The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1299: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 19 -Wolfgang Smith- w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

64 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series on the subject of Continental Philosophy, which focuses on history, culture, and society. In this episode Thomas talks about the life and work of Wolfgang Smith.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Back to the Pekina Show. Thomas is here, and we are going to continue continental philosophy. so um how are you doing thomas how was thanksgiving it was fine see i'm observing the day of the burr oh it was nice man i like thanksgiving and i met some of the fellas uh downtown on wednesday night uh and that was great one of the one of my comrades here he's is a more Thai fighter like he lived in thailand and stuff i mean he's white but um you know he's a serious uh competitor and boxing in Muayai you know so we I mean I'm old now but you know I was always a huge fan of the fight game and he tends bar at a at a place our Northern Division so like

his speaking of families like his family came out and his wife who's a real peach and yeah we we hung out and got to rip it up a bit it was nice and then yesterday I'd show with my dad and I kind of made the rounds and spread a holiday cheer with my magic bag because that's what I do on holidays you know that's that's awesome man yeah glad it was glad it worked out yeah it was all right but I think an unsung cultural theorist and philosophy of science figure who's a real giant was Wolfgang Smith interestingly a lot of younger people became aware of them in the YouTube era because into it he only died a couple years back and he was in his 90s but

he's one of these guys like kissinger was who had all his marbles into advanced age and he was still writing when he was 92 or something but he he was a huge critic of the scientific perspective what he postulated dovetailed a lot with a lot of figures in that traditionalist school but he was not of that he was very distinct from that body of thought. It was Viennese by birth, but he moved to America, I think in late adolescence.

He was an aerospace engineer. He worked for Bell Aircraft. And to be clear, before the days of McDonald-Douglas and General Dynamics and all these kind of giants of the Cold War and high-tech weapons platforms, Bell aircraft was king. They developed the first super-hypersonic

multi-role aircraft prototype and Wolfgang Smith he taught at Purdue he taught advanced physics and he wrote prolifically in the problem of atmospheric reentry which was a major engineering concern in the cold in the early Cold War obviously this had basic implications for the space program and how to you know devise an engineer reentry vehicle that wouldn't kill the occupants but you know there's a strategic application too not just in terms of intercontinental platforms that obviously trail on a ballistic trajectory but the zenith really of that mode of

strategic nuclear technology is orbital bombardment so even as far back to the 50s even when manned bomber aircraft or the primary platform or strategic delivery mechanism of the most powerful nuclear weapons it was understood in the future that being able to assault from orbit which would defeat early warning and overwhelming countermeasures it was clear that that was the way to accomplish a splendid first strike capability and obviously, and that's what the

Space Shuttle ultimately was. It wasn't, the Soviets freaked out about it because clearly there was a deployment mechanism for orbital strike platforms. But my point being Wolfgang Smith, he wasn't just some theologian, and

he wasn't some cloistered philosopher. I mean, there's nothing wrong with being those things, but this gave him an innate credibility because the man was a scientist, he was a high-level scientist, he was also an engineer, people couldn't dismiss him and say, well, this is some man of religion who just has an axe to grind with the scientific establishment, but they couldn't say, well, he's some academic philosopher. He doesn't understand science. He understood science better than virtually anybody he was criticizing, okay? And he was very much an ally of, people in the 20th century who were resisting the calculated assault and religiosity and then after the Cold War he made the point he made a case for ecumenicalism and I do too as long as I like René Ginoon you know Orthodox Catholics were foreign people like myself pious Muslims we need to look at our differences and resist the tyrannists of Zionism as well as the scourge of secularism which is an assault on the

assault on the human being under offices of a you know a humanist concern but so Smith was that basically the way to understand him is that a hero he was a philosophy of science scholar but he critical treatments of the science what he called scientism his starting point was that what he called scientism it does away with the fact value distinction you know facts and the interpretation of facts are not synonymous and subjectively facts are always associated with some kind of interpretation of a that's a very value oriented.

