Replies

That is all that was certain for Descartes; everything else might have been a dream or deception.”

Complete rubbish.

There is plenty of certainty in Descartes...that’s sort of his whole point. It’s just that he wants to obtain certainty beginning on a firm foundation. He only doubts as a starting point, then begins anew.

Now...obviously...you can say that his certainties (which include, incidentaly, some of Newton’s laws....) are not grounded or do not follow. Or you can say that IN EFFECT as a matter of history that his beginning point brought about uncertainty.

But it’s simply wrong to say that Descartes had only one point of certainty.

This is half-assed philosophy. And it’s not helpful.

Incidentally, Descartes also sought the help of a Catholic seminary in his day to try to help him think about truth. He made a very eloquent plea, in fact, and if you read his letter it seems to be in good faith. He was ignored. So he gave it a shot on his own. And this is what he came up with.

So he was ignored then, and he is only partially read today. Very unhelpful.

“4. Man’s understanding of himself and the world has been in a downward spiral ever since. Only the mind and what the mind says is reality, is real.”

This is where Descartes went off the rails. The first 3 points are actually basically in agreement with the Biblical view, just arrived at through a different path.

Now if you rely on logic, alone, point four may seem to flow naturally from the first three, but if you posit point four, any further conclusions that you might draw are worthless, since you could never hope to determine if ANYTHING is real. If you let your subjective mind be the instrument of observation and the sole judge of reality, then everything you experience could be delusion, or fantasy, and you have no way of proving otherwise.

So logic would dictate that you must accept the existence of an external, objective reality as an a priori assumption, if you hope to draw logical conclusions farther than point 4. The failure of the modernists and postmodernists to realize that is what really causes the trouble.

“Let us pray that our reintroduction to reality will not be too harsh. But I am afraid that it will be.”

There is no separation between the physical and spirituality, the two are one.

Reality is a function of perception and our perception of reality is a function of the frequency of consciousness from which we view reality. I have found that by praying and tuning our consciousness to a higher level, consciousness itself, including thoughts and stored memories become physical objects. There is no dualism.

In fact, the “Tower of Babel” concept relates to the various levels of consciousness. There is much more to this than most understand.

Our reality changes when we cleanse our souls and/or receive the Holy Spirit. The “Born Again” or new way of perceiving is a direct result in the change in our consciousness. We can tune our consciousness so low that mole hills look like mountains or so high that mountains look like mole hills. When you tune to the higher levels of consciousness in prayer, not only are things previously invisible now visible, but you begin to perceive directly from your soul or spirit rather than just your five physical senses.

Just my humble opinion based upon my perception of past experiences

I wish I had a week with nothing else to do, so I could critique this point by point. Instead, I’ll just make one point.

There is reality, and then there is our perception of reality, and they are not the same. We know this because we have enough knowledge of the physical world, and of our own biology, to refute our own perceptions. A simple example: “color” is something we perceive in the world, but it does not exist in the world, only electromagnetic waves c.700-400 nanometers, which are reflected off objects, are absorbed by our eyeballs, and then transduced into electrical impulses sent to our brain, which then creates a conscious fiction that the objects have color—it’s a fiction because there is no such thing as color, and it is conscious because it occurs in our conscious mind. Except that the objects are not solid: we perceive that they are solid because they block our entry, but we also know that they are nothing more than a collection of electrical impulses (subatomic particles) that at any instant only fill one billionth the volume of the object. Except that the electrical impulses are not what they seem, as quantum physics and beyond shows us...

We make a distinction between practical decision-making and knowledge of reality on a regular basis: I don’t try to walk through a wall because I “know” it is only a collection of electrical impulses, because a combination of testimony (other people’s experiences) and personal experience leads me to not take the chance that my attempted walk-through would be successful. However, I also know that, if the electrical impulses that make up my body could be positioned in just the right locations as to not coincide with the electrical impulses that make up the wall, I could walk through the wall and come out the other side without injury to either myself or the wall.

So if I walked with God closely enough to have the faith of a grain of mustard seed, if God were to lead me to walk through the wall, I could walk through the wall, knowing that He is capable of positioning the electrical impulses exactly as necessary—just as I could command the mountain to remove itself and go into the sea, even if I don’t yet understand at all how it could be done, the way I can understand today how walking through a wall could be done.

This is part of the distinction that is made in I Corinthians 2:14, which distinguishes between the “natural man,” which in the Greek means the man of “psyche,” the logical-minded man, and the spirit of God. Ultimate truth can only be found in the spirit of God, because only the spirit of God fully understands the nature of all existence, having proceeded from the Father (and perhaps from the Son, that’s a topic for another time :> ). The best we can know about anything is either what our rational mind is capable of formulating based on reason and evidence—which is what Descartes was attempting to do—or what the spirit of God is willing to impart to us through revelation, which includes the recorded revelation of Scripture, and the present-day revelation of His Spirit to our spirit, which would be additional without being contradictory.

I have written much too much already, but the destruction of reason does not come from Descartes, but from Hegel, and it is in the post-Hegelian world that the antichrist spirit finds its greatest opening to spiral the world towards the end of the age.