Absolute Truth and False Absolutism

A good theory must not only explain the data, but it cannot in the process "unexplain" things that we bloody well know to be true, as Colonel Beaglehole puts it. Obviously natural selection explains many things. However, if elevated to an all-powerful, all-encompassing paradigm, it unexplains so much that it quickly transitions from science to just bad philosophy. And yet, as with global warming, or "gender studies," or "diversity," or multiculturalism, or the homosexual agenda, or so many other hobbyhearses of the death culture, there is considerable pressure on all of us to go along with the Darwinian program on pain of not just being wrong, but being bad -- a telling clue about the unscientific nature of this moralistic exercise in mind -- and spirit -- control.

One of the ways activists achieve their aim is through a kind of mindlessly repetitive group pressure that amounts to bullying, something Al Gore has become famous for, what with his repeated insistence that there is a scientific consensus about manmade global warming. One does not argue a scientific point by bellowing that "everyone believes it," but this is increasingly the tactic of leftist agenda-driven science. No one has to argue about the existence of gravity by insisting that everyone believes in it. Rather, its existence can be demonstrated. Belief doesn't enter into it. The belief that poverty causes crime (or jihad), or that homosexuality is an inalterable genetic condition, or that men and women have identical abilities -- these and so many others are just religious dogmas of the left.

After all, this is why no one asks if you know about global warming. Rather, they ask if you believe in it. No one will have to ask if you believe in it if and when it can actually be proven. And even then, the questions of whether it is a wholly bad thing, or what, if anything, to do about it, are completely separate.

Likewise, no one would have to ask if you "believe in evolution" if it could be established as fact instead of theory. (And I am speaking, of course, of the logically self-refuting extreme reductionism of natural selection, not evolution itself; obviously the cosmos evolves, the whole question being how.)

Again, just as the left has no interest in ending racial discrimination -- indeed, they are its only organized advocates -- committed leftists have little interest in science itself unless it can be used to promote leftist ends. Thus, their attraction to global warming is political, not scientific. Global warming hysteria just happens to be an outstanding way to assault the free market system, to vastly increase the size of government, to diminish liberty, and to erode our sovereignty under the guise of "international law," perfect for leftist aims.

Just as reductionistic natural selection is a bullying tactic to try to make people feel foolish about belief in God, environmental hysteria is a way to displace the Judeo-Christian system of morality with a kind of flatland substitute. Only in such a bizarro world -- for it is literally turned upside down in vertical space -- can people perceive the United States as immoral and the U.N. as moral.

In the real world, the U.N. is a disgraceful swamp of absolute moral depravity run by criminals, tyrants, and genocidal beasts, whereas the United States is the most decent and moral nation that has ever existed. In fact, it is so liberal and open that it even allows the U.N. to exist within its borders, whereas the U.N. would never allow decency to exist within its halls, unless it were accidental -- for the U.N. is essentially rotten and accidentally good, whereas the U.S. is the converse. The U.N. ejected John Bolton in the same way a healthy person ejects a toxin from his system. For he was toxic to their evil.

But again, if we use the new faux morality of radical environmentalism, the left is able to achieve its end of depicting the United States as evil and the U.N. good, which is quite an accomplishment. In a stroke, it makes the luciferic system that opposes global spiritual evolution (of which the U.N. is only a small part) operate that much more efficiently. After all, if the left actually cared about the issue, they would spend all their time vilifying China. For that matter, if they cared about "refugees" and "occupations," the U.N. would be preoccupied with the plight of the Tibetans instead of promoting the agenda of the genocidal animals known as the "Palestinians."

Yesterday a typical know-nothing bully careened into the Cosmos and commented, "wow, you really made a fool of yourself with that post. Good thing for you your regulars don't have a clue either. Stick to somewhat clever wordplay and leave philosophizing to those who actually know something about what they are talking about. Your 'ideas' about Darwin and its implications are laughable at best."

