Emile Durkheim, following the positivist school of sociology defines the Social Fact as social phenomena having an existence independent of the individuals comprising the social group. As such, it has a coercive effect. A corollary is that the individuals comprising the group can change, while leaving the group behavior intact.

Positivism admits only the existence of facts, not consciousness, the material world, not the spiritual. Hence Durkheim cannot provide a theory of how the social fact came to be independent of any human beings; nor can he explain how the social fact controls the group, nor even how the group came to be constituted in the first place. How are we then to understand this from the metaphysical point of view?

First of all, to be an effective force, the social fact must be experienced as a thought in consciousness, though to be efficacious, it must not be reflective self-consciousness. That is, it is experienced in its immediacy and as unquestionable as any observation of the external world; in other words, no epistemological distinction is made between the social fact and an external fact. Julius Evola describes this type of consciousness:

the “I” still lives only as if in a dream: it is not yet a self-consciousness, nor an autonomous principle of action: immersed in an immediate, indistinct coalescence with nature and the world, we can say that it is not so much he who thinks, speaks, and asserts himself, as much as that various forces and impulses think, speak and assert themselves in him. He therefore is only a type of medium, a passive instrument that has his very life outside himself, and he experiences everything as grace, as spontaneity, as the immediate self-manifestation of something that transcends him. (From The Individual and the Becoming of the World.)

In the first edition of Pagan Imperialism intended for an Italian audience, Evola makes explicit reference to Durkheim and other similar sociologists by name. Although the names are removed in the subsequent German edition, the argument is the same. Durkheim used field studies of primitive societies to reach his conclusions, on the mistaken assumption that they represent earlier stages of evolution of more developed societies. Evola comments on the stage of consciousness of such societies, although he uses the word “totem” in much the same sense as social fact:

the totem is the mystical soul of the group, the clan, or the race: the individual members do not feel themselves, in their blood and in their life, as anything other than incarnations of this collective spiritual force, and possessing in themselves almost no trace of personality.

Given Evola’s thesis, then, such societies do not represent human societies at all, but something else entirely. In them, individuals are fungible, essentially indistinguishable from each other. Just a in a bale of hay, one piece of straw can be replaced with another without altering the characteristics of the bale, so in such societies the individual members may change without altering the group characteristics. Thus, they persist unchanged for centuries, unless disturbed by outside forces. Evola writes:

If the totemic force remains at this diffuse and faceless level, so to speak, and if, consequently, there are neither leaders nor subjects, and the individual members of the group are nothing other than “placed together” (com-posti) — then we find ourselves at the lowest level of human society, at the level which borders on the subhuman, that is, the animal kingdom: something confirmed by the fact that the totems—the mystical souls of the clan — are often regarded at the same time as the “spirits” of particular animal species. In addition, it is interesting that, even as the totems represent masculine figures, the composition of these societies reflects above all the telluric-matriarchal type

So, while Durkheim’s ideas may pertain to such societies, they are not valid for a Traditional civilisation, properly so called. Thus the claim of sociology to represent a universal knowledge of social groups is falsified. A true civilisation is compose of persons, not individuals. A person, as opposed to the individual, is a conscious agent. As such, he is not replaceable by any arbitrary individual, as he has a specific place and role. The aim of such a civilisation is not to keep its members in bondage to a lower animal-like form of life, but rather to further develop the personality. Evola explains:

A civilisation, in the true and higher sense — with reference both to individuals and peoples — arises only where the totemic level is surpassed, and where the race element, also understood mystically, is not the last resort; where, beyond blood, a force of higher, meta-biological, spiritual, and “solar” type manifests itself, which does not lead outside of life, but determines life, transforming it, refining it, giving it a form which it initially did not have, freeing it entirely from every mixture with animal life, and opening the various paths for the realisation of the various personality types.