You know, so when we're talking about scientism, we're not talking about perspectives that value the scientific method or something. And we're not talking about some Luddite sensibility that view science is bad. Your technology is deleterious of human culture. I mean, there's a case that you made for those things. It's not what Smith was talking about. You know, it made the point that when we say science, we're talking about two disparate factors. We're talking about with positive findings, which are articulable facts that can be falsified and are neutral in their interpretation as presented.

But we're also talking about an underlying philosophy and the way in which these discoveries and their implications are framed and discussed. So when we're talking about science as affiliated with some sort of political regime of any kind it's never some sort of purely empirical enterprise as it claims that it is there's epistemic priors and ontological assumptions and moral claims that always that always underlie it you know i want one good example and i look like the human genome project okay you get these goofs in the in academe they'll go out of their way to talk about population genetics and human biodiversity and how this has

all these incredible implications for medical research, which it does. But now we'll turn around and insist, but this doesn't mean there are racial differences. But you can't that's Orwellian, literally, holding like two totally contradictory posthalids in your mind and refusing to acknowledge that one

repudiates the other. You know, these aren't serious people. A lot of things that they propose are quite literally insane. Yet, this has become sort of the religion of officialdom you know um most recently it was on display with the covid nonsense you know people in authority demanding under pain of any number of punitive sanctions that you do

insane things that even a child would recognize are insane yet insisting that it's because of science you simply must abide this you know um there's a there's a reflexive thoughtlessness to it that these people that have the gall to turn around and say characterizes religion in their mind you know but and the problem with this is too is that people are inundated from a young age with these foundational postulates that again are concept that are conceptually prejudiced towards a discrete ideological coding but sort of by osmosis they internalize that you know this this is just part and parcel of of a scientific education you know and they almost subconsciously internalize the lie that this can't possibly be partisan or driven by politically motivated concerns you know and really from the enlightenment onward the scientists themselves they they've refused to even acknowledge that this exists you know um Einstein and Heisenberg were both, they both stand out because they did acknowledge that.

Einstein really kind of sold out. Everything Einstein was morally a good man, but that's a different thing. But he wasn't a fraud in the way that a lot of these scientists are. And obviously, Heisenberg was a great man in all kinds of ways. But Heisenberg openly acknowledged that there is such a thing as a, it's scientism. and it's an ideology you know but

you know the problem is too that scientism what it draws upon it draws upon a valid set of postulates and it draws upon

an exceptionally utile methodology that does produce results but then it bastardizes those results and suggest that there's some total theory of human existence. You know, so

it's a lot easier to rebut something that's abjectly farcical, that they can't draw upon a body of knowledge that has actual merit. You know, but again, the problem here isn't with actual

scientific methodology. The problem is with the framing and interpretation of you know the data that that methodology yields and also i'll get into this in a minute but i want get ahead of myself there's essential pillars of the science of the scientism perspective that that are truly fallacious but they superficially present some of these ideas as scientifically valid and methodologically rigorous when they're not so it gets assimilated into a broader pastiche of rigorous and credible science that then can't be extricated so this is very

very confusing especially to people you know again who've been availed to this sort of subliminal conditioning through the entirety of their education you know and that dismissal point that, you know, scientific belief is an oxymoron. It's become a secular theology. Science isn't about beliefs. It's not about trusting things. You know, a good scientist is part of his mandate as a researcher is to rebut things that he previously believed to be factual. The scientific establishment doesn't do that. What they'll do is they'll cling to outmoded structures and theories that have in fact been falsified. They'll insist that they're true. They'll insist that these things are factually coded when in reality they're philosophic opinions being passed off as scientific truth.

with, you know, and, uh, when challenged, there'll be this kind of a fuscatory rationale where they point to things that have been proven and claim that if you don't accept these dubious philosophical postulates, you're somehow rejecting science in absolute terms. You know, it's a very, it's a very false dichotomy and it's very dishonest, you know, and, um, The problem is, too, you get a lot of mediocris who, owing to, you know, sometimes even the most dubious association with a highly respected and admired sector of the scientific community. Like, take, you know, a guy like Fauci, you know, people will associate this guy in his title. This guy was a mediocrity and a nobody in a liar. and, you know, they'll associate him with, you know, some doctor who, like, helped their mom overcome cancer or some, or some surgeon who's world-renowned because, you know, he devised some incredible technique.

