A Reactionary Cosmology

Like most young reactionaries who survived the public school system and years of university, there comes a point where you question just about everything you were ever taught by a figure of authority. You don’t quite figure out that literally every single thing you ever learned in those institutions was wrong, but that’s only because those institutions had to teach you how to read, write, and add numbers together. Everything else, however, falls under suspicion.

Some people take a wrong turn someplace and question even the most basic principles of geometry, in part probably because they weren’t taught geometry in the first place and were never introduced to the first, best, and for most people, only geometry textbook you’d ever need. These unfortunate souls are those whom we call Flat Earthers, and we’ll get into that amusing conspiracy theory later.

Most of the rest of us end up believing the standard evolutionist’s model of cosmology—that somehow, four and a half billion years ago, the planets of our solar system came together because of gravity, and over the next few billion years, geological and chemical changes allowed for the environment in which life could somehow have been made. A few hundred million years later, here we are. The Earth is round, God’s presence in the world is dubious but ultimately unknowable, species experience genetic mutations and drifts that have made the plurality of creatures possible, and human beings are basically over-sophisticated apes.

And then we get, lastly, to the creationists—and specifically, the most mocked of the bunch, the Young Earth Creationists, who believe among other things, that the Earth is only about six thousand years old, that the flood mentioned in Genesis and alluded to across all major contemporaneous civilizations was a fully global deluge, that the narrative of the evolution of organisms is an anti-Christian conspiracy which has no basis in reality, that Man was created by God directly, and that the rest of the events of Genesis are more or less true in a literal sense. And, though it may not need to be said, they also believe that the Earth is round.

Consider for a second the general public opinion of these three competing cosmologies. One is taken as the standard, and it’s defended by just about everyone who has ever attended a public school. One is seen as a quirky alternative to the standard, defended mostly by internet trolls and over-educated, gullible college dropouts. And the last one is, predominantly, reviled and ridiculed, and frequently defended by people who are almost never directly addressed by secular media.

Flat Earth and the Unfortunate Nature of Conspiracies

The Flat Earthers may try to insist that they’re never given proper attention and that somehow their theories are distorted by their detractors. The reality is they’re never taken seriously because they have nothing of substance to take seriously, and more importantly, the motives for going into such a theory full-bore are always pretty transparent. Flat Earth does not offer anything of narrative value that most people of fringe beliefs don’t already know. The only thing of practical knowledge that is derived from entertaining the Flat Earth thesis is that major institutions lie to you about everything, even the shape of the globe. And it turns out, most of us already know that much, and we don’t need to pretend like the globe is a lie in order to believe that people in positions of power hate us enough to lie about even the most basic things.

The Flat Earth narrative is driven by this reaction.  What they’ve learned has turned out to be mostly wrong, and whatever worldview they had crumbled in the process. Absent a rock of truth to be pinioned to, when the Modern’s view of the world is revealed as so much empty rhetoric and flimsy lies, he finds himself susceptible to believing just about anything—from the inherent superiority of neo-pagan religious beliefs to the possibility that the whole universe is an infinitely large flat disk and that outer space is fake.

In fact, sheer absurdity of their model has made me only half-jokingly believe that the entire narrative started as a joke by some CIA spook to see just how crazy was too crazy for conspiracy theorists to actually buy into.  As we know, the coining of the term “conspiracy theory” started in the wake of the JFK assassination, and although at the time the government was able to push the lone gunman narrative, eventually—through the use mostly of Hollywood, interestingly enough—public consciousness now readily accepts the presence of a bona fide conspiracy afoot to eliminate Number Thirty Five, and that members of the US government were in on the plot.

Now fast forward to 9/11, and the wealth of information that began pouring out as a result of the existence of the internet. Entire amateur documentaries were produced, volumes of works written, all referencing contradictory explanations for the events, witness and expert testimonies on the validity of the official narratives that were offered, surveillance footage, tampered camcorder footage, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, to the point that it again neared the forefront of public consciousness that there was simply no possible way to believe the official story.

Like JFK’s assassination, the true culprits are difficult to identify, but it’s hard to get around the fact that the only people who believe the official stories about either of these events are people who simply have not bothered to look into them. Good for them, I guess, since it means that they at least have social lives—or hopefully higher priorities. For those interested in losing your social life and jumping into the “9/11 Truther” fray, albeit fifteen years late, I recommend starting here.

