From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me

Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract · Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5] · From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me

Lundahl makes his most defensible concession when he says:

“As to the area where I really am subjective, perhaps it is one in which objectivity is not attainable.”

... But this concession changes the conclusion. If objectivity is unavailable, Lundahl cannot use private discernment as objective evidence that the Holy Spirit spoke.

It doesn't change my conclusion in the least.

I was not claiming to publically demonstrate the Holy Spirit spoke to me. If the Holy Spirit prompts me to give 50 c. to a fellow beggar, what I need in order to do that is to have the 50 c., not to convince Parish Priest, Bishop, Pope, Secular Authorities that I absolutely could do nothing better with 50 c. and even so needed a specific permission from the Holy Spirit to actually give the 50 c. AND then got it.

There are callings where someone has to assess if someone else is prompted by the Holy Spirit or just being a dumbass about himself. I am not pursuing any of these callings. I'm not standing before a monastery in order to become a novice, and I'm not standing before the gates of a seminary in order to study for the priesthood.

His interest seems too heavily similar to that of a shrink who wanted to poke into what he thinks I have decided or failed to decide.

What I have decided is to write, and both talent with words and knowledge of subjects are such that this decision is not totally whacky unless backed up by the supernatural.

What I've failed to decide is what I have left others to decide, namely when they will start treating me as an actual writer instead of attributing to me claims of prophecy or higher than usual Catholic callings.

If I claimed to be a monk, I would indeed be doing such a claim, but I am not claiming to be a monk.

If I claimed I absolutely wanted to become a monk ... which I probably haven't stated since last year in High School ... (I'm 57 now), I would again be close enough to doing such a claim, and I would need someone to verify the calling with. That someone is not Phil Stilwell.

I did a check on that, in early 2000, the monastery answered in the negative. I have since then been abiding by that decision, tried to get a wife and an income from writing, and I have been blocked by liars who mis-label my work as prophecy, unless it's demonic, prophecy, unless it's psychosis, and so on. As I am not claiming prophecy, I'm not obliged to tell the Blessed Virgin that the Parish Priest requested roses in winter to prove She was She. My name is not Bernadette Soubirous. And what I claim to do is not similar to what she claimed to receive.

If someone wants to be heard over seeing the Blessed Virgin, she had obviously better provide objective and miraculous evidence. Often it's girls not boys.

Meanwhile, I claim that theologically speaking Young Earth Creationism is a necessity. Gap theory and Day Age theory are not obviously heretical, but that's on the condition that they leave the creation of Adam as directly from the dust and the timeline from Adam to Jesus at least roughly speaking similar to Luke 3. One is not a heretic for preferring the Vulgate reading of Genesis 11 which has no second Cainan. But it should roughly speaking be similar to Luke 3. Which, since carbon 14 dating, a theory of an old universe and especially an old earth with an old atmosphere will not. So, when it comes to combining Day Age with a Biblical chronology from Adam on, that's theologically licit, it is actually done by the Watchtower Sect, often decent people by the way, but it is scientifically impossible.

If the atmosphere was billions of years old when Noah left the Ark in 2957 or 2347 BC, two dates in conventional Biblical chronologies, that of the Roman Martyrology and that of Ussher, that atmosphere could not leave organic material dating to 39 000 BP. It would most probably have dated to third millennium BC. And very certainly not older than fourth millennium. Human remains exist on either side of the carbon date 39 000 BC. To me, as a Young Earth Creationist, this means they were prior and subsequent to most probably 2957 BC. The Biblical timeline is intact at a point where no person is dying unless it's in the Flood (and if so the dating method will probably be Potassium Argon and give a much older date than carbon) and the persons alive being limited to Noah, his wife, Shem, Ham and Japheth and their wives (OK some may say Ham's wife was already pregnant). I have no problem with the conventional carbon dates given according to that convention, since I as a Young Earth Creationist belong to a school of thought according to which these can be reinterpreted variously to "much younger" or to my own more precise attempts of calibration, using Biblical events with archaeological traces as anchor points. But the moment you think the atmosphere has been around 100 pmC well before any of this and remained so with minor vaccillations, the moment you say the Neanderthal nicknamed Thorin really died 42 000 years ago, you have loads of skeleta you can't deny humanity to, and you would either have to stretch the timeline after Adam to 40 000 + years or you would have to pretend these skeleta belonged to actual human creatures before Adam. The one is inconsistent with the claims the Catholic Church traditionally makes for the Bible. The other is a heresy which the Church condemned by placing Isaac La Peyrère's book on the index.

I am very far from being a prophet, I'm a theologically concerned layman, and an amateur sleuth into questions that would "question" the Biblical narrative. And I have no duty to show anyone that the Holy Spirit prompted me to this position or to this activity.

Why do I bring this up in the context? Because in another place, and I don't care to cite, Phil Stilwell is half and half suggesting that I might have taken up the existence of a missionary because of what I took as a prompting of the Holy Spirit. Nonsense, if I live a less laidback life than I'd like it is not that I am sacrificing it to be a missionary, it's that people are sacrificing it to challenge me if my supposed decision to be a missionary wasn't stupid. It's pretty stupid to take me for a missionary in the first place.

And what I want to prove that my tables work is not show either an atheist or a priest that I'm led by promptings of the Holy Spirit, what I want to prove that is simply win an argument whether it solves a problem for Young Earth Creationism.

