Fifth Fifth, a Few Arguments and Strawmen to Round it Up

"Interview with Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX" First Fifth Reviewed · Continuing the interview with Fr Robinson, Second Fifth · Third Fifth of Same Interview · Fourth Fifth, Same Interview · Fifth Fifth, a Few Arguments and Strawmen to Round it Up

Same video as first post in this series.

40:48 Newton's physics state the resultants of certain factors provided nothing interferes.

Newton's physics cannot exclude the possibility that something outside Newtonian physics, namely freewill with powers over matter, God's and angels' wills, interferes.

If I show you the height of my hand and you have already weighed the grams in my ball point pen, you can calculate with what force the pen will hit the floor if I just drop it and do not interfere further.

This is not in any way, shape or form a guarantee I wouldn't prefer to catch the pen with the other hand, rather than let it hit the floor.

Now, you could obviously pretend that St. Thomas somewhere said "everything" in nature is moved by God only through secondary movers. Not true. Some of the secondary movers will be such that God immediately is moving them, otherwise the series of secondary movers would be infinite, and that would not just be impossible but also destroy the point of prima via.

C. S. Lewis actually made a very apt remark in the book Miracles. His point was, "miracles don't break the laws of nature, but adds to them" ... and his illustration was sth like this.

Suppose pool tables and pool balls to be placed in a steamer that experiences some rolling. Suppose a physicist to be standing by, observing, -- at some point he will be able to start making calculations that are able to predict the movements. But he will himself insist that his calculations are only valid provided nothing interferes. He is not able from his physics to predict how likely I am to take up a queue and push a ball in a different direction.

His point was for those special occasions on Earth where divine moving visibly takes the place of what normally secondary movers would be moving differently. But similar observations are totally valid for not just Creation week, not just the punitive miracle of the Flood, but also for if some continuous processes at their normal state directly require divine intervention to go on. Usually a conservative Christian will very well admit that existence as such requires God to provide it "second by second" ... that would correspond to Tertia Via. However, there is a Biblical case I've already touched on for a similar observation, related to Geocentric observations, with Prima Via.

42:15 The volumes within the so called solar system can be measured optically. Where a body casts or receives a light beam or a shadow with an angle, you can safely do trigonometry that's not over time or only negligibly so, therefore you can know the distance, you can know the real size from distance and apparent size.

But apart from volumes, lots of the bodies at least need extra assumptions about density and materials in order to make the Newtonian explanation of the orbits work. When you want to calculate the orbit of Mars, you don't just multiply its known volume by the exact same density as of Earth, which in its order is not supposed to have uniform density, you adjust the density and mass of Mars at meast slightly by back-calculation from the observable orbit.

When I state that Carbon 14 levels in the atmosphere have been constant since the fall of Troy at a half life of 5730 years, theoretically I just could be wrong, the halflife could instead be twice as long, but the level increasing from 80 to 100 pmC during these last 3000 + years.

So, what if the Masses are different than usually supposed and even a Heliocentric system couldn't work without constant intervention?

Or what if God decreed Geocentrism as an extra tweak, making planetary orbits other than Sun and Moon into spirograph patterns? And if so, what if angels are needed to perfectly balance the vectors to complete such patterns rather than disastrously even out to some version of Heliocentrism?

Those things cannot be excluded by Newtonian physics, they could only be excluded by an extra assumption that Newtonian physics are lifting all the weights in the universe.

You might answer that "this cannot be tested" ... neither can the exclusion of factors other than Newtonian physics.

Or you might answer this is against a famous razor, wielded by one Occam. But not only am I adding an extra causality into the agency field, you are also equally adding an extra causality into the experiential field, namely the parallactic optic illusion.

42:47 Yes, the force that makes these bodies move around the Earth is mentioned in Romans 1. And in Aquinas' Prima Via. He ends that one with "which everyone calls God"

The real miracle is why the gravity of the Sun doesn't dislocate the Earth from its position. I had tried the solution that if the Sun turns around Earth each day, the gravitational pull comes from different directions and has no time to dislocate Earth other than negligibly, but with my model of the aether (useful for Coriolis and related, including Geostationary satellites), counting within the aether, the Earth would actually be receiving the attraction from roughly the same point. As a different approach, I recommend "the Earth is God's footstool" taken in relation to Secunda Via. God is not just the first cause of movements, but also of stillness.