Reflect for a second. What were the chief conspiracy theories of the day in the decades leading up to 9/11? JFK’s grassy knoll leaps to mind, of course, but so does Roswell and the innumerable cases of alien abductions and supposed so-called cover-ups that followed. Conspiracy theory had already been a term indistinguishable from “lunatic that believes farmers are being sexually violated by little green men”, whether the conspiracy you actually believed involved something as outlandish as four-foot-tall sodomitical extraterrestrials or something as believable as a successful coup of American politics.

Let’s leave aside the alien stuff for now. That’s a rabbit hole for some other time.

The important point here is the conflation of the “conspiracy theorist” title. How do you discourage active investigation and the proliferation of information that might dangerous to the public trust? Attack the characters and reputations those who investigate it, smear the entire field as untrustworthy, and present their information as being synonymous with the absurd frivolities of cranks. In the eighties and nineties, that meant that anyone who questioned the government narrative also believed in aliens. Today, it means anyone who questions the government-media-entertainment complex also believes the Earth is flat. The whole point of the movement isn’t to question everything, it’s to derail conversation.

Weaponizing Cosmology

Amusingly, although creationists have frequently been ridiculed and smeared, the term has only been used as a weapon against Christian fundamentalists. Since most creationists seem to be of a low-church American Protestant variety, it isn’t hard to find cranks and weirdos who are all too willing to publish illustrations of men riding around on dinosaurs and holding crosses. These people are the fakers, though, propped up or even invented by the media to make the movement look more insane than it actually is, as even just a cursory glimpse into the field reveals.

Creationism has been used for decades as a tool for the secular establishment to bludgeon any form of Christian organization with, be in the true Church or any variation thereof. It’s so bad that even Catholic priests and scholars have felt the need to denounce sacred Scripture, to paint whole swaths of events that even Our Lord referred to as probably being metaphors, and to suggest that the creation story depicted in Genesis actually refers to the random mutation of genes over time—that somehow evolution is compatible with the Biblical narrative.

It’s been a successful rhetorical attack on believers for a while now, but it’s never crossed over into the mainstream the way the Flat Earth arguments have, despite most creation science for the past decade and a half or so being—surprisingly—better researched and more grounded in peer-reviewed, established, academic science than the sort of brazenly retarded playground physics on display in the Flat Earth community. This probably has to do with the fact that the Flat Earth community is largely comprised of YouTubers, bloggers, and other internet content creators who are seldom known for intellectual rigor. Creationists, on the other hand, at least have the decency to get publishing credits under their belt, and a surprising number of them turn out to be people who work in the fields of geology, biology, and astronomy—typically with graduate degrees in their studies.

I admit that I’m not one to trust academics in general, but a man explaining geology with a PhD in the field will always be easier to believe than someone who hasn’t finished college. We’re not talking about liberal arts professors, here. But this is beside the point.

If an idea is bad, it doesn’t take a smear job to reveal how dumb it is. It just takes some investigation. So what does the secular, evolutionist, mostly anti-Christian narrative have to fear from the creationist narrative that it would seek to deny it being taught in schools and attempt to paint all those who consider it reasonable as literally knuckle-dragging functional illiterates? And all this despite creationism being a fairly unpopular set of beliefs, even among church-going, self-professed Christians.

Let me be clear about all this: I’m not going to make an argument here for the validity of the Biblical account of creation, nor am I attempting to do a take-down of the standard old Earth model in favor of Young Earth Creationism. I personally have no great opinions about that debate for either side, and have little interest in arguing the science behind either one. I simply mean to state that if the field of creation science was as easily dismissed as you’re led to believe by the secular media, then it wouldn’t be as vilified as it actually is. Flat Earth is easily dismissed because of the scope and magnitude of its errors, and Flat Earthers are painted as harmless morons (and possibly autistic) by the secular press. Creationists are grouped in with gun-toting Evangelicals whom the New York Times audience already believes to be domestic terrorists.

Creationism As the Final Boss

So let’s take a slightly closer look at what it would mean if some form of creationism was actually correct. I say some form because within the field of study you have several competing theories, and since I’m not looking to do a serious exegesis on creationism here, I see no need to really get into that. What the theories all have in common, however, is a much shorter time period in which the Earth—and usually the whole universe as well—has been in existence. They have in common the belief that evolution, in which genes randomly mutate from one generation to the next, is a false belief, and that Man was made more or less according to the means described in the first and second chapters of Genesis. They have in common that the flood was a worldwide catastrophe, rather than a localized inundation of the middle east, and they tend to believe now that the catastrophe that caused the flood also fundamentally changed the landscape of the whole world, as several parts of both Genesis and Psalms point out. The main thing they all have in common is that the focus of their study and research is guided and assisted by an at least partially informed reading of the divinely-inspired Scripture.