And if on some stretch of the Biblical and archaeological timelines they don't work, what I want to conclude isn't "perhaps it wasn't the Holy Spirit after all" but rather to rework the tables. From 2020 to 2024, I have been using a set of tables which in French are called: Tables de carbone 14 sur les bases révisées (I - VI) / Tables continuées (VI - IX) and which in English are called New Tables. Since Christmas 2024, I have tables I made even newer than that, so they are called Newer Tables: Preliminaries · Flood to Joseph in Egypt · Joseph in Egypt to Fall of Troy. But when in 2020 I called those tables "New" I implied they were newer than something else which I had previously elaborated and tested against archaeological items and the Biblical timeline. The weak spot of New Tables is the date of the corpses in the Mladec cave. In that now previous calibration, they were too many dead too soon after the Flood. I patched it with appealing to the reservoir effect, which is still an option, I have since remade the calibration in Newer Tables.

And I am sick and tired of people who do not share my polemic interest but also do not want to leave it alone, but make it a thing for them to worry about. Like worry about mental disease if you have Commie or Swedish Social Democrat inclinations to making Science your religion. Like worry about prelest as the Orthodox tend to illicitly do with the children of Fatima. Like worry about pastoral focus, since there are so many other topics I could preach about if I insisted on being a priest or similar. But I don't insist on it, I insist on not being it. I insist I'm not a seer. I insist being Young Earth Creationist is very far from a mental disease. If anything it's the Atheist who's delusional if he thinks his mind is a by product of matter via very complicated biology.

But let's give Phil Stilwell the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was not an umpteenth in between for some shrink trying to assess me without putting himself or his personnel at risk, perhaps he genuinely was just interested in the general question. Well, if so, there are other people than I who also would prefer to be left alone on such items. His original question never was one I intended to answer to the full, and I'm worried other Christians could be trapped into someone sidelining what in some sense promised to be a decent chat about the epistemology for accepting Catholicism at every step into "how are you making your decisions?" ... when it's none of his business nor of the kind of people I feel he reminds me of.

Hans Georg Lundahl
ut supra (vel infra ut in bloggo)

Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5]

Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract · Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5] · From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me

I will here elaborate on the points, three here:

• the practical point of the individual evaluating whether to follow an inspiration
• the point of the hierarchy when on behalf of the Church evaluating whether an individual was a saint
• the question of the Church and Her divine origin.

1. The Question That Never Received an Answer

As mentioned in my answer to the abstract, I don't think his question really needs one.

The two questions "what do I do know" and "am I right in what I'm habitually convinced of" are distinct.

No reasonable man usually fuses them.

2.1 Absolute certainty is too much to demand

The serious question is therefore not:

Can the believer prove the Holy Spirit’s involvement with absolute certainty?

It is:

Does the proposed method make correct source attributions reliably enough to justify confidence, and how would we know?

A medical test need not be perfect to be useful. But we need some idea of its sensitivity, its false-positive rate, and the population in which it was tested.

A parallel insanity is proposed in:

3. The Logic of Discrimination

... No mathematical precision is required to see the problem. Lundahl supplies no defensible values, ranges, or even comparative arguments for the likelihoods.

Totally superflous, as already stated. Except perhaps internally for the Church. Which would not use Bayesian logic in mathematical form to make assessments of moral probability anyway.

The method the Church uses is, did this method of discernment make saints.

This leaves us with the external question whether we have reasons to believe the Church.

2.2 Historical inquiry is not identical to experimental prediction

...

This concession does not rescue Lundahl. It removes an easy escape. ...

I briefly halt here to note he claims the paper format is meant to reduce rhetoric that could be too vague, to logic barebones. (See: why answer in a paper).

The metaphors like "rescue" and "escape" and qualifiers "not" and "remove" are rhetorically calculated to give the impression I'm the person divagating, the one who needs some kind of schooling in logic. But does he back this up?

The problem is not that Acts fails a laboratory test.

A laboratory test is not applicable in the first place. As a rhetorical flourish, this sentence is of course OK. But as a serious objection, no.

The problem is that Lundahl treats the claims inside one religious narrative as if they independently confirmed one another,

Well, depends on what you mean by "independent". If you certainly want "independent" sources, it's not just the Christian account, but loads of others, that lack comparable outside confirmation. No one will say that Acts confirms that Caesar made or destroyed a bridge over the Rhine. Perhaps Livy will confirm it, but Livy is as little independent of Caesar's tradition (not necessarily limited to the text in Bellum Gallicum itself) as an early Church Father is independent of Acts and related oral tradition.

For the Battle of the Somme, we can have an account independent of French sources in English or German ones, but if we treat the West as one community, which it is, what would you answer a Japanese if he were to ask "are there any Indian or Chinese confirming sources?"

Communities are not lab teams that have agreed to double check on each other. If you want to establish that colchicine is good against gout, it may obviously help if both French and American doctors report it (however, they differ on posology recommended). Because American and French doctors are members of an international "meta-team" where national medical corps are treated as "local teams" ... that have since long ago agreed to check on each other's results. And usually to do so in open scientific polemic.

