Redeem the Time

This is fascinating:

Though the dinosaurs might find it crass to say so, the late Cretaceous cataclysm that did them in was a planetary bad hair day compared to the mass extinction that occurred some 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period. The Permian event is probably the closest that life on Earth ever came to being completely extinguished. Around 95 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrates were wiped out — a greater percentage of the Earth’s species than the next two largest mass extinctions combined. The break in the fossil record at the Permian boundary is so severe that 19th-century geologists saw it as evidence of two completely separate creations of life.

Someone’s blogging it.

Yah can’t even make a perfunctory announcement these days without the ID-Darwin debate popping up in the comments section.

I want to avoid this issue for the next 3 years or so, but it’s getting harder every day. One cautionary note to all: after putting ID in its place, one needs to turn immediately back to slapping down and straining the falsity out of modern science. Let’s not pretend that over the last twenty to thirty years there have been strictly “scientific” textbooks in our schools teaching kids science. ID has fatal flaws, but the modern natural philosophy masquerading as science is the real threat to teaching the truth these days, not well meaning ID adherents. Generations of kids have learned that things don’t have specific natures, generations of kids have lost any notion of substance they might have had, generations of kids have learned that chance is a cause, generations of kids have thus lost all notion of causality in nature, generations of kids have learned that morality is based merely on belief, generations of kids have learned that the universe is not ordered, etc., etc., all because of the way they were taught “science” from the time they were little kids in school. Modern science, or rather, the modern philosophies with which it is mixed is THE main opponent of Thomism in the world today. It is because of science, or the way people think about science, that the entire old order of education has been overthrown.

The IDers are trying to solve and fight against real problems—they don’t quite realize their solution is flawed yet, but many of them will in the future. ID adherents have made this mistake because they are so angry about their opposition—they are sick and tired of “science” speaking falsely. They know their opponents are horribly wrong about some things—they and everyone else needs to focus more on what the truth is. We need to clearly delineate the principles and methods of the various sciences, and then use modern examples to show where modern “science” is true and where it mimics natural philosophy. For this to happen, true natural philosophy needs to be reborn.

UPDATE
And another thing: I’d be a whole lot more sympathetic to all these scientists coming out of the woodwork to condemn ID if they’d do the same thing when Dawkins and Hawking and their ilk make millions off another pseudo-natural philosophy book, but the chorus gets awful quite when they speak, doesn’t it? Are the ACLU and the courts putting thirty plus years of crap-ass modern natural textbook philosophy on the stand? I don’t see it happening. The fact that everyone gets upset only when Intelligent Design tries to put a confused natural philosophy into ill-fitting science clothes ought to show that the emperors aren’t wearing any.

And lest anyone take me the wrong way, I’m not speaking against the great work that the shulamite has done on the topic. I think that much like with the conservative Catholic anti-american confessional state-ers, the good side needs to sweep itself up and get its ducks all in a row before marching off to war—but there is a greater war here, and while we need to make sure everyone knows their song well before we start singing we need to remember that. (I can mix metaphors with the best of ‘em.)

UPDATE II
Speaking of all this, I hope everyone is reading this guy and putting money in his tip jar.

UPDATE III
Speaking of all this, I hope everyone interested goes and reads this guy NOW. He’s on the right path, in my humble opinion.

UPDATE IV
And this guy.

Darwinian natural right? Aristotle’s Physics and Leo Strauss? Nature and a politics of virtue? Darwin and Aristotle agree? St. Thomas Aquinas says what?

Physics and Metaphysics in Leibniz and Aristotle?

Scroll down this page and read the pdf files.

Lots of interest, lots to learn from these debates…

…including the fact, like I said in an email earlier today, that all the branches of knowledge are so damned confused as to their respective principles, ends, and methods, that reading almost any of these modern thoughts is insanely fustrating—the modern university is an almost hopelessly tangled ball of rapidly fraying yarn.

Nature, science, evolution…check out this paper…is this the sort of thing we ought to be doing?

De Koninck is challenging us to take seriously the form as perfection of matter, and even as only a partial perfection of matter, matter which is open to an infinity of such partial perfections.

Here, we get an important point at to what DeKoninck means to say about nature and its evolutionary process. He tells us:

The higher one climbs in the hierarchy of species, the more the forms become necessary and consequently intelligible. Quanto magis distant a materia, tanto magis necessariae.(96) But only the human form will have an existence which is totally assured, by the fact that it is spiritual and that its duration [sa durée], leaving aside the time which it involves by its union with matter, is eviternal.

The idea is constantly to give us more and more a sense of the nature of corporeal forms, as having something of determination and something of indetermination.

Interesting post over at North Western Winds on the Darwinism/ID debate, with comments by the Shulamite.

UPDATE

Of course, if you haven’t already seen it mentioned by all the other blogs who have lately, its probably not obvious to you yet that IF theory is going to change everything.

Another UPDATE:

Okay, so I couldn’t help jumping in to the comments myself.

I wouldn’t vouch for some of the things this guy says here, but this post points to something that is worth considering—Aristotle, Darwin, and the problem of the Mule. Think about it.

His other posts are also worth checking out.

An article about the Vatican Observatory.