You know, it really has kind of taken on the trap. A guy with doctor in front of his name or a guy in a lab coat who's got credentials from MIT. It's like a man in a priest's collar in the Middle Ages. You know, it really is. It reminds me back in the 90s, when David Letterman was still on the air, he had Edward Bernays on, and Edward Bernays made him call him doctor, and then he explained why he called, why he made Dave call him doctor, because it, now everybody thinks I'm an expert on something yeah yeah exactly and it it shouldn't be like that you know um but unfortunately i mean people are hardwired to i mean uh humans are human psychology is highly symbolic i think that's

indisputable and people have this need to seek out authoritative structures and personages, you know, both in concrete terms and in abstract and sexual terms, and especially when you consider a lot of these punctuated crises of modernity of a psychological and social and spiritual nature, if you allow that descriptor, if people look for a new priestly cast. You know, that's, they do, okay? Even otherwise sensible people, I see it all the time, you know, and like I said, I I'm sorry to keep going back to the COVID thing, like some cheap polemicist, but that's the best case and point in recent memory of this kind of mass hysteria owing to acclaim cloaked in, you know, a veneer of science when it's nothing of the sort. You know, it's an ideological and philosophical imperative being presented as something that it's not.

Smith talked about two aspects of of scientism, and then he went on to talk about three pillars of these aspects that constitute, in broad strokes, the core and essential elements of this perspective. one of these fundamental aspects is what he called universal mechanism or what he thought of as the axiom of physical determinism which is the tenet that the external universe consists exclusively of matter and the motion and action within this constellation of matter is determined exclusively by the discrete interaction of its parts and given the configuration of this physical universe and the state of the matter that constitutes it the the

science and ideology essentially posits that once the physical laws that govern this mechanism can be determined in principle the future evolution and development of the

entire universe, not of the most discrete, minute detail can be predicted or calculated. All uncertainty can be eradicated by deciphering the physical properties of the universal

mechanism. So in this way, the Enlightenment perspective, which is the basis of scientism, is that the cosmos is a kind of gigantic clockwork. You know,

where all these discrete parts interact with other parts and they determine the movement into the hole and uh this really this idea began to take shape in the 16th century you know and Newtonian physics which can point to a tremendous litany of accomplishment like don't get me wrong and Newton himself also was something of a crank and he had this sort of petuling need to assail a classical and thomist notions of matter and the essence of physics. You know, the traditional view, obviously, is that the natural state of objects is to be at rest.

Like, like, how can objects naturally be in motion and tend to. to remain in motion without being acted upon that doesn't make any sense that's one example you know um this perspective a guy named herman von helenholz he was one of the leading uh kind of early progressive era intellectuals and he was a leading scientist and no game wrong he was re-accomplished but he openly stated that the final goal quote the final goal of all natural science is to reduce itself to mechanics now interestingly I'm admittedly a way very much a layman like I like astronomy and stuff but I you know I I'm I don't know about physics and things you

know I consume a lot of podcasts and magazine content related to astronomy, but I don't know any more than anybody else does, to be clear. But what I do know, and this has become a big deal, and the guy who does the Event Horizon podcast, which is dope, he gets into this a lot. the advent of quantum theory really dramatically changed things and it completely screwed up this kind of traditional Newtonian perspective because the new physics

as it was called is not compatible with this mechanistic premise you know because it's totally indeterminate but despite the fact of quantum indeterminism you still have this kind of community of the you know the scientific community continuing to insist on what amounts to like the Newtonian mechanistic tenant you know that's one

example of this kind of sensibility among these people of like let nothing ever change you know and we'll return to this because it becomes important in terms of what Einstein's significance was as you know something of an outlier um as regards um you know people being willing to abide the the ideology of scienceism because like i said like qualifiedly i praise einstein but he you know he very much was was heterodox in his thinking and he wasn't a fraud in this way like a lot of his peers were and successors are um The second basic tenet of the perspective of scientism as described Wolfgang Smith