The epistemically correct "independent confirmation" in history is usually the independence of observations resumed in one source. If I knew nothing from the things Jesus said apart from His obviously being the one telling the disciples of the temptation by Satan, I would be reasonable to doubt it. But there are claims that are far easier to check than that, to the first Christians, because different people actually all saw them. If the story is true, which shouldn't be the first go to main issue.

The "religious narrative" is a resumé of the independent sources that were available to those formulating it, that is mainly to Luke and prior to him those whom he spoke to.

The fact that the narrative is religious doesn't warrant it a treatment of higher and all the way up to disingenuous suspicion nor exempt it from being the story of a community's immediate origin. And for non-religious origin stories, Stilwell will not put up this doubt. I have never heard him put any scepticism on the United States correctly remembering to have started out as thirteen colonies of the United Kingdom which then at a certain date broke off connections in a war. I have never heard him pretend George Washington didn't exist or that his actual role was very different.

then asks his critic to explain every missing stage of an alternative history.

If I pretended that George Washington was a British governour and obtained independence by first petitioning and then calling a referendum, I assume that Stilwell would want me to explain why a War of Independence and a second War of 1813 was inserted into the narrative. Stilwell might pretend we could easily solve the problem in another way, by appealing to British records. That's beside the point. I could push disingenuous even further and say British records were faked later on. I suppose that at least at this point Stilwell would require a coherent, if not the one accurate, at least a coherent and possible history of how the non-event in the series of events became an event in remembered history.

I am applying exactly that same test. I am being perfectly consistent about my criteria. I am just not treating "religious narratives" as a specially suspect category, but instead "immediate origin stories of actually existing communities" (and to a weaker degree "stories of the community's past, even outside the crucial point of immediate origin as the community started) as a specially robust one. Amnesia plus false memory is curious even in one person, and even more so collectively. A claim that a community first knew it's origin to be A, then forgot A and replaced it with B to the point of referencing B as knowledge of their origin is a remarkable claim which would require quite some evidence. I ask my critic to produce it. Or at least an explanation, if not evidence for it. Even that is apparently too much, and warrants irony in a paper pretending to use the objectivity standards of the paper format/

And by the way, I would have a coherent scenario of why Jewish sources don't confirm the Christian ones. Stilwell himself has called the general mechanism I'm speaking of "villain-driven irrationality" in a different paper. That Jews to this day have a very clear tendency to cast Jesus for a villain, though non-religious versions have weakened it, and some Jews even religious ones, living among Christians, have dropped it, can be seen in some of the comments by Tovia Singer.

4. Satan Makes the Proposed Test Harder, Not Easier

Even if a healing were genuine, a language genuinely unlearned, or a vision genuinely external to the recipient’s imagination, a second question would remain: Which supernatural agent was responsible?

For healings, we assume Satan cannot imitate a totally sudden healing. God has put limits on his power.

For a person's good or bad inspirations, we assume, if he didn't repent of them and if he was a saint, they came from the Holy Spirit. And guess what the one most crucial test for him being a saint is? Healing miracles. Which brings us back to God having put limits on Satan's power, some types of sudden never ever having been within angelic power, fallen or unfallen, and some powers Satan would actually have in his nature being made inavailable to him if it were about deceiving ... so much that when Biblical prophecy talks about the Antichrist doing "signs and wonders" some say they won't even include miraculous healings and others that he'd need real relics from real saints.

Lundahl says that good moral direction points to God and the wrong moral direction points away from the Devil. But this assumes that a deceptive agent must display his final aim in every local act.

A Christian praying to God for direction, if he were in good faith following a deceptive but apparently morally good inspiration from the Devil, would thereby merit God's protection from deception when it became crucially bad. This is to some degree also true of as yet non-Christians. And this is part of the reason why someone outside the Church if genuinely a Christian would come into Her.

If Satan can imitate signs of goodness, then orthodoxy, charity, success, and even wonders do not reliably identify the Holy Spirit. If Satan cannot imitate them, Lundahl needs to explain why the deception hypothesis appeared in his own account of imagination in the first place.

Has Stilwell heard of consistently and all the way versus not all the way and finally with some glaring inconsistency? When the Church evaluates if someone became a saint, the Church has some real clues on what went "all the way" (not saying this has been the case with the Vatican II sect accepting John Paul II as a Pope, but that's a different discussion). For the individual decision maker or decision accepter, again, the person doesn't quite as much need an epistemic as a moral guide. Though obviously being acquainted with the truths of the faith clearly helps in detecting fraud.

5. The Church Does Not End the Regress

[diagramm notation could not be replicated here]

In ordinary language: the authority is legitimate because the Church is protected; protection is known through a tradition certified by the Church; and miracles read through that tradition are then used to confirm the Church.

You forget that the tradition is not just "certified by the Church" (as by an institution) but is actually the memory of the community. The Church is not a parallel to FBI, not even to Supreme Court, the Church is a parallel to the United States. Stilwell has probably confused the two related concepts "the Catholic Church" and "the hierarchy of the Catholic Church" ... which in some contexts is actually called "the Catholic Church". The United States does not recall being founded by Kemal Atatürk and arguably never will.

The historical existence of an institution is independent evidence that the institution existed. It is not independent evidence that the institution possesses supernatural protection.

Granted, but irrelevant.

We independently know that Mormonism exists. That fact does not verify Joseph Smith’s plates.