44:24 Do you hold to a "totally different notion of the movements of bodies," if you presume your fingers are moving a pen because you want to write

44:46 "a thing of the pre-scientific era"

A k as Scholastic and Patristic eras, in part.

But if you want to do science what you have to do is you 46:42 have to propose some sort of theory about how things work and then make 46:47 those predictions and test those predictions so they they have to provide some sort of theory about why the Earth 46:54 would not be moving why the rest and and explain the movement of these other bodies they would have to take the data 47:00 that we have from our telescopes um and to be honest they would have to count 47:05 for me they have to count about the fact that we put all these satellites up there and we we've got all these 47:11 observations so it's not like flat out Theory where you can observe here on Earth the Earth is not flat um but it's 47:17 it's sort of a second tier where we have devices that are able to observe the movement of of the earth and the 47:24 movement of of the solar system

You cannot ask all angelic beings to just step aside to check we have a "solar system" that works.

You cannot halt it and pick out the Sun and check if everything moves the same in that case too.

Putting Geostationary satellites up there involves an aether spinning around earth (below the Empyrean heaven).

I was already not a Flat Earther in the first place.

As to satellites rotating around Earth observing it rotates, that's like saying the Eiffel tower rotates because you have arranged to observe it from a chopper that flies around it.

We do not have all that many reasons from satellites or space craft further away to believe in Heliocentric orbits, to the exclusion of Tychonians ones.

Fr. Robinson:

again you're going to have to account for how everybody is um in on 47:32 the conspiracy as it were not when when everybody's using 47:37 satellites and and observing things

Brian McCall.

well I always say just because there might be some conspiracy doesn't 47:43 mean everything's a conspiracy

Systematic misinterpretation of data does not need conspiracy, it's sufficient with a culture that involves an error.

Some have pretended that the era of Pythagoras' ban on irrational ratios lasted until Euler, but in fact that was rejected way earlier, by Aristotelians, by Platonics too, I think, by Stoics I imagine. Now, Pythagoras was not just in error in relation to the existence of irrational ratios, his school also noted the first full out Heliocentric.

You would arguably agree that Pythagoreans did not conspire to misinterpret the evidence about Sqrt of 2 or pi or phi, they genuinely (as long as it lasted) believed that. But you would agree, they were misiterpreting data.

48:55 Brian McCall:

I wonder if it's the the clinging 48:38 to um this theory of geocentrism of a heliocentric sorry geocentrism got my 48:45 terms Pi is a a lack of real belief in what Aquinas proved so sort of a fear 48:51 that if we admit this then we're actually G to admit there are two truths

Pseudo-empathy is the oldest trick in the bag of Psychiatry, an illicit art of bullying.

I was expecting sth else, sth on the lines of Geocentrists are adherents to Siger of Brabant, they believe Geocentrism in Theology and Heliocentrism in Science. Also inaccurate, but less distastefully disarming than the Psychiatric schtick.

How can someone argue against such a charge?

In psychiatry, arguing against anything brought up by the shrink can be labelled "in denial" ... which would confirm the pseudo-empathetic diagnosis "fear" ...

It is in fact also more than just slightly Bulveristic. It bypasses the question of whether Geocentrism is in fact wrong. Not in this context, but it can easily enough be taken out of the context, to suit another one.

49:14 St. Thomas against Siger was not arguing we had a different understanding in Philosophy to what the text taken literally gives "pre-scientific" people in Theology.

Will Fr. Robinson be content with the strawmanning and gaslighting he has been doing with Brian McCall (or allowed Brian McCall to do for him), about Geocentrics in general, and implicitly about myself, or will he ever dare to enter into a debate with Sungenis or myself? Sungenis might prefer oral debate, I definitely prefer written.

49:36 With Sungenis, there may be a tinge of it, when it comes to stating "without revelation, we wouldn't be able to tell whether the universe or earth rotated" ...

With me, no. The correct way to do a thing which I would not quite label Science in the modern sense, but which involves observations and logic conclusions, is not to discount the prima facie view of a phenomenon before there is a necessary reason for it.

