Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Aporia

I must have been over at Aporia magazine a couple of times in the last year, because my auto-complete for URL's brought up two articles. But the article by Matthew Archer An Open Catacomb: Four Days with the Nietzschean Right, was the one I clicked on once I got over there.  There are more I am going to try, I think. They seem to be a hereditarian group of social scientists, a somewhat beleaguered group these days.

Archer speaks to someone - a "man of science" he describes as the most intelligent and most accomplished person he has ever met, but does not identify because he has no permission and believes it might hurt the man's career, about his faith, which is unusual in this group. He speaks about himself first by way of introduction.

(Emmanuel) Carrère exposed the most embarrassing part of my own militant atheism. Not only had significantly smarter people believed in God, but they had grappled with questions I had not even considered. And yet I concluded in the ignorance of youth and with the conviction of a convert that they were obviously wrong...

Then describes the mans long answer in front of many who are listening in rapt attention, though they are not believers themselves.

The main theme is the Bible as the story of human evolution. He weaves Milton and Nietzsche into advanced scientific observations. Listening to him is like watching Federer play tennis. It’s not as if he’s a little bit ahead of you, as if you’d be able to catch up with a spot of hard work. It’s immediately obvious that the chasm cannot be closed. And it’s liberating. You can often understand the individual moves a great mind makes, but you cannot replicate the whole. Genius is more than the sum of its parts, a Gestalt entity. 

They do weekly roundups or research, which I have found very interesting. 


1 comment:

  1. “I’m in search of students to speak with. But something far more interesting quickly catches my ear: the slurred, demented screams of a madman.

    He’s slouched on a plinth in the middle of campus…. He yells at a group of distant students, closing his rant accusing them of being disgusting communists. Perhaps he isn’t mad, after all.”

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