Blowing my Brain

Scientia and Sapentia, or, What the Schoolmen Knew -an excerpt

by John Médaille -The Full Article

These displaced truths, scientia (the integration of all knowledge) without sapentia (Wisdom), have another effect: they become, in the language of the post-modernists, “master narratives.” That is, they become organizing myths that “explain” everything without being subject to explanation themselves, or even to examination. In the realm of economics, we can see this phenomenon in a crude form in such books as the popular Freakonomics series, which purports to explain everything in terms of an almost comic statistical analysis.

But there is another displaced truth that has become an even more powerful myth, namely the myth of Darwinian evolution. It is certainly a truth that species succeed each other over time, and that there is a tendency to higher levels of organization and intelligence, as the fossil record reveals. Now this truth is remarkable enough in itself, but in attempting an explanation, the Darwinists have ventured into the realm of pure mysticism. That is, they attribute the phenomena to random mutations which are tested against survivability. But to say something is random is equivalent to saying it has no scientific explanation, for that is what a random event is. The findings of a “science” of random events are suitable only for publication in the Journal of Non-Repeatable Experiments. If the changes in the genes are random, then there is no science which can reach them.

Of course mutations can be as frequent as you like, but this only adds to the mystery, for what is interesting is not the rate of mutations, but the rate of useful mutations occurring at a precise time. For not only does a mutation have to be an improvement, it has to be an improvement at the moment it occurs. A higher level of organization imposes a higher cost in energy, and if an eye, a wing, or a fin is not needed at the moment it appears, it is of no value. The rate of useful changes would surely be an infinitesimally small number, and the number that appear at the right moment would be infinitesimally smaller. And if these odds were not poor enough, this remarkable set of coincides must occur in more than one individual in the same area at the same time, unless one wants to posit a single mother, an Eve-like origin to all species. But even Eve had her Adam, and without a mate with a similar trait, a trait is not likely to endure. Is it not odd that the Darwinists, having rejected a common mother for man, posit a common mother for every other species?
Yet the changes do occur, with remarkable frequency at the precise moment they are needed and over a sufficiently large population in a sufficiently small area to ensure that a beneficial change will endure. Something very interesting is happening, something that cannot be reached by a “science” of randomness, which can only be a pseudo-science. Creationists would like to attribute everything to the direct intervention of God in every case, which doesn’t tell us much about how God does it, which is the object of science, but at least it is internally coherent, in a way that a “science” of randomness is not; the creationists may be mere mystics, but they are not half as mystical as the Darwinists.

It is not as science that Darwinism obtains its remarkable prestige, for it stands outside the scientific hierarchy and will accept no critique from statistics, biology, zoology, or any other discipline. It is a master narrative, claiming to explain all things, even as it has no explanation of itself. I was reminded of this fact by a book on technology covered in the last issue of the New York Times Review of Books. The author would tie the progress in technology to the theory of Darwinian evolution. Even the reviewer noted how silly that was, but I doubt a week goes by when the Review doesn’t carry notices on a book that “explains” something or other by Darwinian “science.” The path to scientific prestige in our age runs through Darwin’s mysticism; only by embracing this myth can we prove that we have risen above tribal taboos and myths of the Jews.
Of course, we all live by some organizing myth; it’s the only way to live. Our information must be “slotted” before it is received, or we could not make sense of the world. And the mythical narratives can never be proven, they can only be compared. The Scholastics were fully conscious of this fact, yet they could not rest with it. They worshiped a God who was not merely a mythos, but a logos as well, a rational God ruling a rational universe. The great and bold project of the Schoolmen was to understand this universe, not just a a collection of “facts,” but as in inter-related whole, in which each truth found its proper place to produce wisdom, a wisdom that was a remarkable union of belief and science. Modern science has given us modern miracles, like iPhones and atom bombs and Chrysler cars, but has not given us the wisdom to use them. And it is this wisdom, sapentia, that we need right now, if we are not to bring the whole thing down upon ourselves and our children.