This post is about Science. It will not seem so until the end.
Most know the Catholic Church had, and still has, the position of Advocatus Diaboli, a.k.a. the Devil’s advocate. The canon lawyer who takes the position of prosecutor against the defense. The defense advocates for the sainthood of certain individuals.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia (this is from the turn of the last Century), the Devil’s advocate’s “duty requires him to prepare in writing all possible arguments, even at times seemingly slight, against the raising of any one to the honours of the altar.”
This is to be praised because, we emphasize, of those required “even at times seemingly slight” arguments. Compiling every bit of relevant evidence in favor of your case is, after all, what a competent lawyer must do.
This is in the vein of the West’s argumentative style of justice. There’s no need for us to rehearse the arguments, for you know them well, that the best way to discover truth is open and robust examination. Married, of course, to the judgement of an impartial jury.
The consequences of sainthood are, or were, and should be, important, and designating sainthood should not be taken lightly. All relevant and pertinent information must be publicly given. Nothing hidden. No secrets. Especially since you’re asking people not involved in the decision-making process to act on the results.
Enter John Paul II, now himself a saint. As Pope, he reduced the powers of Devil’s Advocates’s office, weakening its powers and ability to advocate against sainthood.
After this move, in a curious coincidence, the number of newly proclaimed saints shot up. Whereas in prior days the proof required for sainthood was burdensome and difficult to procure, it is now somewhat easy, even trivial.
The man in office now, as of this date, has conferred sainthood on 909 individuals. This is not a typo. Nine hundred and nine. There was a “group canonization” in this, which boosted the numbers. But still, it’s 909.
Pope Benedict the XVI canonized forty five. But Benedict, God bless him, was in his heyday known as a hard ass. Theologically speaking.
His predecessor, saint JP II, slipped 482 through the door.
From the Thirteen Century (records before are not as sharp), if this article is accurate, double digits were exceedingly rare, happening only four times or so, before our three examples above, with three of the four being quite recent.
Naturally, given population increases, we might expect, given a current background level of saintliness, more saints now than before in history, simply because there are more people alive now who might considered.
Yet no one—that I know, anyway—argues for anything but a decrease in saintliness. Current headlines concur in this depressing opinion.
Therefore, we must account for the increase in official saints in reasons other than population growth. And one prominent reason is standard “democratic inflation”, i.e. the loosening standards, in membership.
And those standards have been loosened, in part, by requiring less of the Devil’s advocate. By ignoring, that is, those “even at times seemingly slight” bits of evidence against a candidate.
I said this post was about Science. Now, please, this well known clip:
Carl Sagan's words on the existential threat to technological societies from charlatans exploiting the ignorance of people & pols to take power & wealth from them were prescient. Demonising CO2 to diminish our economies is just that. Feynman explains how. https://t.co/fmp9n3kOpj
— Brian Catt (@catandman) August 31, 2022
Feynman’s advantage is both sublime and profound. The physicists of old were lucky, or they chose their objects of study well. The objects under examination, large or small, were amenable to isolation. They could be pulled out of ordinary life and put into cleverly oh-so-carefully designed experiments, all meant to tease out cause.
As Feynman said, it isn’t easy. Indeed, discovery of cause is brutally hard. It’s error-prone, it’s confusing, it’s subject to confirmation bias the same way a Pride parade marcher is to disease. The easiest person to fool, as people used to say, is oneself. They might still say it, but most now don’t believe it.
We have in Science made it at least as easy to “prove” results as JPII has to canonize “saints.” And we did in the same way as the Pope. We have hamstrung the Devil’s advocate.
Evidence against hypotheses is ignored, castigated, even thought suspicious, or inserted by dark “deniers.” Or by “racists”, “homophobes”, whatever.
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Modernism is not Catholic. Wojtyla is not a saint except in Modernism.
Hear, hear, Mike.
The Novus Ordo, not being the Catholic Church, but a new, counterfeit “religion” has seen a massive growth in “saints,” who are nothing of the sort because the men who declared them as such, not popes, either, because it requires an establishment of its own pantheon as all new religions do, warranted or not. In the case of Roncalli, Montini, Thirty-Three Days, The Deuce, and Mother “Be the best Hindu you can be!” you know the score.
And imagine thinking that The Rat, one of the primary architects of Vatican II, denier of the resurrection of Our Lord, amongst other heresies, is or was some kind of theological “hard ass.”
I used to be convinced by the idea that science came from a purging by procedures of ‘devils advocacy’ – for instance Popper’s model.
But I don’t think this is true – most of the best science wasn’t done like that.
