Karl Keating - Part 2

Having read carefully all 355 pages of The New Geocentrists, I feel competent enough to answer the question put to me:  What is good about the book?

 

At the end of page 355, I am forced to conclude that there is nothing really positive, i.e., good about the book.  Whenever a compliment or agreement on some truth seems imminent, it is cancelled out with a “not so”, or “it is wrong.”  This amounts to a pattern and can be seen in the title to the third subsection of Part I:  “Convincing but False” (Wow! How can it be?)  This is the stylistic habit of Karl Keating.  Very jolting on the mind.  And its main disadvantage is that it leaves the reader with nothing but negatives, quite hopeless. 

 

Modern science, according to Keating, is essentially agnostic.  I cannot find the page now, but somewhere, you describe the methodology of modern science in such a way that it can never arrive at a truth worthy of absolute certitude.  And this, I would say, is absolutely true:  the incertitude of modern scientific theories is due to their inductive method.  However, and so:  This is the reason why Divine Revelation is absolutely necessary.  And if it is absolutely necessary, then, that Divine Revelation must give us the absolute certitude we require for salvation.  And this certitude is found in Sacra Doctrina.  In the time of St. Thomas, the trio, Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium were not yet separated.  In fact, as an aside, your book is an example of the extreme fragmentation so typical of all things today.  As John Donne said of the Copernican theory, writing his poetry in the 1600’s – “all coherence gone” the center lost…..If he felt it so soon after (1543) , but then he was a poet!

 

Back to the man who was not a poet, but the best example of scientific discourse ever – St. Thomas Aquinas.  For St. Thomas, Sacra Doctrina was the teaching of Divine Revelation gleaned from Scripture and the Fathers and interpreted/endorsed by the teaching Church which was mainly theologians.  Remember the case of Pope John the XXIII, who taught there was no particular judgment, and how he was quickly corrected by the theologians of the Univ. of Paris?  That was Sacra Doctrina in action and so much needed today!  Also, your book seems built on the premise, although you never state it – that Divine Revelation can state or teach one thing, such as an earth-centered cosmos – and all of the natural sciences could hold and teach something quite different, with no consequential effects in the world at large.  I would put it perhaps this way:  you probably would not accept my term Divine Revelation, but substitute whatever.  How can there be a dis-unity in basic doctrine such as cosmology, and not have dire consequences?

 

Grace builds on nature.  And if the nature is full of errors, it is the task of Grace to heal them with Truth.  And the Catholic Faith is a synthesis of truths – both of reason and of faith.  Modernism, as Pope St. Pius X defined it, is a synthesis of all heresies.  It is what I have defined as the Copernican-Darwinian worldview.  Yes, St. Pius X did not include Copernicanism in his synthesis of heresies.  That is a mystery.  The only answer must be that he, too, or the man who wrote Pascendi, was also deceived by the false science stemming from Copernicus.  There is so much that is true in modern science.  I have tried to build a cosmology on it, especially the physics and chemistry of the elements.  I think this is what we must be doing.  We must be building the Catholic , i.e., true synthesis of all truths, both of reason and of faith.  I have been trying to do this during these last 20 or so years. 

 

However, I find more and more difficulty, even though the wonderful principles are and remain clear.  I cannot figure why Sungenis entitled his movie The Principle.  What principle of reason or of faith was it?  You should have told us since he did not! 

 

In conclusion, please let me urge you to read and study the 1^st question of the Summa.  It is absolutely the key to all these problems.  I fault Sungenis for failing to take his stand on St. Thomas’ guidelines for Scripture:  the literal is the basis of all other senses of Scripture.  When Our Lord compared Himself to the Door, it is necessary to know what a door is:  the opening, entrance to a house.  This literal meaning is absolutely necessary for an understanding of His comparison.  The same with all such references.  All figurative significations require an understanding of the literal.  And this literal is always true, it cannot lie.  Because it is based on Reality, the Reality God created in the beginning.  Here go on to Epistemology.  (I once wrote a paper called The Cognitive Loop.)  Very important to be a realist.  Please read my later writings.  I would love to communicate.