is physical reductionism. What he means by that is the fact that this perspective, it hinges upon an epistemic prior, which ironically is really an idealist postulate. This perspective claims that all sensory perception terminates not in an external object as it actually is and as we experience it, but at some sort of subjective representation of some kind that's necessarily, that's intrinsically corrupted by the inadequacy of human senses to perceive reality. To overly simplify it for a layman like me, you know, looking at a red apple, the way in which I perceive it or any man or woman perceives it is, you know, somehow tragically and incorrigibly limited, you know, we need a scientist to explain to us, like, what the constituent elements are of this apple, you know, and what it actually is. Because otherwise, we're just mired in ignorance, you know, and without, without literally the enlightening perspective of these people who, you know, constantly the scientific priesthood and possess the tools and intellect to, you know, wield this methodology, you know, we can't possibly determine the actual essence and nature of things. you know and that's

that's really the enduring legacy of cartisanism they cart contributed a huge amount to mathematics including theoretical mathematics of which I have no understanding at all but what I just described

as the Cartesian element that constitutes a core philosophical foundation of modern scientism not science scientism are going to be clear I don't want a bunch of people thinking of some what I hate science I'm not talking about that and neither was smith he's dead now um you know so this constitutes alfred north whitehead who was actually a major critic of what was then the scientific perspective you know in his

lifetime he referred to this as the cartesian bifurcation you know which he said was deleterious to a reason, practical reason, and thus morality and those, all the kind of things that hold, you know, the intellectual side of human culture together. Because what it essentially is, it's this concerted attack on the common intuition of man. And it's equally at odds with, you know, what is kind of the Western canon of philosophical traditions, not just Tomism, but you know, the Aristotelian perspective and, you know, the pre-Socrat, going back to the pre-Socratics, even, you know, and this is a fundamental, what Wolfgang Smith called it, like, artisan bifurcation, Wolfgang Smith considered to be a fundamental plank of physics, you know, or a fundamental core aspect.

of the scientific worldview in terms of how common people are expected to interpret physics. You know, it's something that's just totally beyond them and can only be interpreted by, you know, the scientific priesthood. And what Whitehead was talking about, and William Smith came back to Whitehead again and again. it again and again. He was a guy he really respected. But why this is so destructive is because it represents it represented and represents a relinquishing of dominion over the physical world by religious authorities, but also by anybody but, you know, the self-enointed scientific community. You know, Smith's contention was that religion goes a strict. the moment

that relinquishes what it justly it's rights that it has over the natural domain and you know the attendant morality and philosophical orientation that encompasses that

now has been occupied by science you know the contemporary crisis of faith in his estimation and the ongoing assault on Christianity and Western society. He believed this was only possible.

Smith believed it's only possible because this had been openly ceded to the scientists. You know, and that's really that's really almost unfathomable when you think about it. You know, a priest who spent his life studying philosophy, and you know who is scientifically literate declaring that well he's not he's not going to weigh in on you know questions relating to the the cosmos because that that's for the scientists to decide that that's preposterous you know

um well vang smith one of his books opens with a quote by a guy named Theodore Rostchik. Roschek said science is the religion of the postmodern West because most people, in his words, can't with any conviction see around it. You know, everything in your environment,

every sort of intellectual endeavor relating to ontological or epistemological things, people are only capable of thinking of these things and the terms established by scientific authorities. And that is true. The only way people can understand the natural world in any other way is if they have some sort of religious education. You know, and going to some megachurch now and again or going to some, you know, non-denominational milk toast church or some guy like, Joel Osteen basically talks about self-help, you know, and occasionally mentions Jesus Christ, it's not adequate. You know, people aren't equipped with the intellectual tools to contemplate competing perspectives or even conceptualize them.