It may verify the existence of the plates, which I could explain as demonic, or it may not verify it. Depends on the detail. For instance, could the people attesting the plates have been in on a con game? And THAT depends on the detail of the story.

While we are at con game, before you ask "why not the reports of Jesus' Resurrection" con men don't volunteer to risk martyrdom. And if you pretend that the one doing the con game and the ones being martyred are different persons, how do you account for the top tier of the hierarchy being the ones martyred? The criterium is consistent, it involves "con game is a possible explanation, except when it's impossible" ... and it sometimes is for an obvious reason.

We independently know that Islam exists. That fact does not verify Muhammad’s revelations.

It arguably verifies he had or claimed to have revelations. If he was sincere, there is a certain problem of discernment that is not solved by the Catholic Church canonising him, because the Catholic Church hasn't canonised him.

The continued existence of the Catholic Church establishes continuity of a community, not the divine truth of the community’s account of itself.

How about starting with the human truth of the community's account of itself? I don't appeal to divine protection of the US when saying I trust the US on George Washington. I appeal to the improbability of a real origin A being completely forgotten and replaced by a fake origin B taken by all as if the real one. Already a very problematic and improbable claim about individual memories, but pretty absurd on the account of the community.

Now, the Mormon account of the plates is on several levels perfectly compatible with human fraud.

• Few people present when the plates were given
• plates often in a closed chest
• plates absent when Joseph Smith produced translation with use of two or one seer stone (depending on stages)
• plates returned, so not kept as relics by the Mormon Church.

I'd like you to construct one level where the account isn't so compatible on principles perfectly consistent with those (oh, never mind, I forgot whom I was asking, but still) I'm using to exclude fraud within the Church's account of Herself.

And similarily, the single person who could verify that Mohammed had revelations from Allah was Mohammed.

In this context, I'm reminding that Islam makes claims about only five miracles for the founding of its Ummah:

• the Quran (good style vs illiteracy of Mohammed, scientific knowledge beyond the period have featured)
• the split Moon
• the expansion in military action with victory after victory
• the spider weaving very quickly a web before the cave
• the night journey.

The two last of these, like receiving ayah after ayah supernaturally, depend entirely on Mohammed's claim about his own experience. The split moon can be explained by social conformity within the Ummah and social and military pressure for the king in India who confirmed it (in the 13th C).

And I think one can agree after seing long term English misrule in Ireland, including a genocidal application of tenant's contracts in 1847 to 1853, military conquest doesn't prove divine protection from error. From our own Bible, we have an even more direct confirmation thereof:

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them. And power was given him over every tribe, and people, and tongue, and nation
[Apocalypse (Revelation) 13:7]

Whether you believe the prophecy or not, I think you can at least relate to the principle. Vanquishing someone doesn't prove him wrong and doesn't prove oneself right.

Any more parallels? I'll give one about Rome. I'm accepting Rome was founded by Romulus in 753 BC, I'm just not accepting he was son of Mars or that Jupiter Capitolinus as his granddaddy promised prosperity to Rome forever.

The Church’s existence, age, influence, and selfunderstanding are all compatible with a successful human institution. None discriminates divine protection from institutional durability. The regress stops only because Catholic authority is declared a stopping point. Declaring the stop is not validating it.

The account of the initial miracles, primarily the Resurrection, leaves no reasonable room for deliberate fraud, for honest misunderstanding or for hallucinations, which do not exist as collective phenomena. Several people in the same hospital may hallucinate due to ergotine poisoning, but the ergotine poisoning won't make their hallucinations agree. Radical restructuring of what was initially reported and taught need substantiation. Dating of Gospels and then pretending they were the only reports available for the community and then selectively presenting cases for initial absence of claims of physical resurrection are clearly prima facie absurd solutions, would not have occurred to Stilwell to do with the United States, would therefore require at the minimum a model.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Ruffinus of Assisi, Martyr
30.VII.2026

Assisii, in Umbria, sancti Rufini Martyris.

Dan Makes my Point Again

He Thought He Has Refuted YEC, Well, Not My Version · Dan Makes my Point Again

Directly Observed Mutation Rates Disprove Young Earth Creationism
Creation Myths | 29.VII.2026 (US TZ)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i4eIQvNueM

Thank you again for making my point.

At some point in the past, for young earth creationism to work, we need to have had more mutations per generation and less weeding out.

Why is the time after the Flood ideal?

1) We see lowering life spans, suggesting degraded genome or mutations, as well as carbon 14 buildup and on my view even the Ice Age which I set earlier, all three of which hang together with more radiation.
2) Just after the Flood, mankind had pretty few mutations (though the Neanderthal inherited ones are from pre-Flood times), and therefore the arriving mutations were far less likely to do harm.

Noting

that my answers keep disappearing.

fol alibi

@folalibi2743

Poe's Law in action... :)

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@folalibi2743 I had to look it up.*

No, my intent wasn't ironic, I'm a Young Earth Creationist, I'm also at loggerheads with CMI over a few things like whether Neanderthals were pre- or post-Flood.

And they have not been eager to look at my tables for carbon 14 build-up either.