To which one can only respond that his knowledge of God is plainly non-existent -- which is the same response I would give to any doctrinaire Darwinian. If he should ask, "what, don't you believe in evolution?," my response would be, "what, don't you know about God? You're kidding, right?" And if he says, "but God is not great," I would ask, "tell me what you know about God. No, not about what other people say or do. Tell me what you personally know." To which, if he were honest, he would have to respond, "oh, nothing." That being the case, he would be compelled to change the title of his book from "God is Not Great" to "I Know Nothing" -- or perhaps "I Am Nothing," which is what a human being unarguably is in any materialistic paradigm.

To be completely accurate, the materialist must affirm that "I Am Nothing, and So are You," for in the end, atheism is nihilism, and a nihilist is just an atheist with the courage of his absence of convictions: there is no truth and everything is permitted. As I mentioned in passing yesterday, there is no possible metaphysical basis for something wholly random, transient and accidental to know the Immutable. Or, if it can know the Immutable, then we must revise our assessment of the transience of this entity, for there is something absolute about it, something which mysteriously touches the eternal, something which cannot be surpassed. In reality, there can be no species above or beyond the human being. It is inconceivable. We are evolutions's end.

We also had a couple of commenters who advocated -- as they always do when the issue comes up -- for the spiritual continuity of human beings and animals. This is wrong belief and wrong movement, grasshopper. Of course there is continuity between animals and human beings, just as there is continuity between matter and life (or humans and God, for that matter). Nevertheless, there is also a radical ontological discontinuity between matter and life, something "present" in life that could never be seen in its constituent parts.

Naturally, being that we are alive and conscious, we are privileged to bear witness to countless fascinating spiritual hints and clues embedded in, and radiating through, matter, which "looks" at us with its outward forms of inexplicable beauty and "speaks" to us with its extraordinary inner mathematical elegance. But to suggest that this means that matter is just as spiritual as the divine consciousness that contemplates it is basically stupid, just a sort of exalted flatland Spinozean pantheism that is superficially appealing to a certain kind of middlebrow intellect, but ultimately blind to the true hierarchy of being.

In the paradigm of natural selection there can be no absolutes, no end states, no final accomplishments. Everything is a work in progress, minus the progress. Thus, the inability to explain how natural selection has produced the perfection of the human archetype, something which is an absolute end and cannot be surpassed. Anyone who looks into the eyes of his child realizes this. Yes, it is hypothetically possible -- no, inevitable -- that natural selection will continue to tinker at the margins of this archetype, but this archetype cannot surpass itself any more than perfect beauty or absolute truth can surpass itself.

This is what it means to say that human beings are in the image of their creator: that they are in their own way absolute, only in reflected form -- as above, so below. Thus, they are absolute, but only relatively so. This makes much, much more sense than the opposite -- that we are really reflections of matter, or absolutely relative: as below, so above. Despite the fact that this preposterously upside down metaphysic makes no sense at all -- for how could relativity be absolute without immediately refuting itself? -- it is what you must believe in order to be a self-consistent doctrinairre Darwinian.

Let's be honest: either we are a random, transient, and therefore meaningless organization of molecules, or we descended from something which surpasses us. Woe to the impoverished soul incapable of intuiting our source and ground in that which surpasses us. And woer still to the beasts in human form who admit hierarchy but who substitute their own imaginary mind parasites for the reality of the One.

Thus, the Raccoon is an embattled little beast who is always waging a war on two simultaneous fronts: the boneheaded and spiritually bereft anti-intellctual flatlanders of the secular left, and the cannibalistic denizens of the lower vertical with their false absolute. In fact, both of these spiritual adversaries fight on behalf of their respective false absolutes -- which is why leftism and Islamism are "absolutisms," or intrinsically false religions as opposed to true ones.

In the end, it all comes down to the choice of imposing absolutism vs. defending spiritual absolutes and their reflection in the herebelow: liberty, truth, love, beauty, decency, and the human being who embodies these and other absolutes. Underneath it all, the meaning of history's struggle can be reduced to just this one dialectic. For history, like evolution, has an end. It achieves this end any time a human being realizes the absolute in any of its diverse manifestatons, which is the sufficient reason for our existence. And, being itself absolute, there is no end to this end -- not while we live, anyway.