And I believe, and I mean, obviously I can't prove this, but people need to have that exposure and conditioning at a young age. You can't one day at 45 wake up and say, you know, I'm going to start reading Calvin's Institute. I'm going to start reading, you know, the sum of theologica on, like, going to mass or, you know, or going to, you know, a serious reform church and just somehow, like, empty out my mind and heart of these sort of conceptual biases. I mean, yeah, intellectually, people might understand that, you know, okay, there's problems with this dominant perspective, but, they're not really going to develop an instinct for it i don't think but again that's that's probably pretty subjective but i do believe that to be true um you know the uh and also too the you know people even people who come to reject this kind of the scientism of the regime and but they don't have any proper spiritual education they're just

going to become nihilistic because they're just going to say that well you know what I'm being told doesn't accord with physical reality you know it certainly doesn't accord of spiritual reality that means everybody's lying to me and you know the the system I live under is is based upon you know false postulates you know but if there's nothing to fill that void you know you people basically come just wallow in despair where they become totally fixated on hedonic distractions and i mean so that's the other side of it too i mean it's not just a question of disabusing people of this miseducation it's the fact that it's uh you know destructive of the human spirit and uh the cultural learning that

can mitigate that deterioration of the basic dignity of the human being um you know um Smith cited a guy named Gene Borrella a lot, who I didn't, I'd never heard of him until I started reading Smith, which probably exposed some of the gaps in my philosophical education, but he said, quote, the truth is that the Catholic Church has been confronted by the most formidable problem where religion can encounter the scientific disappearance of the universe. of symbolic forms which enable it to express and manifest itself that is to say which permitted to exist the destruction has been affected by Galilean physics not as one generally claims because it's the private man of a central position which for St. Thomas Aquinas is cosmologically the least noble in the lowest but because it reduces bodies material substance to the purely geometric thus

making it at one stroke scientifically impossible or devoid of meaning that the world can serve as a medium for the manifestation of God what Borrella called theophanic capacity is thus denied in absolute terms now fundamental the wolfgang smiths um paradigm is what he called the three presiding paradigms of scientism that encompass and frame all conceptual modalities within the postmodern west reigning as a you know the the scientific perspective does. The first of these is the Newtonian, which, again, defines the world and the cosmos

as this clockwork universe. What exists is bare matter, the parts of which are only animate, only the forces of attraction or repulsion, and that the movement of, the whole of the entirety of the cosmos is determined by the disposition of these discrete parts um unlike the other two presiding paradigms that we're going to get into that wolfgang smith identifies the success as it were or the enduring persuasive power the

Newtonian perspective that actually makes sense in a way that the other is dumb because dubious as core aspects of the Newtonian philosophy, and it is a philosophy, are that Newtonian theories have had spectacular successes that are unprecedented, in my opinion, relative to any other, you know, individualated school of physical science. What really put Newton on the map was the publication of what's called colloquially, the Principia. The full title translated is Natural Philosophy and Principles and Mathematics. Aphrelia, Naturalis, Principia, Mathematica. Really from the 17th century, until the early, 20th century, it was regarded not just as a framework or the paradigm of physics, but it was literally viewed as like the King James Bible of natural science, almost like some sort of master

code for understanding everything about physical matter, you know, from the most prosaic understanding of, you know, magnetic retraction to the movements of astronomical objects and everything in between. You know, and anything that's that dominant in terms of its ability to frame conceptual processes, it's going to exceed the boundaries of, you know, mere mechanics or mere physical science, it's going to become, for lack of a more dignified way to phrase it, a theory of everything. And, I mean, make no mistake. I agree with you Michael Jones. I believe that was, I believe that was Newton's intent. You know, now what happened however was the emergence of quantum physics again you know that did real damage the Newtonian perspective you know but there was something of a synthesis after Einstein's revolutionary proposals

which did break fundamentally with Newtonian conceptions but there was a return I don't fully understand all this and also I'm not going to bore people with the essence I do understand there was something of a return to the fundamentals of Newtonian physics

okay even into the atomic age okay and to this day and this is fascinating to me because I'm kind of a space F.A.G I'll be like a layman you know one of the reasons the web uh telescope and these deep field telescopes generally are such a big deal

they're they're cutting to pieces the entire theory of big bang cosmology but uh the scientific community just won't accept it you know they'll resort to these tortured uh and laughably uh you know, unprovable claims and tautological um, potulists to try and shore up and sustain, you know,

uh, what amounts to a totally obsolete and speculative understanding of cosmology. But increasingly, it's not possible. That's another thing that the internet is facilitating is breaking the bully pulpit

of the scientific community. But, you know, the last kind of gasp of the Newtonian perspective is this cosmological theory of everything that's going to be done by the end of this century. And it's going to be because of discoveries yielded by things like the Webb Telescope. I stand by that assertion. I know there's probably guys watching this. We're going to, like, chuckle or get mad and say, well, you're not a scientist. You don't know shit.

