Morris' blacklist and mine

15 minutes or less into this video:

The Dark History of Evolution - Dr. Henry Morris
Creation Sensation | 24.V.2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmwlKz4CzSc

4:17 I agree Darwin, Freud and Marx are on what a Christian might reasonably consider a black list.

But I would put Galileo and Einstein there too.

The other three come between these, or Freud perhaps contemporary to Einstein.

"occult influence"

For Galileo, he was repromoting an idea recently promoted by Giordano Bruno, who definitely had something occult going on. Look at prologue part of "Ash Wednesday ..." (forgot last part of name) [La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584) - checked on article].

It was also (from Newton on - also an occultist, btw) more successful in Bruno's version.

For Einstein, while I don't know of occult activity, his outlook is more Zohar than Talmud, more Kabbalah than Orthodox Judaism (if that ever occurs without Kabbalah is another question).

Obviously, I totally endorse Richard Wurmbrandt's analysis of Marx.

I also see some sense to José Antonio's words (he was a practising Catholic and killed by the Reds):

"Karl Marx was a talented Jew, who saw the problem of Capitalism, but not the solution to Capitalism"

If Satan had a hold on Marx, which I think is fairly obvious from Wurmbrandt's work, it would be like him to give a keen awareness of a problem, while denying to disclose the solution, working the "patient" (in Screwtape's wording) away from the real, Christian, Catholic solutions which have been promoted by Leo XIII, Pius XI, Chesterton and Belloc, Austrofascism, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, to a lesser extent by Italian Fascism or National Socialism, while these (especially the latter) mix it with evil on other planes than the economic one.

5:11 "his book Marx and Satan"

Alternative title (that is the edition I read) : Was Karl Marx a Satanist?

5:50 While speaking of Marx' "hellish vapours", one may note that Engels (his accomplice both as "scientific socialist" and as very probable occultist) is behind much of the evolutionary view of early history of man.

It was not Darwin who fleshed out things like "neolithic revolution", it was by and large Engels.

The evidence which is really from recovery of agriculture after the Flood (around the carbon dated time of Göbekli Tepe, as it would be around the time mankind grows manyfold and starts building Babel) is mislabelled according to his ideas as "discovery" of agriculture.

6:50 "Freud's unconscious hostility towards the faith"

How do you know it was unconscious? (OK, he's dead, he won't answer this side of the grave).

For some Jews not being Christian is more important than being Abrahamic, like for some Protestants not being Popish is more important than being Christian.

I think Freud's hostility towards the faith was anything but unconscious.

10:10 And of course, Malthus is on my blacklist too.

He inspired Wallace.

And yes, Spencer is on my blacklist too.

12:07 I think you are definitely overreacting about "two hours of a fit".

I detest the result, but if you have been thinking on a problem, one second is enough for a solution to flash.

It is also not comparable to Darwin's work, since Darwin was not just making up a solution during 20 years (he had in fact not been getting one?), he was busy fleshing out the consequences.

If Morris is trying to demonise the mere event of "inspiration", I must protest!

12:14 Finding a solution is less about getting the most resources than about spotting the right one.

Wallace had spotted the "right one" because he was less distracted than Darwin.

And he was less distracted, because he was in the jungle with fewer distractions.

That he was in some sense receiving this "light" from the devil, I don't deny, but that is more like we receive temptations from the devil, not inherently because of the state of mind he was in.

Also "in a fit" does not necessarily mean in all English usages "in an abnormal state of mind" or "not himself". We find a similar phenomenon in John Bunyan's account of how he started writing Pilgrim's Progress.

12:42 - I am far from disputing Loren Eiseley's assessment of the interaction between Wallace and Darwin, but calling Eiseley one of the greatest science historians or historians of science as Morris did a few seconds before the quote is perhaps excessive.

Here is a really great historian of science for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Duhem

The man from whose works many of the things I read about Nicole Oresme or Jean Buridan have been excerpted.

12:52 Let's start at basics.

Wallace did not have a vision of a light-enhanced humanoid person.

Wallace did not have a vision of Nine Muses or of Jibreel or of Moroni or even of Nymph Egeria (though in that case she may have been a real girl under Satan's influence rather than Satan).

Wallace simply had a click of mind, which is a perfectly natural thing per se, like when you suddenly recall where you may have left your car keys and wonder why you had forgotten that.

Wallace HAD read Malthus. He was wondering how he could have overlooked that.

I don't think Wallace was more of an occult possessed or contacted person in that moment than a thief is when he recalls or first comes up with a good plan of entering and exiting a museum with a diamond.

And Morris taking THIS as evidence for sth occult going on, this kind of Puritan thing among Protestants is really one of the things which among others (including obviously atheists) has tended to discredit Wurmbrandt. Here Morris is committing hasty judgement.

If someone considering Jonathan Sarfati a heretic were to take his chess skills as a sign of demonic possession, that would be about the same kind of hysteria. I won't. I do consider him as heretic due to Calvinism, but I won't jump on his chess skills as a sign of demon possession or occult activity.

Too sad Morris didn't have more sense than that!

Now, Satan is surely interested in trying to turn men away from God.

Yes. But he has about as much a chance of about the same type when Martin Luther is reading Galatians!

13:01 "and evolution has been his main weapon in doing that"

As a Heliocentric, Morris is underestimating Heliocentrism.

As a Protestant, Morris is underestimating Protestantism.

These also are Satan's weapons. Older and in some periods bigger than Evolution.

13:05 There are more concrete indications Satan was communicating with Luther than that Satan was communicating with Wallace. Satan was TEMPTING Wallace, but the temptation was not a "supernatural communication" but rather a very humdrum event of inspiration. To the wrong thing, certainly, as when a thief is inspired to stealing.

13:35 Nature's Divine Revelation

It was, note well, "delivered" in trance.

Even that is insufficient to call this a "communication".

But it is far closer to it than Wallace's brainwave.

And obviously, considering the spiritual universe arose by evolution is heretical - one which C. S. Lewis combats in Miracles. A spiritual universe in which logic and morals arose instead of being eternal is simply not adequate.

In the case of St John, both Apocalypse and Gospel were inspired by God.

But it is the Apocalypse which is clearly "a communication", and it is the Gospel which, as we see from automatic handwriting and his writing with both hands at once, which is closer to being "delivered in a trance".

Evolutionism in Andrew Jackson Davis.

Fine, you have a case of AJD getting perhaps a diabolical communication.

It is perhaps not improbable, on lines like Wurmbrandt's, which I endorse even very probable, Darwin and Wallace were secretly readers of AJD. But the finding of a theoretical solution in Malthus was not in a fit of demonic possession, in which Wallace was not himself.

It was a "brainwave" as the English saying goes (I think the Swedish "snilleblixt" is perhaps older, but "brainwave" now is its translation) and this is fitting.

It is NOT a diabolical delirium to link Malthus to Darwinism.

On the contrary, both Malthus and "Natural Selection" are denying God's Providence. Denying Psalm 103 - that survival is from God.

[Now, I'll try to get on with the video.]