It is really much simpler: a dedication to knowing the truth about something, on the part of the individual scientist (or even of a single individual – some of the best early science involved tiny groupings of just a handful of independent amateurs).
If you really want to know what is true, then you are your own devils advocate; indeed you design your experiments or selective observations to be as decisive as possible.
There is no secret to science in terms of methods – it is just normal human reasoning combined with a genuine motivation to know the truth about something – which includes doing the necessary work and developing the necessary skills.
The reason that Feynman’s example of pseudo-science ‘social science’ is not scientific is (and I speak from many years of experience actively working in that field; as well as in biology and medicine) that almost all social scientists are ideologically driven (almost all *very* leftist) – and motivated to seek confirmation of their ideologies – Not to discover the truth about something.
Real science Can be done in the social domain, by the truth-motivated – but it is always ignored, and often demonized; because it is (“leftists always project”!) invariably accused of being ideologically-driven!
My understanding is that the devil’s advocate went out with the penguin suit.
The standard now is that you are a good person.
God has mellowed out quite a bit since the Fifties.
Good Pope John sat Him down and explained how hard it is to keep all those rules and God finally relented.
He doesn’t fly off the handle and send people to hell for the least little thing like He used to.
Where have you been?
Indeed, “discovery of cause is brutally hard”. Yet here it took so little to ascertain that the causes of the increase in saints is the loosening of standards. What would be other possible reasons?
Soon, Saints will be as thick as British Knights and Nobel scientists. Some new honor must be created to distinguish Superior Moderns from the festering mass of Saints and Knights and Nobel scientists. That new modern honor must be Godhood. Only Godhood can satisfy progressive ambition. Until, of course, the March of Progress has to create some new honor, such as “GodPlus”, to distinguish amongst a deviltry of contending Godkins. And then “God DoublePlus”. Okay, nothing can satisfy progressive ambition. Except maybe destruction: “His Holiness the Grand Annihilator, God-Emperor of the United Nations!” — known affectionlessly by his subjects as, “Big Nil”. Motto: “Destroy Everything!”
The following may be relevant both to Matt’s post of today and of yesterday. There is further information on the current canonization process there as well.
http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/2022/09/an-alternative-take-on-fr-capodanno.html
An Alternative Take on Fr. Capodanno
Here is truth, slowly derived, separating wheat from chaff and scientific garblefarble from reality.
1. The total energy at every point is a constant. (Planck energy.)
2. There is no such thing as negative energy. (This has nothing to do with opposite types of energy.)
3. Spacetime is a field of potential energy, governing motion. (Action is caused by gradients, but the absolute value matters, too.)
4. Space is Euclidean. Spacetime is hyperbolic. (Time is imaginary to make it at right angles to space.) (The study of geometry and trigonometry are fundamental to understanding.)
All else follows. There are no paradoxes. There are no contradictions. There are no infinities. There are no singularities. (Black holes are hollow shells of maximal density surrounding absolutely nothing.)
Yes.
But, if I may, your key sentence could be amended a bit:
“Evidence against hypotheses is defunded, ignored, castigated, even thought suspicious, or inserted by dark “deniers.” Or by “racists”, “homophobes”, whatever.
The devils advocate is a lot like the putative qualifications of Kamala Harris to be the VP – it doesn’t exist
https://www.catholic365.com/article/5514/no-the-church-did-not-eliminate-the-devils-advocate-position.html
The following may be relevant both to Matt’s post of today and of yesterday. There is further information on the actual current canonization process there as well.
http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/2022/09/an-alternative-take-on-fr-capodanno.html
An Alternative Take on Fr. Capodanno
Mr. Briggs, you still don’t get it! Not completely, anyway.
You tell us, “Evidence against hypotheses is ignored, castigated, even thought suspicious, or inserted by dark “deniers.” Or by “racists”, “homophobes”, whatever.” And this is quite clearly true. But you mischaracterize this phenomenon as “evidence against hypotheses”…NOOOOOOO. That’s not it at all.
We live now in Woke World. There are NO hypotheses in Woke World. There is only Revealed Truth.
And this is a critical difference.
It would make no rational sense at all to ignore evidence against what is hypothetical. Gosh, anyone who would do that would be an idiot. BUT — if what is ignored and dismissed is just ‘evidence’ against the Truth, well then it’s only right and reasonable to dismiss it! Who wouldn’t? Further, how can there even be ‘evidence’ which disputes something we Know Absolutely is True?
Obviously there can’t be.
And since there can be no evidence which disputes an Absolute Truth, any so-called evidence (like ‘masking doesn’t do squat’) can’t really be evidence, now can it? The evidence, rather, is revealed as lies…and those who present it, as Lying Liars. They must be cancelled!