* footnote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's law

Winnetouch

@noWinneTouching

Out of all the ancient human skeletons and fossil remains ever unearthed, why haven’t we found a single skeleton with the biological age of a 500 year old human? High radiation leaves clear pathological markers on bone tissue, yet ancient skeletons look biologically identical to modern ones dying in their 60s, 70s, or 80s. Taking patriarchal lifespans directly from bronze age mythic genealogies doesn't magically create the forensic evidence to back it up.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@noWinneTouching My point is, the genetics was such that a man of 100 or 200 back then would be biologically like modern 30 or 40.

Mutations changed that.

I'm not sure what levels of radiation you think of.

In my case, it's like maybe 10 to 20 times the modern background radiation.

fol alibi

(Since this doesn't seem to be a parody...) How were Neanderthal mutations inherited from pre-Flood? Through a ghost lineage that was not on the Ark? Or was Japhet's wife a Neanderthal and Seth's a Denisovan? Oh, and there's even less time before the Flood (6000-4350=1650 years) to have accumulated these mutations, especially since people in those times supposedly lived to hundreds of years old.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@folalibi2743 "How were Neanderthal mutations inherited from pre-Flood?"

Example, if one or more of Noah's daughters in law had a Neanderthal daddy, or if Noah had a Neanderthal mother. Or if his wife was half or full Neanderthal (but if so daughters in law of the sapiens type to account for genomic dominance over the residual Neanderthal genome).

"Or was Japhet's wife a Neanderthal and Seth's a Denisovan?"

Neither of them had non-sapiens mitochondriae, and Denisovan DNA is in a smaller proportion, so probably further off in the ancestry.

"Oh, and there's even less time before the Flood (6000-4350=1650 years)"

Let's speak in BC terms, 5200 - 2957 = 2242 years and probably that involves a misreading about Mathuselah and should be 2262 years.

Less time, but ….

"to have accumulated these mutations,"

Supposing they were only accumulated by natural process rather than accelerated by preternatural ones, involving at some level the Nephelim.

"especially since people in those times supposedly lived to hundreds of years old."

An old daddy obviously legates more mutations to his children than a young one

qiexia

@muskyoxes

Aren't you arguing the wrong way? If mutations are slower and generations are longer, we need a lot more time to account for the observed genomic differences

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@muskyoxes Lifespans were longer, generations maybe not quite as much (except the lineage in the Bible).

After the Flood, previously accumulated mutations were fewer, but the new rate of mutations was not just faster than before but significantly faster than now.

John

@John.0z

How widespread is this flood that you are talking about?

Does it perhaps extend far enough back to encompass the First Australian people... with their 40,000+ uninterrupted culture, without recording new arrivals, and that does not mention a flood at all? What is recorded in Queensland is the retreat on land from a rising sea level that drowned the earlier reef (about 30,000 years ago) and saw the growth of the Great Barrier Reef we now see offshore.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@John.0z I highly doubt that their own records can be ascribed a totally fault free chronology.

The 40 000 years date is from thermoluminiscence in sand, which I don't know how to calibrate, but I suppose it disfigures real dates more than carbon dates do.

Lake Mungo 3 (I recall) has a carbon date of c. 20 000 BP, which would be during the post-Flood Ice age or midway in Noah's post-Flood remaining lifespan.

Some time between 2725 BC and 2712 BC. Which are respectively carbon dated (usually) as 18,786 BC and as 17,081 BC, while the carbon 14 level in the atmosphere was rising from 14.329 pmC to 17.585 pmC. Yes, carbon 14 was, on my theory, produced faster than now, and significantly so.

The 30 000 years date would be 28 050 BC, between 2892 BC and 2870 BC, if obtained by carbon dates. Between 65 and 87 years after the Flood.

Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract

Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract · Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5] · From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me

Here is it, the paper, starting with the abstract:

The Spirit in the Closed Circuit: Why Catholic Authority Does Not Solve the Problem of Discernment
By Phil Stilwell | Published 2026
https://www.academia.edu/170883041/_The_Spirit_in_the_Closed_Circuit_Why_Catholic_Authority_Does_Not_Solve_the_Problem_of_Discernment

How can a person tell whether an inner prompting comes from the Holy Spirit, a deceptive spirit, or ordinary human imagination? Hans-Georg Lundahl answers by recommending prayer, conformity to Catholic teaching, submission to Catholic authority, attention to moral fruits, and, in exceptional cases, later miracles. These practices may help a Catholic decide whether an impression is safe to act on. They do not identify the impression’s source. A thought produced by religious training can agree with Catholic teaching. An institution can approve a mistake. A decision can turn out well by coincidence, competence, or selective reporting. Even an event that remains medically or historically unexplained would not, by that fact alone, identify the Holy Spirit rather than some other supernatural or unknown cause.

Phil Stilwell seems bent on mixing two problems that have nothing to do with each other.

How do I know?

This is usually not what I or any Catholic of typical Catholic culture (though it wouldn't be heretical) would try to solve with attending to personal promptings of the Holy Spirit.

Nor are such promptings anything like why I converted to Catholicism.

What should I do?

Obviously a Catholic who already accepts the authority of the Catholic Church will not take practical decisions as occasions to put it in doubt.

I can come to doubt whether this or that version of the Catholic Church is the correct one if it's making it harder for me to get a correct decision started.

I have ditched more than one for this reason.

So, I kindly suggest to the author of the paper

to admit fairly and squarely these are separate problems.