I stand by that postulate, you wait and see. Moving on, the second aspect of the three paradigms is Darwinism. Darwinism is the weakest of the reigning conceptual paradigmatic aspects of scientism. Wolfgang Smith described Darwinism as kind of the opposite of the Newtonian perspective. perspective, because Darwinism has been a failure from the start. It's literally on the level of Lysenkoism. It's not science. It's not biology.

It's tautological assertions, speculation, conjecture, you know, it really is kind of the anglophone parallel to Soviet Lysenkoism. Smith contends that not only is Darwinist claims about evolution incorrect, but he said it's worthless as a biological paradigm. This is not a scientific theory. It's literally an ideological claim masquerading in scientific garb. And interestingly, Carl Popper, who have got nothing nice to say about, he made a big deal about that and that guy was an atheist jews like what does that tell you okay

it remains amazing to me people act like darwinism is is science and anyone doesn't accept that it's some holy roller who doesn't believe in dinosaurs and i i've got to believe they don't understand what darwinism actually is you know nobody takes this seriously who isn't a blithering idiot there isn't you know grossly intellectually dishonest and utilizing this paradigm to prop up a conceptual model that they profit from personally and professionally now what was smith's core objection well darwin claimed that existing species derived from one of more primitive ancestors through chains of linear descent over a miller millions of years now he never explained by what means this transformation from

primitive to differentiated comes about or what that even means and truly you know it explicatory terms but what is clear to anybody who's right origin of species is a darwin you can see a revolution as a gradual process involving countless intermediary forms that's indisputable yet somehow none of these none of these appear in the fossil record apart from a handful of highly dubious specimens many of which have been discredited as representative of the aforementioned phenomenon these intermediary types that should be legion or nowhere to be found. This is now generally admitted even by scientists who believe in some process of evolution. Stephen J. Gould, you know, who was this big progress, who is, and he's still alive. He was this big progressive anti-racist type. You know, not exactly a guy who puts scientific rigor atop his priorities. He stipulated that Orthodox Darwinism is basically worthless. You know, I mean, what does that tell you? You got Stephen Jay Gould, you got

Carl Popper, you got people like this saying, I'm not going to cite Darwin in any direct capacity because that would, you know, subject me, at best, it would subject me to kind of casual ridicule by my peers. At worst, it would shoot to pieces, everything that I, I'm going to claim subsequently you know i i'm not just reserving the hyperbole when i say nobody takes this shit seriously except maybe i'm like reddit or something you know yet that um you're expected to accept this as some absolute tenet of uh of uh of uh you know of a biology and and um existence it's

quite literally insane Philip Johnson he's kind of forgotten now in 1991 he wrote a book I think it was called Darwin on trial and Johnson he was a law professor

okay he was at Berkeley and he wasn't some holy roller i think he was uh he might have been a soft atheist who was at least an agnostic he is also the father of intelligent design that's what these frauds and these cretons like a dawkins branded him as i mean obviously they were trying to do so in a punitive way but that's not entirely inaccurate but um he was famous for the quote he's

said in this book that he wrote quote darwinism apparently passed the fossil test but only because it was not allowed to fail now his book uh darwin on trial he wrote it in response it was a famous supreme court case from the 80s it was in 1987 i believe if there's some law students watching and i'm wrong on that feel free to correct me in the comments whatever but there's this case called edwards versus agvalard and uh i think it was from Louisiana, but it involved one of these challenges that was common in a lot of southern parishes to the exclusive teaching of Darwinist theory as, you know, the only perspective on human origins.