So let’s start there. When a literal enough interpretation of Genesis is employed, time takes on a moral dimension that the standard belief system has no measure of. A few thousand years is easier to wrap your understanding around than a few billion. That’s as many years as a there are students in maybe six or seven local high schools. You’re certainly not able to hold in your mind the uniqueness of these years in their totality, but to grasp the concept of their existence? That’s easy. But now try to rationalize something comparable to four and a half billion.

A much younger Earth places the importance of your own personal life in greater standing, because it isn’t so easily brushed over by the enormity of incomprehensible spans of time. You extend the scope of time out far enough and it’s easy to lose focus of specific ramifications of events. Using an incomprehensible scale of time as the context of an eighty, ninety, or even hundred year long life is, in practice, attempting to find meaning in an eternity of events that have no beginning or end. It’s easy to see how the development of atheism and the practiced belief that nothing really matters could thrive under such a system.

Next: a global cataclysm that, in the space of about a year or so, not only resulted in the submergence of all lands, but also the formulation of mountain ranges like, say, the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Rockies, the plunging of the seas to abyssal depths, the raising of continents out of the waters, and the complete desolation of all land-based animals and life: what if this actually happened? And more, what if this really did happen within human memory, and only a mere four or five thousand years ago?

For one thing, it means the Earth’s geography is subject to radical, drastic change in ways that the evolutionist perspective has no correlation of, save perhaps two planetoids crashing into one another. This belief emphasizes man’s place in the world; the Earth did not always look the way that it does now, and it was changed violently and suddenly into the continental globe we see today. Such is God’s power and foresight to be capable of such a feat and, miraculously, to preserve the lineage of Man so that he would not be eradicated entirely. God giveth and He taketh away, but trust in Him and you will be saved, even should the whole world be consumed.

The flood narrative’s moral dimension makes no sense whatsoever should the believer have the impression that the flood was a merely local problem. Local problems give way to an arbitrary method of contextualizing misfortune. Instead of addressing the real issues of the cataclysm, such as trusting God, the believer would instead be left wondering what would have happened had Noah lived just a bit further to the north, or on a mountain, or perhaps on a different continent altogether.

Everything Actually Matters

There is an obvious motive at work in undermining what was once the normal cosmological view of the world, and that motive isn’t as simple as pursuing what is true. It’s part of the same modernist framework of ideologies that we see everywhere else in the culture.

As I mentioned earlier, my point here isn’t to suggest that Young Earth Creationism is definitely true or that the evolutionist’s model is definitely false. It’s to investigate why things as presumably unimportant as the age of the universe, the origin of life, and the history of the world are so staunchly and adamantly defended by believers of the secular option. If you point out legitimate errors and flaws of the evolutionary model—be it the Darwinian or neo-Darwinian one—you’re an idiot. If you point out legitimate abuses of information and research in the collection and interpretation of geological data, you’re an idiot. If you don’t shut up and listen to journalists at National Geographic, who have gotten caught red-handed lying about the fossil record and contorting the claims of archaeologists in order to push the secular agenda, you’re an idiot.

Cosmology is an easy weapon for them to wield. We all have some lingering questions of our origins, and answering the big picture can help us find orientation in our little world. So if you can paint the big picture as incomprehensible in size, unending in time, and accidental in cause, then the natural conclusion follows: the actions you take in life have no significance and no general weight. Even for the Catholic, should he buy the evolutionist’s whole ideology, will be left with the nagging impression that even God, in his infinite knowledge, attention, and mercy, won’t be looking at him all that closely and that his sins don’t matter all that much. An infinite universe is a universe in which nothing matters. Intellectually we can still apply the same defenses of God as we always would, but the disconnect occurs in applying that intellectual rigor to the practical, moral concerns of daily living.

But a finite universe, one so finite that its finitude can be grasped by a few simple calculations: this is a universe that matters. It’s a universe in which everything matters. No action exists that escapes the sight of God. No natural aspect of the world is an accident. These are true no matter what sort of universe exists, but they are comprehensible by our intellect only in one in which the universe is comprehensible as well.

What the evolutionist defends is a world that means nothing, under the belief that his own ego is enough to fulfill the boundless spaces of an empty infinity, where most actions are arbitrary and most people don’t really know anything. What creationist defends is a model of the world made with the calculated, beautiful, absolutely deliberate intent of God, where everything that happens in it is important to Him, and where no life that could ever live in it is meaningless.

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