This is not to say that Durkheim’s ideas fail to describe man as he is in a disordered untraditional “civilisation”. Stuck in a worldview of naturalism, materialism, and rationalism, modern man is no longer able to transcend the social fact. Seeing no sense in the idea of a “virile overcoming”, he is mired in sensuality. Unable to discern any connection with a higher world, he is satisfied with an animal existence. Intellectually incapable of understanding the sacred traditional sciences, he subjects himself to the limiting ideas of a scientific positivism as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The modern techniques of mass manipulation — advertising, propaganda, media — have introduced new totems to occlude the personality of modern man. Evola explains:

Far from not exhausting itself in a naturalism — as today only the ignorance or the tendentious falsification of some people are able to present it — beyond knowing the ideals of virile overcoming and of absolute liberation, in the pagan conception, the world was a living body, suffused with secret, divine and demonic forces, with meanings and with symbols, as illustrated by that saying of Olympiodorus: “sensible expression of the invisible”. Man lived in an organic and essential connection with the forces of the world and of the supraworld, so that it could be said, with the hermetic expression, to be “a whole within the whole, composed of all the powers”: the sense which is revealed by the aristocratic doctrine of the Atman is no different. And that conception was the basis on which, as a whole in its perfect way, the corpus of the sacred traditional sciences developed.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

In these passages, taken from The Destiny of Man, Berdyaev reveals his origins from Russian Hermetism and that he is more than a “philosopher” in the academic sense. He rejects the notion that we can study man as he is today and then extrapolate back to his origins. Like Guenon, he sees modern savages as a degenerate form and not as the proto-man. Science shows us nothing about origins, since it merely mask “philosophic assumptions” as scientific fact. Interestingly enough, he proposes that the world was more “plastic” than it is now. Of course, this is identical to the claims of Tradition as articulated by Guenon and Evola. By “Akashic Records”, we recognize Evola’s Traditional Method or the technique of Hermetic meditation.

Anthropologists and sociologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the primitive man but their methods and principles of investigation were determined by the evolutionary theory of the second half of the nineteenth century. They studied modern savages and from them drew conclusions about the primitive man. Scientific investigation in the strict sense was from the nature of the case impossible, but as a result of philosophic assumptions it was believe that, to being with, man was at a savage, half-animal stage and then, up to the nineteenth century, he gradually progressed. Man’s distant past was inferred from his present, from savages and animals. The scientists’ imagination was so poor that in man’s distant past they could conceive of nothing different from what they found in modern times at the lower stages of life. But ancient man and his life were infinitely more significant and mysterious than anthropologists and sociologists suppose. In this respect theosophists and occultists are nearer the truth. There is something to be said for the Akashic Records, the Chronicle of the world, though the idea is easily vulgarized. At the dawn of humanity the world was at a different stage than it is now. It was more plastic, and the limits which divide this world from other worlds were less sharply marked. We are told this, in a covert form, in the book of Genesis.

Berdyaev continues with his critique of scientific evolutionism and denies that the study of primitive people of today or of animal behavior can tell us anything about the mentality of ancient civilizations. Like Guenon, he denies a unitary notion of progress. On the contrary, civilizations arise and die. The myth of Atlantis may serve as a warning to us. Rather than being the pinnacle of human evolution, modern man is more likely the degenerate, fallen, and weaker product of something much greater.

The evolutionary theory of the nineteenth century has been disproved both by science and philosophy, and cannot be used as the basis of the methods and principles of inquiry. It is inadmissible to transfer to the ancient, primitive humanity our habits of thought and feeling and our view of the world. Everything then was different, not at all similar either to the savages or to the animal world of our day. Levy Bruhl, criticizing Taylor and Fraser, tries to discover the nature of primitive thought, quite different from civilized people’s thought, but his modern positivist and rationalistic mentality prevents him from understanding it. What he calls la loi de participation shows that primitive thought was of a higher type than that of the nineteenth-century man for it expressed the mystical nearness of the knower to his object. Man loses as well as gains through the growth of civilization. He not only progresses but degenerates, falls, grows weaker and poorer. There is no doubt that some ancient knowledge connected with the proximity to the sources of being was lost by man in the course of time, and only a memory of it is left to him. There is no doubt that there existed great civilizations in the past, such as those of Babylon or Egypt, and that their fall meant a period of regress and a loss of tremendous achievements. There are considerable reasons to believe in the truth of the myth about Atlantis, where a very high civilization became morally degenerate and perished. It is far more likely that the savages as we know them are a product of degeneration and retrogression, and do not represent the primary stage of human development. In speaking of the primitive moral consciousness as we know it, we must not draw conclusions with regard to the first origins of mankind. The facts that lend themselves to study and observation are chronologically secondary and not primary.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

The great religious traditions of the world are the repositories of the greatest wisdom that human beings have discovered and passed down throughout history.  In the modern world, knowledge and wisdom have splintered, such that we have different fields of study such as psychology, biology, history, and philosophy, and people are encouraged to ‘specialize’ in only one, such that their knowledge and their perspective become unbalanced and distorted.

