Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Everything You Know about the Catholic Church, Science, and the Middle Ages Is Wrong

Mark Shea introduces this post, titled "The Age of Unreason", thusly:

Mike Flynn is like a walking encyclopedia of arcana about medieval science and philosophy. Yesterday, I read aloud to my wife and son most of his reply to some dude who was emitting the normal credal agitprop about the Dark Ages and Christian hatred of science and reason. If it had been a boxing match, the ref would have stopped the fight. You come away, not just laughing, but shsking your head thinking, "Poor Mr. Walker really deeply believes in his own intellectual superiority. Yet... how? What conceivable reason can he have, if he read Flynn's evisceration of his astoundingly ill-argued regurgitation of Atheist Triumphalist Talking Points, to feel anything but humiliation, embarrassment, and a driving urge to remove that wretched excuse for an essay from the web and recant in sackcloth and ashes for the sin of just pure ignorant wrong dumbness and arrogance?

My 14 year old is taking a writing class. He asked, "Why do I need to know how to argue about stuff?" I tell him, so you won't serve as a warning to others like Mr. Walker here. The man's gutted corpse is hanging from a tree branch and he's still talking as though he is Way Smarter Than You. You don't want to look a fool like that.


Thou wouldst do well to read it.

I must admit that I laughed out loud when I read that Flynn characterized Giordano Bruno as "the L. Ron Hubbard of his day". I also had to chuckle at one of the comments posted by someone else:

You didn't mention St. Macrina and automata.

I love St. Macrina. As she was on her deathbed, she cheered up her little brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, by holding a Socratic dialogue with him. He later recorded this as "On the Soul and the Resurrection", as well as in The Life of St. Macrina.

Anyway, in the middle of all this, St. Greg points to how atheists of his day said automata proved there wasn't God or a soul, and St. Mac went into how automata indicated there was. Awesome moment in girl geek history.

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