And, when it comes to the practical one:

it doesn't even closely matter to you if we can in a given situation know with full certainty or moral certainty that the Holy Spirit actually was behind a prompting.

Far from being a philosophy paper asking a reasonable question, it would then become a kind of psychology paper, or worse, an undercover psychological examination of the one you are dealing with. I have more than enough of that rabble.

Also, you don't start questioning your presuppositions every time you take a decision, so why should I?

Now, let's go to "How do I know" ...

Lundahl tries to close these gaps by appealing to Christ’s promise to the Church, the Church’s preservation of the Gospel accounts, the prima facie credibility of tradition, the growth of early Christianity, and the beneficial effects of Catholicism. But these claims form a closed evidential circuit. The institution certifies the texts, the texts certify the institution, traditions and miracle reports certify both, and the institution’s alleged divine protection supplies the favored interpretation of those reports. Evidence that is genuinely independent—the mere historical existence of the Church, for example—does not establish the supernatural authority attributed to it.

Analysing an argument correctly is a good starting point before trying to answer it.

Stilwell tries to construct a circulus vitiosus in probando.

The institution certifies the texts, the texts certify the institution,

More like, every community that ever existed usually knows how it started. The opposite would be more improbable. The US is not likely to forget about George Washington and Lafayette and replace them with Kemal Atatürk. It is also not likely to forget the actual process and substitute sth like Moses parting the Red Sea or Seven day trumpet blows making Jericho's walls tumble down.

Therefore, it is a priori probable that the texts of an institution that's a community (which the Catholic Church is) and not just sponges of one (like the FBI on the US, I get the impression, when FBI targets Latin Mass Catholics as a security threat) actually do fairly historically accurately reflect the actual process by which the community came to be.

This paper reconstructs Lundahl’s position in its strongest form, then shows why it fails.

Stilwell is hardly likely to be able to do that if he:

• conflates two positions on two subjects with one single position
• generously pretends detecting circuli vitiosi in probando just for ease of refuting, which to me seems more like strawmanning than steelmanning.

It also refines the original challenge. Absolute certainty is unnecessary, and historical claims are not tested exactly like laboratory hypotheses.

Thank you.

The proper demand is more modest: a method must discriminate among the proposed causes better than chance, bias, and hindsight. Lundahl provides no such method.

I did not propose promptings of the Holy Spirit as the best way to evidence Catholicism. If Stilwell wants to evaluate what I'm doing when discerning anything, as if it were a medical cure, no thanks.

Doctors need to be able to verify the kind of medical cures they prescribe to others. People are very much entitled to try and persist in their home cures for coughs, colds, diabetes and whatever without continuously being poked by doctors trying to validate or invalidate their methodology.

If anyone wants to take away that right from me, I take that as a very inimical action. Sufficiently grave, as being a kind of slave hunt, to merit death penalty in a court and therefore sufficiently grave to merit a self defense that could be lethal.

So, I'll suppose we'll be dealing with evidence for Catholicism.

He offers an internally Catholic policy for managing impressions, not a publicly reliable way to discover who—or what—produced them.

Impressions are not public busines, and an internally Catholic policy is good enough for a Catholic.

On top of that, he insinuates that "public" and "Catholic" shouldn't go together, ideally obviously they should.

A dedicated objections section answers the strongest replies in his own words. A verification roadmap then identifies the conditions, possible falsifiers, and prospective tests Lundahl would need to establish his claims,

I hope this deals with "How do I know" in the credal sense. That's all that such verification roadmaps should deal with.

while two appendices supply a formal argument audit

Not sure what that even is. And given certain propensities for overdiagnosing circulus vitiosus, I'm not sure Stillwell is capable of doing one correctly.

and a practical discernment matrix.

This one on the other hand should be on "what should I do" ... thankfully the two appendices are separate items.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Olaf
29.VII.2026

In Norvegia sancti Olavi, Regis et Martyris.

Biblical Prophecy, a Mormon Called Up Joe Heschmeyer, and Then I Comment (Daniel 2)

A Reflection by Mother Miriam (Who I Think Has the Wrong Pope) · A Novus Ordo Gave Advice · FSSPX Does Not Equal Sedevacantism or Conclavism, There is a Difference of Approach · Biblical Prophecy, a Mormon Called Up Joe Heschmeyer, and Then I Comment (Daniel 2)

I'm Not Catholic Because I'm Mormon...
Catholic Answers Live Clips | 20 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgFlbDzW4wo

Just out of curiosity, has the Catholic Church condemned the Book of Mormon?

I am totally on board with Mormons usually being outside the Church (possible individual exceptions of the type Dimond brothers dispute and even then, they are outside Her in the external forum).

But it was founded in the early 1800's, like sometime after 1838 or sth. Book of Mormon is as far off a prequel to that Church as Book of Acts are, according to their claim. They can show no more direct unbroken unity with Nephite believers than with 1st C AD Jewish and Greek ones.

That said, I don't believe that book to be true, but what if it had been? Obviously, if it clearly teaches a theology like that of Joseph Smith, it's out.

6:16 While not disputing this, I'd say they also are the main rulers over another Eretz, the one divided from Sea in Genesis 1.

Rome is (to the exclusion of Genghis Khan) ruling in great shape in the treaty of Tordesillas.

