Are Catholic Clergy Helping to Make Knowledge Flat?

New blog on the kid: Are Catholic Clergy Helping to Make Knowledge Flat? · Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl: Me and Jacobus de Bruyn on Heliocentrism / Geocentrism and Sovereignty of God · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Ascension and Geocentrism (Contra Ortlund and Torrence)

Today we don't ask 2:07 the muses for help we ask notion and 2:09 notion answers but it doesn't remember 2:10 in the way memory used to function it 2:12 doesn't remind you when it matters it 2:14 doesn't bring context to bear unbidden 2:16 it doesn't knit the disparate events of 2:17 your week into a coherent thread it just 2:19 returns what you've tagged memory is not 2:22 recall it's recursion it's what allows 2:24 thoughts to become beliefs and beliefs 2:26 to become character when you offload 2:28 memory you sever that recursive loop and 2:29 you make knowledge flat this is not a 2:31 nostalgic complaint although nostalgia 2:33 certainly plays a part it's a warning in 2:36 a world of flattened knowledge the 2:37 coherence of personal narrative 2:38 collapses you know the data but not how 2:41 it fits together you recall the facts 2:43 but not the frame ask a modern knowledge 2:45 worker where they learned something and 2:46 you'll get a shrug or a vague gesture 2:48 toward somewhere online

I wouldn't say that source is necessarily always the most important part of the frame.

"Somewhere at university" or "in school" (where the teacher recalls university) and so on are clearly not much more informative about whether the info is reliable or not, since some university disciplines aren't all that reliable and since what one recalls from a university lecture may in fact also be "a summary of a summary". Or even more so, what you recall from school.

On the other hand, the internet can have pieces thoroughly aware of this problem and trying to do something about it. The video I just quoted may definitely be trying to do sth about it, by decrying an AI help to fact finding. Here it is:

Cognitive Hygiene: Why You Need to Make Thinking Hard Again
Westenberg | 24 June 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHPOyS6mjwI

I am less concerned with the tendency as such (knowledge in the Middle Ages could often enough be a summary of a summary, like someone quoting "Agellius" (in fact Aulus Gellius, so "A.Gellius") and his Noctes Atticae without checking in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia which in turn was not itself providing the sources, written or anecdoctically oral, that Pliny the Elder based himself on). And I'm more concerned how this helps to cementify certain cultural outlooks inimical to the faith or natural reason or the law of nature.

I comment on those, and cannot afford my own work to be just "a summary of a summary" because it's polemic, not a work of reference. To some, both the quality of polemic and the quality of really checking out how something is known dashing what amounts to magical thinking in the overconfidence in modern science, can be resumed as "inefficient and quarrelsome" ... they loathe me for it.

Now, if only some Jew or Muslim who might not be an avid student of Talmud or Hadiths himself and still less has patience for someone thinking Rabbi Akiva and Mohammed are wrong, or Maimonides and Averroes are wrong too, if that's their preference, that would be less bad. But when fellow Catholics take up the attitude, it becomes somewhat of a chore. Usually an author doesn't live off people reading his blogs for free because they hate what he has to say, and want to keep abreast of the latest in order to make their latest (secretive, behind closed doors, but available to the gate-keepers) rebuttal, but of a more sympathetic public, willing to pay for printed and bound actual books. And for most authors, this would come from fellow members of their own religion. Richard Dawkins doesn't live off New Agers. Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley and Margit Sandemo didn't live off people who prefer going to the Ark Encounter. Much as I regret it, Ken Ham's Ark Encounter, per se not Anti-Catholic, is not getting most visitors from Catholic parishes, who boycott it because Evangelicals, the main audience, have an anti-Catholic tendency.* Vice versa, whatever Robert Barron has to say on Catholicism, or Heschmeyer** and Horn*** (who unlike Barron need to sell books to feed their families), it's not mainly supported by Young Earth Creationists, because Heschmeyer and Horn have the unfortunate habit of defending Old Age compromise as at least possible. But also, because they are NOT Evangelicals. Heschmeyer and Horn are also not bought mainly by disciples of Tovia Singer, and his books are not the most bought by people who listen to Imran N. Hosein.

You see my point. Getting blocked from your own is costly. I could sell among Catholics if they aren't anti-Young-Earth-Creationist. I could sell among Young Earth Creationists, if they aren't anti-Catholic.

Now, Catholics can never everywhere be against Young Earth Creationists, like Christ promised to preserve His Church in His Truth (Matthew 28:16—20). Young Earth Creationists who are Protestant by default, but not fanatically anti-Catholic (not Hislop fans), will not cease to convert. A man claims to be Pope who is probably going to authorise the Marian apparitions at Lipa, in polemic against those who sit in the physical buildings of the Vatican° and arguably he is, like his predecessor, Young Earth Creationist and Geocentric. I cautiously adher to Pope Michael II. But in Paris, no priest celebrates Mass in communion with him.