In truth, in Woke World, we’ve reached the End of Science. Where we’re going we don’t need Science because we’ve arrived at the point of an ahistorical ‘knowing’ which, of course, exists outside of history, independent of history, as it must … to avoid contamination by all the tainted reasoning produced by Misogynistic, Patriarchal, Heteronormative, Racist, Sexist, Colonialist and Highly Toxic White Males.
In Woke World we Know that my lived truth is equal to your lived truth and that both (and all) lived truths create independent realities. Who needs Science?
Real Science would tell us Men can’t become Women. Real Science would tell us that ‘transitioning’ is impossible. But since we know absolutely that Men CAN become women (simply through the act of declaration), then equally we know that Real Science must be wrong.
As underlined by the Bizarro Scotus Justice Kennedy: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Does that sound like a place Science lives?
There was a “group canonization” in this, which boosted the numbers
Reminiscent of Rev. Sun Myung Moon presiding over Unification Church’s mass wedding
(your number of saints is chump change in comparison)
The thing that needs to be added, is that THE SCIENCE ™, and SAINT Inc. didn’t just come up out of the ether to exist in a vacuum.
They were set up to serve a purpose. An agenda. They are there to market a product and sell you something.
THE SCIENCE ™ serves THE STATE (c) which runs frequent marketing campaigns for the current thing, from Vexxines to digital ID to Beyond Meat which is beyond plants even considering the crap it is made of.
Meanwhile SAINT Inc. was created to market Vatican II and the easy wide road into Heaven, so easy that every other religion can also do it, and peace amongst men is as easy as talky-talky-talky.
What better way to demonstrate the success of your product than by delivering the goods? That CHURCH v.2.0 is making more saints at 100x the processing speed than ever before?
It is as easy as when Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Franky-boy wants to do one better with his underhanded attempts to put Luther in Heaven. Hence the chocolate statues and official Vatican City stamps.
Gotta make good with rising number of holy by lowering standards and cancelling the skeptics with top-down hammering with no shortage of books and media coverage praising the NEW ORDO of things and poo-pooping the traditional classical critics.
Keep the charade going by doubling down, no matter what illegitimate chump sits in the highest office, it helps to conveniently ignore the fact that they refused, both Church and State to properly address the Russian issue…
There’s still time before 2030 to admit the mistake and make the peace deals according to what was required of you, whether at Minsk, or at Fatima.
Better hurry though… California is banning natural gas heaters when 2030 arrives. We might all be too cold to try anything then… Maybe even post-Nuclear frigid!
Changing the rules of canonization so you can get canonized. JPII had an obvious conflict of interests there.
JPII is a fake saint just as he was a fake pope, as have been all the other “saint” “popes” spawned by Vatican II. These “canonizations” are meant to canonize Vatican II, the Judas Council.
The entity now led by Jorge Bergoglio (stage name, “Pope Francis”) and founded at Vatican II is not the actual Catholic Church; it’s the Novus Ordo (New Order) Antichurch, with Antipope Francis as its latest wolf in shepherds’ clothing.
1) Actual popes must be actually Catholic.
2) Jorge Bergoglio is manifestly not a Catholic, is indeed rabidly anti-Catholic, as most recently proven by his participation in a demon-summoning ceremony in Canada. Much, much more could be cited; it’s indeed cited at the superb Novus Ordo Watch site.
3) Therefore, Bergoglio cannot possibly be an actual pope.
Francis and his fellow Novus Ordo Antichurch confreres are the wolves in shepherds’ clothing we’re repeatedly warned about in Holy Scripture. We weren’t repeatedly warned about them, in both the Old and New Testaments, without reason. We’re endowed with the capacity to recognize them as the total impostors they are, as the infernal wolves they are, and to flee from them.
We’re divinely assured that the actual Catholic Church is indefectible. But the Novus Ordo Antichurch has manifestly defected from the Faith. Hence it cannot possibly be the actual Catholic Church.
Similarly, since Francis manifestly isn’t an actual Catholic–since he’s indeed rabidly anti-Catholic–he can’t possibly be an actual pope, since actual popes must be actually Catholic. One cannot be the head of a body of which one is not a member.
And he’s not just a “bad father.” One must first be an actual father to be a bad father. But Francis has never been an actual spiritual father at all. His status as an impostor has nothing to do with any electoral irregularities or any attempted bifurcation of Benedict XVI’s “papacy” in 2013. Francis isn’t a father, isn’t a pope, solely because he isn’t a Catholic; and he wasn’t a Catholic long before 2013. Only actual Catholics can become actual popes. Just as only actual Catholics can be popes, only actual Catholics can become popes.
