[Alamo-Girl]

Sophistry is all the rage in contemporary America, even though it prefers longer, more intellectual sounding names to dupe the gullible. Thus for example, it calls itself postmodernism, empiricism, naturalism, epistemological relativism, anti-foundationalism, pragmatism, situational ethics, pluralism, multiculturalism, interfaith, evolutionary humanism, trans-humanism, positivism, rationalism, and progressivism.

Indeed. The one who controls the dictionary, controls the debate.

Thank you for all your informative, engaging posts, dear spirited irish!

[spirited irish]

The 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was one of the most systematically and clear-eyed enemies of natural science. His assertion that the sophistical naturalist mind is in fact the inability of spiritually dead natural man to transcend the natural dimension is an abbreviated and precise definition of natural science.

In “The Present Age,” Kierkegaard’s cutting satire aimed at natural science, he connects sophistry and natural science which he scornfully describes as, “the increasing mass of drivel which is called science….” Invoking the authority of Socrates he writes:

“If the natural sciences had been developed in Socrates day as they are now, all the sophists would have been scientists. One would have hung a microscope outside his shop in order to attract custom, and then would have had a sign painted saying, ‘Learn and see through a giant microscope how a man thinks’ (and on reading the advertisement Socrates would have said: ‘that is how men who do not think behave.’) (The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism, Aeschliman, p. 30, 31)