I was being blocked as a writer on these topics even when I regularly did go to Mass in Paris, from 2009 to 2012. In St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. Because some people can't believe (after seing "Breakfast at Tiffany's") that someone in the Middle Ages was called Tiffany rather than Theophania (same name and the priest at Baptism would have pronounced "Theophaniam" just as in my case it was "Ioannem Georgium" in the Baptism sub conditione in 1993, but she was regularly referred to as Tiffany, in her own day), some writers of historic novels hesitate to call a Medieval character Tiffany. Similarily, what one thinks one knows about Catholic interpretation of Genesis 1 to 11 or of Joshua 10 blocks some Catholics from checking that St. Augustine, an undisputed Catholic authority was actually Young Earth Creationist (City of God, books 11 through 17, would be the go to) as well as Geocentric (De Genesi ad Litteram Libri XII, go to book I), that these positions were never condemned by a Pope who was in his lifetime viewed as Pope by all claiming to be Catholic and in some cases upheld against pioneers of the opposing theories.°°

But not only are they sloppy about the Catholic stance on these things. Their "knowledge" of the supposed "science" that opposes the traditional view and makes the modern compromise "necessary" is also not traceable to observations and first principles. Too often they are content to look at the programme of science departments giving the desideratum that knowledge of the non-obvious should make sense of actual and repeatable observations in the way that makes best sense, and conclude that Evolutionists and Heliocentrics are in fact doing that as best as anyone can in any question related to their academic fields. Never do they stop to ask the questions that scientists are or should be asking.

• how do retrogrades prove Heliocentrism?
• why is a residue of 25 "percent modern carbon" the actual age of two halflives, or 11,460 years?

It would be awkward to find answers like:

• by the absence of God and angels;
• because the Bible is wrong about the overall age of the universe, and 5000 years ago, the atmosphere was far too old to hold only some more than 43 pmC as opposed to c. 100.

But I think these are the precise tracings of this "knowledge" and as I have been into debating guys even who work on scientific institutions (on their free time on the internet, though even that has tended to get rarer), I am in a position to know it.

My own tables (on alternative Biblical or Bible compatible carbon dating) are not summaries of summaries, though unfortunately they refer to such. Saying that Göbekli Tepe's lowest layer is carbon dated to 9500 BC through ashes of char coals is a summary of a summary. My own identification of that event with "beginning of Babel" in 2607 BC is based on Babel beginning c. 350 after the Flood, when Noah died and ending in 2556 BC when Peleg was born. Doing a similar identification of Campi Flegrei with aspects of the Flood (when the fountains of the great deep were opened, by volcanism disrupting the barriers) permits me to identify carbon dated 39 000 BP or 37 000 BC with real year 2957 BC.

I analysed Mladec caves skeleta as needing reservoir effect, since 30 dead would otherwise have come too soon after the Flood, so, between Flood and Beginning of Babel, I work with two speeds. This permitted me the conjecture, so far not refuted, that in 2935 BC (22 years after the Flood) a sample then dying would have 2.583 pmC, and be dated as 33,160 BC.

And I bring back astrophysics to the questions "what do we see, what can explain it?"°°°

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Vigil of St. James the Apostle
also St. Christina
24.VII.2025

Vigilia sancti Jacobi Apostoli.
Tyri, apud lacum Vulsinium, in Tuscia, sanctae Christinae, Virginis et Martyris. Haec Virgo, cum patris idola aurea et argentea, in Christum credens, comminuisset atque illorum fragmina pauperibus erogasset, ejusdem patris jussu verberibus dilaniata est, aliisque suppliciis dirissime cruciata, et cum magno saxi pondere in lacum projecta, sed ab Angelo liberata; deinde, sub alio Judice, patris sui successore, acerbiora tormenta constanter pertulit; novissime, sub Juliano Praeside, post fornacem ardentem, ubi quinque diebus illaesa permansit, post serpentes virtute Christi superatos, martyrii sui cursum abscissione linguae et sagittarum infixione complevit.

* I was probably asked by an Evangelical on Quora ¿Qué creencias de los católicos se han identificado como falsas o anticristianas? ... Mexican Evangelicals tend to be more Anti-Catholic than US American ones. My response is number XV on Un poco apologética católica. ** Has six books on Amazon *** Has twelve own books on Amazon, plus a minor role in Jimmy Akin's book and exists as target of rebuttal on Amazon. °In 2015 they spoke up against Our Lady of Lipa. °° 1633 condemned Galileo as pioneering Heliocentric. 1860 a council of Cologne condemned the idea of spontaneous and continuous development of the human body (somewhat over the goal if "evolution" is inclusive of the processes that differentiate Black Africans from Asians from Europeans, but they presumably meant "from ape" and "to superman"). °°° Note, many mornings I was in homeless day shelters organised by Novus Ordo parishes and I had some kind of friendships there, even a love interest, the Novus Ordo parishes were quite as dismissive as St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. I think in both types of parish, clergy were active to block me.