In the ancient world of Tradition, study of these different areas of knowledge was undertaken as a unity.  One can see this in medieval Scholasticism, and more recently, in the structure of traditional Tibetan education.  These systems of education encompassed grammar, mathematics, logic, medicine, science, psychology, history, and many other disciplines.  But all of these fields were subservient to, and hence unified by, the metaphysics of the religion which informed the culture.  They were all means to an end, and that end is the Absolute.

Because the modern world has invented this distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular,’ it tends to have a reductionist view of religious traditions, as if they were only concerned with silly pre-scientific theories about how the world was made.  In truth, the great religions all contain profound teachings on the nature of reality; teachings which are multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary, and hence, not reducible to any one modern field of study, such as science, history, mythology, or psychology.  All of these modern areas of study have their origin in ancient religion, and have been informed by the knowledge and wisdom which religion has passed down.

For the ancients, there was no such thing as ‘religion’ separate from the rest of life.  What we call ‘religion’ was for the ancients a holistic way of life and worldview which permeated every aspect of life of death.

The doctrines of the great religious traditions concerning metaphysics – concerning that which is beyond physics and the world of ‘natural law’ – do not only inform our view of the world, but more importantly, of ourselves.  Indeed, they call into question the ego’s distinction between ‘self’ and ‘world,’ and between subjective and objective experience.  They teach us to rigorously examine our own experience, our own mind and soul.  They counsel us: “Know thyself.”

To be a spiritual practitioner is to strive for this unity of the world of Tradition within one’s own soul.  To look for this unity outside of oneself, in the realm of politics or modern-day ‘religion,’ is to miss the mark.  This does not mean one cannot be politically active, or be part of a religious organization, or a student of science, history, psychology, or some other modern ‘specialty.’  What it means is that, as in the world of Tradition, all of these pursuits must be subservient to, and hence unified by, the quest for Self-knowledge, wisdom, truth, love, and transcendence.

The metaphysical teachings of the world’s great religious traditions give us a framework in which to work towards this goal, and shed light on this path.  That is why they are sacred and holy teachings, to be revered and respected.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

Corresponding to the three stages of the consciousness of the individual as described in Evola’s The Individual and the Becoming of the World, there are three stages in the self-understanding of the social group:

• Instinct
• Consciousness
• Science

Instinct

A healthy society is based on healthy instincts. Families are strong, children are valued, elders are respected, ancestors are glorified, economic activity leads to near self-sufficiency, folk religion creates unity, and threats — whether internal or external — are resisted without question. This is clear from the fundamental tenet of Hermetism: “as above, so below”. Since manifestation on the physical plane is the reflection of the spirit, a healthy society follows from a healthy spirit. Each race or national group is connected with its own peculiar spirit. At the level of instinct, this connection is implicit and does not arise to the level of consciousness.

Consciousness

For some members of the society, the values and traditions begin to come into consciousness and may be questioned. In a healthy society, there a system of religious dogma and science that will aid these members in their self-understanding. For example, in Campanella’s City of the Sun, there is training in all the skills and values required for the well-ordering of the city. Then there is training in the various sciences and metaphysics for those with the interest ability. This is the level of Traditional sciences and exoteric religion as described by Guenon. So, while the first group is grounded on instinct, this group is grounded on science and religion. In a Traditional society, there is no opposition between the two groups; the second simply has a deeper and more explicit self-understanding.

In the hands of revolutionaries, so-called “consciousness raising” has the opposite effect. Instead of reinforcing Traditional wisdom, it seeks to undermine the natural structure of society. In the hands of a Friedrich Nietzsche, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” is effective in exposing the hypocrisies of an unhealthy society. However, the revolutionary seeks to undermine the healthy aspects of society. As tools, he encourages pornography, sexual immorality, hatred for the faults of the ancestors, disrespect for legitimate authority, class resentment, the devaluation of marriage and family, egalitarianism, and ridicule of spiritual reality and religion.

Unfortunately, we often find those who call themselves “Traditionalists” or claim to be on the “right”, expounding the same values as the revolutionaries. This merely justifies Evola’s claim that revolutionary ideas have penetrated down to the roots of the mind of Western man, to the extent they don’t realize it and cannot find any way out.