And they wanted there to be equal time given to other perspectives, including things related to intelligent design now what johnson came across came around this amicus curie brief that was filed by the national academy of sciences and it basically defined science in such a way that it was impossible to dispute the claims the scientific establishment like with this n as amicus curie brief proposed in the supreme court was that well what public schools need to do is they need to adopt a rule precluding what they called or what their lawyers called quote negative argumentation and the teaching of darwinian evolution in public schools so basically it they wanted it to be forbidden for anybody to present the reasonable doubts for all practical purposes around darwin's theory

such that uh you know basically you could only you can only present competing perspectives that were signed off on by some arbitrary quorum of scientific authorities and it was going to be defectively illegal to criticize darwinism in a classroom um by anything other than an absolute proving up according to whatever evidentiary standard of a competing perspective on its own merits in a way that rebuts Darwinism by being more persuasive. Like simply pointing out things like the lack of intermediate

forms in the fossil record, that would not be allowed. You know, pointing out that Darwinism isn't a true scientific law as it were, you know, it's basically a postulate, a theoretical postulate, that would not be allowed. You know, so again,

this is censorship masquerading as, well, no, we need to be scientifically rigorous or people are not going to get the education they deserve. And, like, Johnson found this somewhat shocking, you know. And again, there's like some, like, Berkeley liberal, you know, like all these guys that Wolfgang Smith has ticked off in his main critique of Darwin, which was an essay, which later became incorporated into one of his books,

these guys are, like, Jewish atheists, like, Berkeley liberals, guys like Carl Popper, you know, these are not a bunch of Southern Baptists or, you know, right wingers or something. You know, the fact is that this

doesn't have legs to stand on. You know, the one of, I can't remember who said it. It might have actually in popper himself you know darwin's great idea obviously other than the fact that nature produces small random mutations which then you know are passed on to the genetic line in accordance with survival of the fittest like that phrase itself is a tautology it's it's the quote of saying

the rich have lots of money yeah i mean you know and it's it's a definition of an unfalsifiable claim and thus by definition it's unscientific um you know there's um there's a really interesting around the time when um id intelligence design challenges uh to the kind of new atheist community which interestingly like nobody it's just considered cringe now like nobody invokes dockins or or Chrissy Bitchens or any of these fools. But when that was, you know, kind of in pop science journals and stuff and in mass media, when that kind of thing was popular, there was a quorum of ID proponents for also mathematicians.

They relied on the work and part of this guy named D.S. Ulam. and use the example he's the case of a human eye you know and Darwin telling us I mean the human eye is unimaginably almost unfathomably complex so I mean to accept the Darwinian paradigm

you've got to accept that this was accidentally formed through a series of minute mutations DSUM he calculated the number of mutations required to produce a structure of that kind is of such a magnitude that even in a time frame measuring billions upon billions of years, the likelihood of that occurrence is so astronomically small, it's laughable.

The Smith concludes with a quote from Ernst Mayer, who was known as one of those kind of committed Orthodox Darby. like his this is this big response to these challenges quote somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right we are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred that that was this big rebuttal you know i mean that i i don't i know guys who spend their days like gluing their ass to bar stools who could come up with something better than that and this guy this guy was a scientific authority you know um the final paradigm of this sort of core trifecta is what smith called the copernican paradigm and uh it has really little to do with it with

copernicus himself but what it involves and again a lot of this is like outside of my wheelhouse but Einstein's field equations plus astronomical data it doesn't suffice to determine an account for the total structure of the universe and the indeterminate nature of it

now of course after Einstein science has realized that they had to tweak what had been the consensus relating to spatial uniformity and things and the distribution of matter

how the average density of matter is defined what we can assume to be constant throughout space how matter behaves in a sufficiently large scale how matter

behaves at the quantum level under observation I mean really crazy stuff you know that shot to pieces this sort of static perspective there was a guy named Herman Bondi

who referred to these assumptions that you know scientists who had difficulty reconciling these theories refused to abandon with the new physics you refer to this you refer to this as the Copernican principle you know even though Copernic is obviously nothing about the controversies that are than a foot you know stuff relating to you know stellar matter or whatever but uh you know it um

Bondi it seems it strikes me as something like an inside joke among the theoretical physicists and astronomers about how the subject matter in total, you know, somehow represents the complete repudiation of geocentrism. We don't fully understand it. But Bondi dubbed it the Copernican principles, that's what it became. you know and it uh so this idea went from space in the cosmos being this sort of clockwork mechanism you know to uh space being defined as uh void of structure and design, but subject to localize fluctuations from some sort of average density of astronomical objects.

