How to Be Stupid Forever

Our friends are fallen and know they are fallen, while our adversaries are fallen but unaware (or in denial) of the fact. 

As for the apes, I bring them good and bad news: they're not fallen, but they can never know it. It's what makes them apes -- or rather, what prevents them from being human, no matter how much evolution they undergo. 

It's just a way of saying that no amount of material shuffling results in immateriality, duh. To believe otherwise is to believe in magic.

Don't get me wrong -- natural selection is a fact. But so too is human nature, and the former in principle cannot account for latter.

What principle would that be?

Well, man either has or does not have an immutable nature. Now, a mutable nature is no nature at all, for it violates the principle of identity; being would be reduced to becoming, spelling the end of the intelligible order. 

If there is only becoming, without any substance that undergoes the becoming, then this results not only in "the destruction of all truth" but in "the suppression of all thought and of every opinion, which would thus come to deny itself at the very moment it affirmed itself" (Garrigou-Lagrange).

Man's nature -- what sets him apart from lower animals -- is reflected in his rationality, which means that human intelligence is "not immersed in matter," but rather, is "essentially relative to intelligible being and not merely to sensible phenomena." 

That's a big deal, since the gap between the senses -- which are ordered to changing phenomena -- and the intellect -- ordered to intelligible being -- is literally infinite. Thus, to reduce man to the "sensible" or "empirical" animal would represent the death of the very intellect that defines man qua man.

But guess what?

Providence permits all these errors only so that the light of truth may be made even more radiant (ibid.).

In other words, absurdity is parasitic on intelligible being, not vice versa. We might say that God is the transcendental condition for the absurdity of the world. But only because God is certain, indeed, one of the few certitudes available to us, and certainly the Ultimate Certitude -- the One from which other certitudes follow. Put conversely, absent God, nothing is certain, not even that. 

I guess that makes me agnostic, but only about the world. Does it exist, and in what sense does it exist?

I almost forgot. Yesterday's post left off with a question:

The question is, is it possible to not be in a reality tunnel? Is there a reality outside the tunnel(s), and can we know it?

Yes. That is, if the ontology outlined above is correct -- that man has an immutable nature, and that this nature makes him the rational animal, which means that his intelligence is ordered to intelligible being. 

If this is not the case, then yes, we are indeed confined to our illusory reality tunnels, but not even that, for these would constitute "unreality" tunnels, nor could we ever know we were in one -- any more than my dog can (immaterially) reflect on her (immaterial) canine nature. 

Anyway, give a man an idea, and he can think for a day. But give him an ideological reality tunnel, and he can be stupid forever.