Science

By “Science” we mean an organized body of knowledge. We may call those at the second level the consumers of science, and those at this level its creators. Beyond the practical sciences required for the physical and economic well-being of the group, there are the Traditional sciences and, of course, Metaphysics proper, which is as precise and exact as any science. Those in this group are fully conscious of the sources of the values, mores, and existence of the society. Ideally, they rule the society. Through education and religion, they maintain the health of the whole.
Note that there is no class warfare in a healthy society. The elite rule for the benefit of all; in return, they benefit from the free allegiance of the workers, and can thus pursue their scientific and metaphysical interests. I have heard “new rightists” speak of the masses in very uncomplimentary terms. It is true that the masses are malleable; that is what makes the revolutionary so dangerous. But the elite are supposed to be the consciousness of the masses, not its enemy.

By understanding this schema of Instinct, Consciousness, and Science, all social phenomena can be understood. There are three functions of the mind: Thinking, Willing, Feeling. At the level of Consciousness, the mind is restricted to thinking. That is why it is so sterile and often unrelated to reality. This makes it prone to the absorption of ideas, almost willy-nilly, and the lack of a True Will and strong feeling makes them hollow and shallow. Unfortunately, in the modern West, the dominant intellectuality is at this level. Only at the level of Instinct and Science is the full range of mind in play. What the common man knows in his gut, the true elite knows in his heart. The revolutionary is aware of this, and makes both his enemy.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody.

~ Carl Jung

Suppose you observe two men, man A is aiming a gun at the man B whose arms are raised. As a strict positivist, who only accepts the evidence of the senses, that is the limit of what you can say about this “fact”. But have you really explained anything?

Man A could be robbing man B in the street. Man A may be a police officer placing man B under arrest. Or perhaps Man A is a private citizen looking for his daughter whom Man B kidnapped. Three quite different stories about the same alleged fact.

A physicist may treat man A and man B as physical objects and try to predict their future actions based on their mass, momentum, and so on. Of course, he will fail. We cannot understand the scenario without taking into account human consciousness, particularly in its relation to social and political structures that would legitimize or criminalize the observed facts. Similarly, there are “spiritual” facts, of a totally different kind, and these require their own methodology. Consider the following table:

First we have the traditional three kingdoms — nature, man, heaven — as expounded, for example, in the Tao Te Ching. Science, or positivism, is the study of nature in an external way, as a set of facts to observe and theorize about. Depending on the object of study, we have physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology.

Philosophy, or idealism, is related to the second kingdom. Its method is the contemplation of concepts transcending the natural world. Such systems as the Vedanta, Buddhism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Stoicism are the results of such contemplation.

Religion is not the result of purely human expression and creation. They enter the world as a revelation from a divine, supra-human, source. Certain of the world’s religious traditions have preserved that revelation in a superior way, and it is these that deserve our special study.

Boris Mouravieff, in Gnosis, shows the three realms directly influence our world; he refers to these influences as the A influence, B influence, and C influence; all our ideas can be traced to one of these influences. Valentin Tomberg looks deeper into things, and claims to understand the hidden inner nature of these influences. These he calls “occultisms” and categorizes them as mechanical, hygienic, and eugenic. This study, he claims, leads to a higher positivism, where we achieve direct and certain knowledge of higher things; this he calls spiritual science. Julius Evola similarly claimed that there is a positivism of metaphysical wisdom.

So we see that facts don’t speak for themselves and require a consciousness to penetrate into their inner nature.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

Ce que nos pères ont fait par coutume et par sentiment, le poursuivre nous-mêmes avec l’assurance et la netteté scientifiques par raison et par volonté.

What our fathers did through custom and feeling, we ourselves pursue it through reason and will, with the assurance and clarity of science.

~ Charles Maurras

With this quote, we see the dominating influence of Auguste Comte’s system of positivism on Maurras’ entire political program. The other dominant influence was Joseph de Maistre, with his love of Tradition structured by the Church and the Monarchy. However, unlike Maistre, Maurras did not have Maistre’s indomitable Catholic faith to justify his worldview. Nevertheless, Maurras accepted Comte’s claim to have discovered the true scientific basis for de Maistre’s views.