Not unlike, as I understand it, or as I glean from Smith, molecular fluctuations within a gas, which, although might remain imperceptible, without the aid of high-tech instruments, Some of which haven't even been devised yet. You just need to accept this because this is really the only way that, you know, these sort of grand theories of cosmology makes sense. I mean, that's literally what it is. This isn't based on positive findings or proven facts. It's a set of assumptions that basically these leading lights in theoretical physics and astronomy claim, well, this is just what we have to, account for you know for the theory to make sense so it's it's an acceptable supposition like

all there you're a dark matter you know it's like over the equation doesn't make sense there's you know there's not there's not adequate matter calculable you know for this to make sense well there's this thing called dark matter which isn't detectable but you just got to believe that it exists you know it um there's something really amateur amateurish about it um you know the uh and i mean it's it's there's even uh observable observational facts that are being rejected you know and especially i mean it's on display in the case of the web telescope and uh other things um i guess a big controversy of the last 30 40 years galaxies that have been identified supposedly um by close to a billion light years but given

what was supposedly the low relative velocities between galaxies it would take uh some inconceivably long time for uh the configuration at the these distances, these galaxies to exist based upon current, like, reigning cosmological theory. It would take something like ten times longer than the estimated age of the entire universe. You know, and this seems to be not nearly enough matter to account for the gravitational forces that would facilitate this. So, again, the alibi as well as dark matter. You know, the matter, it is there, you just can't see it. Because otherwise, my theory doesn't make sense, and we can't have my theory.

theory not makes sense. Like it sounds like I'm being petulant or being funny. That's literally like what these fucking people say. Um, Thomas Kuhn pointed out that, uh, is, so the primary concern of science as it exists in, you know, modern America, um, is to preserve the paradigm to protect science against hostile data you know and um that's uh that's a point that uh peter dewsberg used to make a lot as um as did uh oh jeez what's his name the uh the PCR test guy um noble prize winner he clad with dewsberg on inventing the AIDS virus i mean a senior moment but um that's that's it's indisputable I mean across the board but I'd say it's most on display in the field of cosmology and one of the reasons that's possible is because again they

presume an ignorance of weight people and admittedly I don't understand theoretical physics or astronomy beyond the most like rudimentary level but I do know what the scientific method is and I do know what it is for a claim to be falsifiable or not and it should be obvious to any reason we told an adult that these postulates don't stand up to scientific rigor. Kerry Mullis, that's what I'm thinking on, Kerry Mullis. He makes the point a lot about, where he made the point, he's dead now, unfortunately, about the scientific community being this sort of cloistered in priesthood, the primary

interest of which is preventing the emergence of hostile data, is a tendency to rebut what they call claim or absolute truths. Yeah, that's all I got for today. Again, forgive me if this isn't really my wheelhouse. I mean, I, continental and analytic philosophy are both things I understand quite well, but I'm not a science guy. I'm no Bill Nye, or that black guy who pretends to know about science and space, but he really kneel the grass, Tyson or whatever.

steal the bike Tyson just a couple things for actually Stephen J. Gould died in 2002 yeah he's been dead yeah that's right that's right yeah yeah he was only 60 years old yeah I didn't yeah

that's right and Edwards versus Aguilar was argued in 86 and decided in 87 okay okay yeah thanks because Rainquist was Rehnquist was chief at the time so right cool yeah thank you buddy yeah man no problem all right um everybody go to thomas's substack that's uh is real thomas 7777.7.7.com

and you can connect to him wherever he is all the other places uh from there so uh go ahead and do that and um yeah we will uh i don't know maybe the next thing we're going to do is watch a movie Yeah, it would be great. But we'll be back soon with Thomas. I will invite you back on soon and we'll see what comes next. Yeah, that's great. Thank you, everybody. All right, thanks.

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