. That's not impossible, but if the conspiracy requires a large number of people to actively and continuously fake new discoveries, with no credible people calling them out on this, we should conclude that a conspiracy is unlikely. Compare this with Holocaust Denial. Questioning the Holocaust will result in your life being destroyed at minimum, in Europe you'll be jailed. Despite this, many credible people have publicly challenged the narrative. High level WWII military intelligence officers like John Beaty and Revilo Oliver, prominent historians such as David Irving, the top expert on gas chamber construction, Fred Leuchter, the list goes on. Questioning a major scientific theory will usually result in no more than mockery, so if no credible people have challenged it, that's a sign that it's likely true. On top of this, Holocaust "study" is largely based on a single fraudulent event, the "evidence" at the Nuremburg trials. If, say, Dinosaurs were fake, this would require fossil discoveries to be faked on a regular basis, all around the world, for the last century. Again, I suppose it's not impossible, but it would be unprecedented.
The most controversial modern theory is the Darwinian theory of evolution. Darwin himself was not an especially faithful man, and his proteges have frequently used the theory as a bludgeon against Christians. However, there is also considerable evidence for evolution, such as the development of anti-biotic resistant bacteria and pesticide resistant insects, as well as the fossil record showing that as we go further back in time, creatures get progressively more distant from the ones we know today. The method of carbon dating seems to confirm that the world is not, in fact, 6,000 years old. The subject of human evolution is even more controversial, but on an intuitive level, it does make sense that some human genetic traits would ensure a greater chance of survival in some environments as opposed to others. For example, the mountain-dwelling Tibetans have a larger lung capacity.
Pope Pius XII, when commenting on evolution, pointed out that there is a distinction between the creation of the soul, which is created by God instantaneously, and the body, which comes from pre-existing matter. The way in which that pre-existing matter developed into its current form would not seem to be important, which is why he did not forbid evolutionary research. Accepting evolution would raise a few questions regarding Genesis, however. I think we can take a nuanced position on some of the early stories in Genesis. We don't have to say that they are merely allegories that never happened at all, or that they provide a 100% accurate historical account. As St. Thomas says clearly in his analysis of Creation, Moses is speaking to ignorant people, and has to convey these truths in a way that they will understand. The first issue, as Darwin himself pointed out, is the brutality of the natural selection process. Wouldn't this contradict the idea of disharmony being introduced by original sin? Not necessarily, as Classical Theist discusses in his excellent video on evolution, Louis Bouyer points out how disharmony was actually introduced into the cosmos by the primordial fall of the angels.
So, who were Adam and Eve in this case? Even our current scientific narrative acknowledges that there was a massive, unexplained leap in the intelligence of proto-humans at some point, despite this providing little initial evolutionary advantage. It seems to fit quite well that prior to this leap, God inserted a "rational soul" into the embryos of two of these proto-humans. With their newfound reason, they were quickly tempted to sin and separated themselves from God, resulting in the chaotic and brutal human society that would follow. Some have claimed that this would take away the uniqueness of Mary as the Immaculate Conception, but there would still be a distinction since Mary was born without sin to sinful beings, whereas Adam and Eve would've been born to sinless sub-rational proto-humans.
Another thing to think about is the story of Noah and his children. Some of the concepts involved here correspond quite well with our current understanding, such as the idea of Noah having three children, one populating Europe, one Asia, and one Africa. Before it became anathema, racial science determined that there was three major races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid), located in Europe/West Asia, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The Flood would also seem to correspond with the large rise in sea level that resulted at the end of the Ice Age.
How about the curse of Ham, whose descendants are in Africa? The current evolutionary theory has humans originating in Africa, this would seem to contradict the idea of Ham's descendants being cursed and changing as a result. If humans were originally Negroids, it would actually be the other races who changed. However, in Ron Unz's article analyzing the book "Erectus Walks Among Us", he shows how it would make far more sense that modern humans actually originated in Eurasia, and then a portion of them were pushed into Africa by the Ice Age. It makes little sense that humans would leave the hospitable African climate for the frigid Europe, and the cold winters of Eurasia would be more likely to provide the selective pressure necessary for the development of intelligence. These humans then interbred with the large population of proto-humans (Home Erectus) in Africa, resulting in the lower intelligence that we see in African populations today. This would essentially be the "Curse of Ham." This would make even more sense when looking at the Jews. Unz persuasively argues in another article that modern Jews are the descendants of Carthaginian Canaanites. In Genesis, despite Ham committing the crime, it was Canaan who was directly cursed. Canaan avoided the physical curse of Ham, and his descendants ended up settling the modern day semitic region instead of Africa. However, Canaan received a worse curse, a moral one, and his descendants were cursed to live in the evil of the Canaanite religion, the Carthaginian religion, and finally, the modern Judaic/Canaanite hybrid religion.
It has become an entrenched legend that Columbus' peers believed he would fall off the edge of the earth during his 1492 journey. St. Thomas's comments at the beginning of the Summa show this for the myth that it is, educated Europeans had known the Earth was round since Ancient Greek times. However, this didn't stop Protestants from using this myth in attacks against the supposed ignorance of the Catholic Church. In an era where the sons of Canaan have established an occupying regime on our nation, it is more important than ever to critically evaluate whether a theory is bringing us closer to the truth, or is the product of Sunstein or one of his co-ethnics.