Truth Censored

I tried to leave a comment on this video:

Why Can Demons Break the Laws of Physics If We Can't? | Ask Me Anything
Jimmy Akin | 8 sept. 2024
Catholic Answers Live | September 6, 2024 Hour 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhnMtcTuxlk&t=2187s

I then briefly left for another video, to see if the comment would disappear when it was only one. It did.

Here is approximately what he had been saying when I commented:

34:45 — 36:12
Why can’t people break the law of physics when demons can? physics so I'm wondering why humans can't also break the laws of physics for example why can't like a human bend light okay um so I don't know that I would say the standard understanding is that demons can't break the laws of physics the concept of the laws of physics is something that um is post Scientific Revolution it's it's a fairly modern concept and how to ex how to discuss Supernatural events is something that people still debate in non-catholic circles particularly among atheists and stuff it's common to describe Miracles as occasions where the laws of nature are broken but competent theologians philosophers and apologists who have thought carefully about this don't tend to look at it that way um instead uh demons use abilities that humans don't have but that doesn't mean that they are breaking the laws of nature anymore than the fact birds can fly and humans can't fly means that birds are breaking the laws of nature birds are using the laws of nature they just have abilities to use those laws that humans don't ...

And I don't agree with my comments being deleted, especially on a video that was recorded on my birthday and then released on youtube the Nativity of Our Lady.

Jimmy Akin never goes into what those abilities are.

Why the hush hush?

The human soul has a direct rule of the own body, but it is not absolute. The soul cannot decide to cease breathing more than very little at a time. Any decision to move a limb and any thought that's rational affect the positions of either particles in the brain or of visible masses of tissue outside the brain or both. Yet, the electro-chemical processes go on without breaking the laws of electricity or chemistry.

An angelic being (demons being fallen angels) has similar rule over any body, having no body of his own (according to standard views of Scholastic philosophy). This involves the capacity of moving from one place to another, in either case. I can move my hand. An angel can move a bullet or the target of the bullet. For instance how Trump's head was moved the particular direction that led to a bullet hitting his ear, but not his brain. An angel could have done it either with the bullet or with Trump's head (in the latter case the one who would have the authority would be the guardian angel).

It is no harder for angels or demons to interfere in results by acts of their will affecting some movement of some body than for a human observer to do so by an act of his body, affecting the movements of a body not too heavy and not too fast moving. If I drop a pen, I can catch it before it hits the ground, and even if this leads it elsewhere than where gravitation and inertia would have otherwise led it, this doesn't affect the laws of gravitation and inertia. Gravitation presumably still is c. 10 m/s² towards the centre of the earth, it's just that the interference of a hand interrupts the acceleration. It changes the result, but not the law.

It's incidental that the factor directly interfering with the fall of the pen is another physical force, wielded by the human soul, it's still not the laws of inertia and gravitation that make the pen stop.

Similarily, an angelic being moving the Sun around the Zodiac one circle each year, or another one that moves Venus in spirograph patterns around Earth, or yet another one performing the "annual aberration of starlight, annual parallax, and proper movements" (all being really a proper movement) of any given fix star, would be breaking no laws of gravitation or inertia, just helping to interfere with and finetune the results of these forces.

And God holding Earth in place and moving all stars of the Zodiac and of any constellation North or South of it around Earth and down to Oceanic currents, yes, that is certainly big time interference in the results, but it is still not breaking any of the physical laws, like objects on normal height (6.37 km above the centre) falling (when they fall) at an acceleration of c. 10 m/s².

One might consider it as breaking such laws if "matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed" were a true law. I would say it is a postulate of Atheism. Clausius was the son of a Protestant clergyman, and in Germany at this time, this would typically imply theological liberalism (i e bordering on Atheism), and of his teachers, one was Jewish, most were Protestant, one of these was Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg who was a Kantian. And Kant had famously stated that while Theism holds in "the thing in itself" it doesn't appear in the world of phenomena. Indeed, even for "the thing in itself" it had to be more postulated than deduced. For the world of phenomena, Kant denied freewill. One could of course state that no material entity can change the quantity of matter and energy available, depending on them itself. But this does not imply similar limitations for immaterial entities. In the body, the human soul could only in microquantities do so, and therefore undetectably, but over reality as a whole, even detectable phenomena can directly relate to the act of will of a spiritual being, like God or an angel.