Moreover, it takes absolutely no legal authority whatsoever to recognize all of this manifest reality, just as one need not be a coroner to recognize a dead body. Our minds were made for truth. It’s permissible, and indeed good for us, to recognize the truth. Comfort is irrelevant. Any future legal judgment by the actual Catholic Church, which is now in the catacombs once again, will simply be a recognition of the present factual reality spitting in our faces daily.
It’s time to get real; really real.
Saints today must be like the Saturday crowd at Disneyland. I probably walk by dozens every day. It’s gotten to be trivialized, like flying the flag at half-mast. When I was a kid I remember a handful of times–JFK, Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and maybe a few other giants. Now it seems like the flag comes halfway down every few weeks. When there are so many saints and so much flag dipping, it all gets to be kind of meaningless.
Vatican Two changed everything from the Mass, the Sacraments, the Doctrine, Tradition, to the Religious Orders owing to Ecumenism and so despite the unofficial motto of modernism Everything is different, nothing has changed everything is different because everything has changed for if it were true that nothing is different then nothing would have had to hav e been changed.
And the principles once supporting decrees of Canonisations no longer exist
https://sspx.org/en/beatification-and-canonization-vatican-ii-3
https://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/search?q=canonisations
We don’t like devil’s advocates.
….in a classic study of decision making (Boulding, 1964) several groups of managers were formed to solve a complex problem. They were told their performance would be judged by a panel of experts in terms of the quantity and quality of solutions generated. The groups were identical in size and composition, with the exception that half of them included a “confederate”. Before the experiment began, the researcher instructed this person to play the role of devil’s advocate. This person was to challenge the group’s conclusions, forcing the others to examine critically their assumptions and the logic of their arguments. At the end of the problem solving period, the recommendations made by both sets of teams were compared. The groups with the devil’s advocates had performed significantly better on the task. They had generated more alternatives (sic), and their proposals were judged as superior. After a short break, the groups were reassembled and told they would be performing a significant task during the next session. However, before they began discussing the next problem, they were given permission to eliminate one member. In every group containing a confederate he or she was the one asked to leave. The fact that every high-performance group expelled their unique competitive advantage because that member made the others feel uncomfortable demonstrates a widely shared reaction to conflict.
Whetton and Cameron “Developing Management Skills” 5th Ed p352.
My favorite philosopher of science is Paul Harrell. Just a man who does comparisons of firearms and ammunition online.
To get a flavor of his approach, take a look at [https://odysee.com/@paul_Harrell:a/shot-timers-and-meat-targets-an:3](39:00 and 47:00.) His grasp of the *philosophy* of science is certainly more lucid than most any philosophers[tiny p value or no]. If I was teaching young students what science is about, I will use Paul Harrell. I have an affection for Karl Popper, but he is no match for this humble fitness and combat marksman instructor for the Army and Marines.
He has conducted hundreds of his small sample size experiments.[1] But he his observations are assessed against a background of substantial knowledge and experience.
On Karl Popper: Here is an example of negative results which do NOT falsify a theory which itself does not quite falsify falsification: The corrupt and/or incompetent studies of ivermectin and HydroxyChloroquine. Some
A) Used doses known to be potentially dangerous
B) Were administered later in the course of the disease where it is least useful in inhibiting the infection of cells
C) Did not employ appropriate treatment protocols. eg. The role of Zinc in the function of the drugs.
That said, there is something to be said for Popper’s evolutionary idea about science: If profession of science should select for models which, say, serve to advance a political cause, they are doing politics in a lab coat.
Genetic selection is not based on improvement, merely frequencies of genes/frequencies. One environment can favor a population whose genes are certain to be fatal in a different environment.
[1] I have read simulations of large numbers of small-sample sized studies will, on average, produce results comparable to large scale studies – With appropriate qualifiers.Is this correct? It makes a lot of sense. In any case, Curiosity, integrity and observation are necessary in science. Funding grants are not.
Paul Harrell’s Youtube channel is among the best! I’ve been a subscriber for years.
The difference between liberality towards sainthood and towards scientists is that the saints are dead and cannot cause any harm to the living.
@McChuck #1
How is a point defined – physically?
Thanks for posting on this subject. It seems that it will always be more difficult to prove something happened in the past because of the difficulty in managing the conditions as they were in the past. A scientific experiment on a historical event can never be exactly isolated from all causes that existed back then. However, I do think that I can prove(to my own satisfaction) that if the South had two more mules and twenty more hours, they would NOT have won the Civil War. Being correct can therefore be seen as the art of lowering or moving the goal posts to a convenient location.