When somewhat later one Tatar type kingdom actually does become important on the world wide scene, it claims to be Third Rome. I'm speaking of Muscovy. The only Tatar kingdom that came to rule one of the Four corners.

So, currently, the four corners are still in a sense ruled by Rome.

Alaska and Tasmania by post-Roman Britain's successor and Charlemagne's ally Alfred's successor. Cape Horn by a successor of Spain, which was once ruled by a Roman Emperor, Charles V. And Siberia by Third Rome.

But, the katekhon, as such, the dignity of Roman Emperor concretely on a human person was taken out of the way c. 100 years ago, when Nicholas II and Charles the Last were so.

One could say, the Holy Roman Empire got carved up into ten kingdoms, not counting Liechtenstein or Luxemburg.

1648, Austria lost Switzerland. 1864, the German parts of HRE apart from Habsburg lands (Erbländer), and after WW-I, it was divided into 8 regions. 1 + 1 + 8 = 10. St. Hippolytus thinks of the ten toes as democracies ... which all of the ten regions currently are.

11:12 "There isn't a clear day, when the great apostasy happened."

For an end times only great apostasy, this doesn't work.

I am open to Vatican II and even Assisi 86 being kind of false alarms, and the great apostasy happening when Wojtyla holds a speech in 1992 that mentions Galileo of Pisa. And by then an emergency conclave had already happened, so, the papacy was not seriously interrupted by Wojtyla losing it.

However, Popes Michael I and II have so far held already Vatican II and Novus Ordo were marks of The Great Apostasy.

As you might know, these never quite flew with all Catholics. Which means the Great Apostasy would even so not have been a Universal one, sth excluded by Matthew 28:16--20.

Cuando las reformas del Concilio Vaticano II comenzaron a implementarse en Norteamérica, fue Sáenz quien lideró la lucha contra ellas. Su tradicionalismo intransigente condujo a un rechazo de la nueva Iglesia Conciliar, y fue uno de los primeros en proponer la conclusión teológica del sedevacantismo, que sostiene que, desde la muerte del Papa Pío XII, ha habido un estado de sede vacante en Roma porque los siguientes llamados papas abrazaron las enseñanzas heréticas del falso Concilio Vaticano II.*

I think this means, Joaquín was still on board with Vatican II until it got practical consequences.

Even earlier? Well, in 1958, Duarte Costa and Michel Colin, though illegitimately so on other grounds, were refusing obedience to Roncalli.

12:52 I hadn't understood the dynastic part.

If I'd give an alternative interpretation ... ethnicities getting drawn into Rome and Germanic and Slavic people are still not Romance, or even Munich is under iron in 1864 and under clay in 1870, Austria is divided into iron of Austrofascism and clay of Social Democrats and Nazis in the 1930's. BUT they are still ethnically the same.

For my interpretation, we have St. Hippolytus.

Or against it. To him, the democracies are the toes.

But the mixing begins before the toes, so ...

* https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquín_Sáenz_y_Arriaga

A Side Note

Creation vs. Evolution: Green Arabia · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: A Side Note

Suzanne Martser's Self Defense Course, Episode 1: Does God Tempt?
TektonTV Redivivus | 28 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvb_6GOymm0

Plus, after Abraham inadvertently nearly killed Ishmael by sending him out into the Arabian Desert, c. 30 years after Green Arabia ended, his nearly killing Isaac was arguably a move on God's part to prevent Ishmael from actually killing Isaac in sheer frustration.

So Abraham rose up in the morning, and taking bread and a bottle of water, put it upon her shoulder, and delivered the boy, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Bersabee And when the water in the bottle was spent, she cast the boy under one of the trees that were there And she went her way, and sat over against him a great way off as far as a bow can carry, for she said: I will not see the boy die: and sitting over against, she lifted up her voice and wept And God heard the voice of the boy: and an angel of God called to Agar from heaven, saying: What art thou doing, Agar? fear not: for God hath heard the voice of the boy, from the place wherein he is Arise, take up the boy, and hold him by the hand: for I will make him a great nation And God opened her eyes: and she saw a well of water, and went and filled the bottle, and gave the boy to drink
[Genesis 21:14-19]

I just need to find a source for Negev having a similar green period, since I didn't read the reference to Beersheba, but cited from memory when commenting on my calculations.

FOUND

From 1987 to 1989, excavations at Shiqmim revealed the longest chronostratigraphic séquence for a late hfth to early fourth millennium site in westem Palestine. The séquence extends >5 m in depth and spans >800 radiocarbon years of occupation (4500 to 3700 BC)

.

Source:

https://www.academia.edu/47953461/Subterranean_Negev_Settlement_Subterranean_Settlement_in_the_Negev_D%C3%A9sert_ca_4500_3700_B_C

2097 BC

74.949 pmC, dated as 4481 BC*

1982 BC

80.546 pmC, dated as 3770 BC

1965 BC

Serug died

1959 BC

81.656 pmC, dated as 3634 BC

Let's count

(1982 + 1959) / 2 = 1970.5 BC

(80.546 + 81.656) / 2 = 81.101 pmC

5730 * log(0.81101) / log(0.5) + 1970.5 = 3702 BC

1970 BC

81.101 pmC, dated as 3702 BC

1936 BC

82.763 pmC, dated as 3500 BC

1930

Ishmael born

1916 BC

Isaac born.