When from a train window I watch hills flying by, optically speaking, I conclude that this is the parallactic optic illusion, stemming from the movement of the observer (like with the guys on the Moon who saw earth turn around itself), and by the way, the concrete movement of the Moon in Geocentrism is about 25 hours, you can ask coast guards about it in regions with lots of tides, so I could consider their view as the parallactic illusion too.

However, before I turn this around and say "well, we should see our experience of earth's stillness or the heavens moving around us as parallactic illusion + being used to the motion" let's analyse why I take the view "parallactic illusion" about the view from the train. Not just that the illusion is possible, but also I know sufficiently about trains to know they move, sometimes I have switched from adressing people in German at one station and adressing people in Swedish at arrival, or the reverse, and I also know sufficiently about trees and hills to know they don't move.

I have no similar knowledge disqualifying the normal view of Earth's stillness or the normal view of stars moving by at 23 h 55 minutes per full circle.

The supposed parallel that "other planets" orbit and rotate is perhaps a non-parallel. The best case I ever heard for it being a sure parallel was heard when I was a child, in Austria. It's the appeal to extra-terrestrials. Biological and rational beings like ourselves, significantly smaller than the globes, inhabiting them instead of Earth, well, they would certainly experience their globes as the centre a much as we do with Earth. The problem is, extra-terrestrials are a modern invention from the time of Kepler to market Heliocentrism. We have no reason to suppose they even exist. They may well occur as demonic apparitions, but they do not exist as what they purport to look as.

is it okay for 49:38 science to have its realm where it discerns the truth for us or do we have 49:43 to learn everything from the faith

Let me return the question.

Are there truths accessible to the sciences or other disciplines like the art of history, which we know by faith as well?

Would it be OK for some woke theory in biology to deny that lions ferociously seek prey, or can we say that would contradict the Bible?

Or, can someone get into Geocentrism without direct reference to the Bible? I know I did. It was the answer to the Distant Starlight argument against Young Earth Creationism. And as to the knowability of Young Earth Creationism, check how Haydock ended the comments on Genesis 3. Moses knew Genesis 3:15 through a historic chain of memory passing over Abraham, via Noah and Joseph or his brother Levi or both.

if 49:57 if um yeah they're not willing to admit the the truths of science um and they 50:03 just want a theology to teach us everything

Strawman.

The correct view of why we need the magisterium is not that the Bible is so opaque that everyone who had no charism of infallibility or grace of state would infallibly get everything wrong. The correct view is that most people set only on an individual journey would get some things wrong.

And the correct view of the reason why we need revelation even for some philosophical truths accessible to Natural Theology is very similar.

Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors.

P1, Q1, A1, a quote from the corpus
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm#article1

This was somewhat true when few people had opportunity to access sciences as disciplines, in St. Thomas' way. It's arguably even more true today, when so many access a false science. And please, note: false science does not require conspiracy, or didn't prior to the internet. By now it may need a high dose of strawmanning Young Earthers and Geocentrics to judge from what I have seen. Falsehood innocently or otherwise naively taken for truth is sufficient

50:37 Father Paul, you know that other Paul who claimed to have fathered people in Christ ...

What was his exact reference scientifically speaking in Romans 1?

The flagellum of the bacterium hadn't been seen since the time of Creation. It was discovered fairly recently by microscopy.

A clockwork universe that God just wound up at the start but leaves to function on its own principles without (usually or at all) interfering after the start is hardly a testimony to God's power being inexhaustible...

I would say Prima Via in its cosmic and Geocentric form is a very good candidate.

50:49 Government of citizens is not in the realm of government of laymen.

Do you conclude there are no such things as mixed matters, that Monseigneur Lefèbvre was wrong about everything he said in Ils l'ont découronné or J'accuse le Concile?

Well, most parts of the sciences and arts are not in the realm of truths of faith, but some do overlap, and part of the overlap may very well be because God wanted to warn against End Times errors. A peasant in the time of the French Revolution, unless he had read the Newtonians of L'Encyclopédie, could get Geocentric Via Prima Natural theology right even without looking at the Bible. Somehow, most of us have lost the art in this "blessed" era of Compulsory Schools. In the previous sentence, there was a euphemism.