Neither irrealism nor postmodernism ...

Yesterday I had the dubious pleasure to be spoken to by probably a Jew. He pretended to be Catholic as I, but it seems his philosophical stance on God was a materialist one, like that of Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses and Old Russellians. Maybe even a fervent believer in Tsistum as a preliminary for creation. Anyway, being Catholic, being Creationist and Geocentric, I stated what I believe, and I got a comment about the worth of "irrealism" ... as if I had chosen my beliefs for contrast rather than conformity with reality insofar as it is knowable.

Fortunately I had the pleasure today to get a comment from a Catholic in FB, since he is a writer, I can tell his name is Richard Aleman:

I speak three languages and I still can't understand postmodern philosophy.

Here is my reply:

It is not a philosophy. Yesterday I talked to a Jew (probable such) who after hearing my view on creation just wanted to state - as "an even better idea" that God needed to make emptiness before creating anything and who wanted to know whet...her I thought matter primordial. That is not philosophy, it is bragging about a non-stated or half-stated philosophy and selling undecidedness off as philosophical to the ones whose philosophy they do not like.

I revisited the status and found a comment above mine which I just had not noticed, by yet another writer I know more or less, John Médaille:

The best--and esiest--introduction is James A. K. Smith's "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism." It's a short book. My review of it is at http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/06/is-the-devil-from-paris/

And I quote from that review:

Postmodernism is a philosophical movement that originates largely with a legion of Frenchmen, three in particular, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault. This “unholy trinity” (as Jamie Smith calls them) has raised a challenge to the received wisdom of Enlightenment thought that many find as perplexing as it is (at times) incomprehensible. ... However, as much as persons of faith might appreciate a challenge to such rationalism, they often find that postmodernism has a basic problem. Namely, although it purports to reject the Enlightenment’s notions of truth, it regards these notions as the only possible notions of truth. Hence, postmodernism secretly accepts back what it rejects, and ends up rejecting truth itself; it therefore ends in nihilism.

My only problems with some trads in St Nicolas de Chardonnet as far as philosophy goes, is that they too accept too much enlightenement, as if Heliocentrism or Acentrism with orbitting around the sun, or at least an earth turning about itself each day were the only real claimants on philosophical truth and rejecting that were some embracing of falsehood for falsehood's sake. But that man also - whatever his confession - had a real problem seeing a moving earth as doubtable or even as possible to consider false, despite the fact neither he nor I ever saw it move around other than on films or television.

And a lot of people have a difficulty grasping I am not writing with my tongue in cheek every article, nor is it madness to give a real and convicted opposition to, not truth, but what Enlightenment claimed to be truth.

A complete philosophy must ask itself not only what is, insofar as we know it, but how we can know it. An atheist can "know" the earth is moving because he knows only God could turn the Universe around it every day. And since he "knows" there is no God, he "knows" it is the earth that turns each day. He can also "know" that earth cannot be centre of all universe, since even slower movements in it would be too intricate not to be directed by an intelligence, which every sane man would call God.

And an atheist can "know" the creation story cannot be true, at least not verse one of either Genesis or Gospel of St John, since it means the eternal background to all that began is spiritual and living. He "knows" life and intelligence are byproducts of matter or energy.

We as Christians of course know no such thing. We know on the contrary that God is indeed both creator, intelligent and all powerful - what he needs to be to order an universe with sun and moon turning around zodiak, and turn it around earth each day.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Sunday in Octave of
Assumption, 2011
Paris