83.166 pmC, dated as 3440 BC

So, the Shiqmim habitation was still going on near Beersheba to five years before Serug died.

Meaning Shiqmim had been inhabited for over 120 years, from 2097 to 1970 BC, then empty for c. 50 years, 54~55 years to when Ishmael was going that way.

And needed an angel to find water.

As Genesis 21 is the first time Bersheeba is mentioned in Genesis, we can surmise, Abraham may have been unfamiliar with the exact circumstances.

When Abraham and Abimelech and Phicol met, in Bersheeba, they may have been looking for Shiqmim./HGL

* The tables cited are quoted from Newer Tables, Flood to Joseph in Egypt, also true for the other post. Years obtained by calculation and not in original tables are marked in italics.

Monilia and manes don't prove Roman ladies wore beads to remember the exact number of prayers

Q Why do definitions and the historical context of words matter when discussing social constructs, like those in dictionaries or legal texts?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-definitions-and-the-historical-context-of-words-matter-when-discussing-social-constructs-like-those-in-dictionaries-or-legal-texts/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-2

Hans-Georg Lundahl

amateur linguist

28.VII.2026

I have as a favourite Matthew 6:7.

Some Protestants translate “battologein” as “repeat oneself” where a more reasonable translation is “speak with a stutter”. But they will point to next words “as the heathen do” and say “look, Hindus and Muslims are heathens, and so are Buddhists, and they have repetitive prayers”.

The thing is, while Hindus and Buddhists weren’t totally unknown in the Roman Empire, they were very marginal. Muslims didn’t even exist yet.

So this means “as the heathen do” should refer to something else than repetition in praying. Unless Greeks and Romans in their paganism did so, and they didn’t.

Look up Velleius Paterculus, Roman History, book II, last chapter.

Another favourite is this verse:

For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable.

It’s Romans 1:20. Certainly, it points to God being provable from observations. But also, the observations are there to the naked eye, to people who have no microscope or telescope. Not saying these can’t bring additional proof, but the thing is, first we need to know what St. Paul was directly talking about.

I’d say, prove God from Geocentrism, like Aristotle did. The intellectual framework was certainly there in St. Paul’s day, and Geocentrism can be evidenced by the naked eye. Unlike the things that are supposed to prove Big Bang.

Obviously, it is also possible for someone’s erroneous definition to matter in the wrong way, like if he were saying Romans and Greeks were doing repetitive prayer since Nimrod in Babylon, as I think … well, I actually know now:

Every one knows how thoroughly Romanist is the use of the rosary; and how the devotees of Rome mechanically tell their prayers upon their beads. The rosary, however, is no invention of the Papacy. It is of the highest antiquity, and almost universally found among Pagan nations. The rosary was used as a sacred instrument among the ancient Mexicans. It is commonly employed among the Brahmins of Hindustan; and in the Hindoo sacred books reference is made to it again and again. Thus, in an account of the death of Sati, the wife of Shiva, we find the rosary introduced: “On hearing of this event, Shiva fainted from grief; then, having recovered, he hastened to the banks of the river of heaven, where he beheld lying the body of his beloved Sati, arrayed in white garments, holding a rosary in her hand, and glowing with splendour, bright as burnished gold.” In Thibet it has been used from time immemorial, and among all the millions in the East that adhere to the Buddhist faith. The following, from Sir John F. Davis, will show how it is employed in China: “From the Tartar religion of the Lamas, the rosary of 108 beads has become a part of the ceremonial dress attached to the nine grades of official rank. It consists of a necklace of stones and coral, nearly as large as a pigeon’s egg, descending to the waist, and distinguished by various beads, according to the quality of the wearer. There is a small rosary of eighteen beads, of inferior size, with which the bonzes count their prayers and ejaculations exactly as in the Romish ritual. The laity in China sometimes wear this at the wrist, perfumed with musk, and give it the name of Heang-choo, or fragrant beads.” In Asiatic Greece the rosary was commonly used, as may be seen from the image of the Ephesian Diana.

So, the one indication that Greeks used rosaries in Asia is the status of the Ephesian Diana according to Hislop. I checked it, and nothing looking like a rosary is there. And Rome?

The necklaces which the Roman ladies wore were not merely ornamental bands about the neck, but hung down the breast, just as the modern rosaries do; and the name by which they were called indicates the use to which they were applied. “Monile,” the ordinary word for a necklace, can have no other meaning than that of a “Remembrancer.” Now, whatever might be the pretence, in the first instance, for the introduction of such “Rosaries” or “Remembrancers,” the very idea of such a thing is thoroughly Pagan. It supposes that a certain number of prayers must be regularly gone over; it overlooks the grand demand which God makes for the heart, and leads those who use them to believe that form and routine are everything, and that “they must be heard for their much speaking.”

He fails to prove that Remembrancer can have no other meaning than “remember to say this prayer” … and also fails to check Velleius Paterculus about what “heard for their much speaking” really looks like. Why should I believe the theology of someone who so grossly bungles basic philology?

As to monile, he thought it had to mean something like “remembrancer” from the verb monere. But here is a different etymology:

Connected to Old English mene (necklace/collar), Sanskrit maṇí (jewel/necklace), and Old Irish muin (neck).]3, 2, 1

monile - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monile#Latin

A lion’s mane has the same etymology, it would seem.