Of the two great “fathers” of a scientific sociology in the 19th century — Marx and Comte — Marx has won out handily and Comte is nearly forgotten. So we are left with a view of science that allegedly supports the forces of revolution. That this “science” is ideological, is all too obvious. Comte, on the other hand, rejected both religion and ideology, in favour of a purer science, which was simiply the exposition of laws concering what can be seen or touched. As cush, it avoided both metaphyscal pre-suppositions (e.g., materialism) and reductionism. In place of the latter, Comte proposed a hierarchy of sciences, even leaving room for a scientific ethics.

Nevertheless, Comte gets little support primarily because self-described religious conservatives have no interest in supporting Comte’s atheism or Maurras’ paganism. On the other side, secular rightists believe they can corral Darwin to their own ends, and accept its materialism and reduction as “rational”, often adopting a form of zoological racism. These secularists also oppose the role of religion in society, which they regard as mere superstition, whereas Comte and Maurras accept religion as a natural conservative and stabilizing force. What religion accomplished through “custom and sentiment”, the positivists seek the same ends through “reason and will”.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

On a blog by a soi-disant reactionary, we read:

As for free will, a minute’s thought will show that the notion of free will implies an abrogation of the laws of physics. (http://mangans.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html)

Such an “abrogation” sounds pretty serious, so I thought about it a minute, pondering which particular law of physics would be abrogated. First I thought of Newton, whose theories were considered to be “laws of physics” for more than a couple of hundred years. Unfortunately, his “laws” were definitively refuted by Einstein, so Newton’s theory turned out not to be a law, but is instead a brilliantly conceived, albeit false, recreation of physics.

So, perhaps he means the Theory of Relativity. Can that theory predict whether I’ll choose pistachio or strawberry ice cream next Sunday? Well, according to that theory, every body follows a “world line” in space-time, so presumably a physicist could compute my world line and predict which flavour I will choose. But another minute’s thought will convince you that what we have is not a “law of physics”, but rather a hypothesis that demands empirical testing. So far, at any rate, no one has computed my world-line, indeed, no one has even proposed how that could possibly be done. Hence, until there is an experiment that can be tested, it is premature to consider it a law of physics. Furthermore, another minute’s reflection will open up this question: am “I” truly a material body subject to laws of physics? Yes, I certainly am a material body, but does that exhaust who or what I am? It appears that the law of physics simply assumes I am nothing but a material object, rather than prove it. Therefore, it cannot be the Theory of Relativity.

Perhaps, then, he means Quantum Theory, which, for example, can predict the distribution of electrons passing through a slit, although it cannot predict the course of any particular electron. Presumably, then, quantum physics can predict what percentage of pistachio or strawberry ice cream I’ll choose over the course of the year, but not what I’ll choose on any given Sunday.

But I can do a similar thing. For example, I can product a very accurate chart of the next million throws of the dice at a casino, although I cannot tell you what the next throw will be with any certainty. Yet, alas, I can do that without invoking any laws of physics at all. In particular, I don’t need to know anything about the mechanics of the motion of the dice—it is simply a matter of mathematics, not physics.

So more than a minute’s reflection opens up the following questions:

1. Why should we suppose there are such things as “laws of physics”?
2. Does physics account for the totality of reality?
3. Is a scientific theory anything other than a clever creation of the human mind?

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

Darwinism is based on two fundamental tenets:

1. Survival of the fittest
2. Variation in a population is the result of random genetic mutations

The current version is better called neo-Darwinism because Darwin did not know about genes.

As Karl Popper pointed out, tenet (1) is really a tautology, not however in the sense that it is trivially true, but in the sense that it is necessarily true. That it is a tautology is demonstrated by its application to other areas; it is not necessarily limited to biology. It can lead to fruitful lines of thinking, for example, in game theory, when it is understood not merely as the survival advantage of different traits, but moreover as the survival advantage of particular strategies of behaviour. Thus, different strategies can be simulated by computer software and the results analyzed.

The second tenet is more problematic.

• It assumes that the variety of life forms that now exist, or have existed, derive from some primal life form, the “Eve” of science.
• It assumes that random mutations are cumulatively creative.
• And finally it assumes that a life form is fully defined and determined by its genetic code.

None of these assumptions is intuitively obvious. Nor have they been demonstrated.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

Evola consistently rejects both the claims of faith and of science to explain the origins of civilization. Instead, Evola makes note of “extra-scientific intuitions” and his methodology is not the study of genetics, or even of arechology, but rather “very laborious philological, anthropo-geological, mythological, and symbolic methods”. In our post-Christian era, in rejecting the claims of faith, may assume that they are therfore committed to the claims of science, without even considerting the spiritual alternative profferred by Evola.