I would say my view is standard "modern scholasticism" (somewhere between Chesterton, his Jesuit mentors, his disciples C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, probably somewhere in Garrigou-Lagrange, probably somewhere in Sheed and Ward) when it comes to the causality. That Geocentrism, which beautifully applies this, has been, widely but not universally, abandoned is not a conclusion of scholastic principles, it's an influx of alien philosophy. Like the Kantian one. Here is St. Thomas:

I Pars. Question 110. How angels act on bodies
Article 3. Whether bodies obey the angels as regards local motion?
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1110.htm#article3

Objection 1. It would seem that bodies do not obey the angels in local motion. For the local motion of natural bodies follows on their forms. But the angels do not cause the forms of natural bodies, as stated above (Article 2). Therefore neither can they cause in them local motion.

Objection 2. Further, the Philosopher (Phys. viii, 7) proves that local motion is the first of all movements. But the angels cannot cause other movements by a formal change of the matter. Therefore neither can they cause local motion.

Objection 3. Further, the corporeal members obey the concept of the soul as regards local movement, as having in themselves some principle of life. In natural bodies, however, there is not vital principle. Therefore they do not obey the angels in local motion.

On the contrary, Augustine says (De Trin. iii, 8,9) that the angels use corporeal seed to produce certain effects. But they cannot do this without causing local movement. Therefore bodies obey them in local motion.

I answer that, As Dionysius says (Div. Nom. vii): "Divine wisdom has joined the ends of the first to the principles of the second." Hence it is clear that the inferior nature at its highest point is in conjunction with superior nature. Now corporeal nature is below the spiritual nature. But among all corporeal movements the most perfect is local motion, as the Philosopher proves (Phys. viii, 7). The reason of this is that what is moved locally is not as such in potentiality to anything intrinsic, but only to something extrinsic—that is, to place. Therefore the corporeal nature has a natural aptitude to be moved immediately by the spiritual nature as regards place. Hence also the philosophers asserted that the supreme bodies are moved locally by the spiritual substances; whence we see that the soul moves the body first and chiefly by a local motion.

Reply to Objection 1. There are in bodies other local movements besides those which result from the forms; for instance, the ebb and flow of the sea does not follow from the substantial form of the water, but from the influence of the moon; and much more can local movements result from the power of spiritual substances.

Reply to Objection 2. The angels, by causing local motion, as the first motion, can thereby cause other movements; that is, by employing corporeal agents to produce these effects, as a workman employs fire to soften iron.

Reply to Objection 3. The power of an angel is not so limited as is the power of the soul. Hence the motive power of the soul is limited to the body united to it, which is vivified by it, and by which it can move other things. But an angel's power is not limited to any body; hence it can move locally bodies not joined to it.

Pretty obviously, that's not how Kant or presumably Clausius viewed things. And due to them, and to their near Atheist views within a basically merely ritual Protestantism, the modern world has an élite which thinks it can and should dispense with understanding St. Thomas Aquinas or believing their eyes, and which is likely, as Jimmy Akin mentioned, to dismiss what we consider demons (or good angels) can do as "breaking laws of nature" when in fact it is no such thing.

It would be sad if Jimmy Akin had decided to, or agreed with others deciding to, censor my views as somehow uncatholic.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Our Lady's Navity
8.IX.2024

Nativitas beatissimae semper Virginis Genitricis Dei Mariae.

PS, a comment was similarily taken away after I posted it under a video by Joe Heschmeyer. My one comment was about the Bible translation he was using, granting Protestants too much. Acts 4 vv. 27,28 doesn't have "had predestined" in either the Vulgate or the Douay Rheims.

On the wider theme of theodicy, I think I made a comment in Spanish somewhere. I'm not sure if Joe dealt with it properly or the last commenter was making a just remark. Joe's video is way longer than my essay .../HGL