In his time, the common theory, as he pointed out, was that civilization arose from the East, moving Westward and Northward. All other considerations aside, there is not even any scientific or historic evidence to support that. Where are the waves of Babylonians or Dravidians bringing civilization to all parts of Europe? The record shows just the opposite.

First of all, there is what is now called the “Aryan invasion theory”, that northerners conquered India, carrying their civilization to that subcontinent. This is not such a popular theory nowadays, not because of new evidence, but because it is “politically incorrect’. But as for Evola’s claim that the ancient civilization of Greece and Rome were really Nordic, we have this:

In recorded history the Nordics first appear in the West as Achaeans. They came from the North from the Dacian Plains and conquered Greece and Phrygia about 1400 or 1500 BC.

About 1200 or 1300 BC a Noridc people, the Osco-Umbrians, sweeping down from the northeast, entered Italy. They were kindred to the Achaeans and were the ancestors of the Latin tribes, including the early Romans.

(Conquest of a Continent, by Madison Grant)

Unfortunately, Grant suffers from the same mistaken belief that to be hard-headed and rational, you must follow the fashions of science. Since Grant wrote that book, science now postulates that the human species originated in Africa! Grant also believed that the different races actually constitute different animal species. Such biological theories of race are so easily refutable, that they end up discrediting his entire work. Grant wants to hang onto notions of which race is “higher” or “lower”. Unfortunately, such distinctions have absolutely no meaning in science. Instead, science can only speak of fitness … that is, whether or not a species or race can thrive and reproduce itself. By that standard, it would appear — if current trends continue indefinitely — that European man is “unfit”, no matter what can be said about IQ tests or the glories of past civilizations.

Only a spiritual transformation — not improved genetics — can halt this trend. Unfortunately, everywhere you look, there is no such transformation, but rather its evasion with a pretense to be such a transformation … thus the competing claims that decadent sensuality, or the recovery of ancient superstitions, or a new “order”, or the next trendy Asian guru will save us.

Only a god can save us.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press

A couple of years ago I participated in an on-line discussion on the web site of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) .

The host was a philosopher (Del Ratzsch) who had just published a good book on Intelligent Design from a philosophical, not scientific, perspective. I asked him this question:

Dr. Ratzsch, do you see any relationship between the philosophy of ID and the problem of universals (e.g., if something is designed, doesn’t that imply that it instantiates some universal idea)?

This was his response:

It certainly, it seems to me, instantiates an idea, and for design theories to do much the idea would need to be recognized as such (even were its content not recognized). I’m not sure that that by itself would commit one to a specific endorsement of universals, or something of that sort. Could you elaborate?

I then elaborated:

Elaboration: I guess I was driving at the issue of metaphysical realism vs nominalism. Is ID neutral in that regard — that is, is it purely an empirical science — or does it commit one to realism over nominalism?

He answered this way:

That sounds like a question that could use some further thought, and I’m not sure how I want to answer it. I tend to have sort of a gut sympathy for realism (in this sense), but on the other hand, it was in part a nominalism arising out of theological considerations that got science off the ground initially. At the moment, at least, I’m not sure that ID would force one either way, although my _guess_ is that realists would outnumber nominalists among ID-friendly philosophers. If anyone has other suspicions on that, I’d be interested in hearing them.

Obviously, my “sympathy” is with realism and I can’t imagine how an Intelligent Design can make any sense at all unless it starts with an idea. When Prof. Ratzsch refers to “theological considerations”, he means the Reformation which rejected the realism of the Scholastics in favour of a formless nominalism. The fact that science allegedly got off the ground under the influence of nominalism is hardly an endorsement. It reveals the limitations of science. The havoc in social structures today is due to nominalism run amuck as so-called scientific theories are applied to politics and society.

Authentic science must be based on realism, that is, it accepts on principle the rationality of the world and the ability of man to comprehend it … in short, a belief in the Logos. Thus, the true battle between neo-Darwinism and Intelligent Design is not scientific, but metaphysical.

This battle has been going on for centuries, and I refer you to Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver. This is a book that is on the short list of every so-called paleoconservative, but seldom does it form the basis of any of their arguments.

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Gornahoor Press