Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27
A nationwide trend pushing to remove tributes to certain historical figures of U.S. history has seized on a new, unlikely target: the bells lining California’s iconic El Camino Real. The reason? The belief that Spanish missionaries — among them St. Junípero Serra — were oppressors, captors, and even murderers of California’s first peoples. On Page 10, renowned historian Gregory Orfalea examines the most common critiques of the Spanish evangelization of California and makes the case for why the bells represent a legacy of love, not oppression.
A nationwide trend pushing to remove tributes to certain historical figures of U.S. history has seized on a new, unlikely target: the bells lining California’s iconic El Camino Real. The reason? The belief that Spanish missionaries — among them St. Junípero Serra — were oppressors, captors, and even murderers of California’s first peoples. On Page 10, renowned historian Gregory Orfalea examines the most common critiques of the Spanish evangelization of California and makes the case for why the bells represent a legacy of love, not oppression.
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no objective reality or truth, and only<br />
exists to humans as we perceive and<br />
measure it.<br />
Twentieth-century <strong>No</strong>bel Prize-winning<br />
physicist Neils Bohr summed it<br />
up with this disturbing phrase: “There<br />
is no quantum reality … only a quantum<br />
description.”<br />
This conundrum plagued scientists<br />
for decades and led to various<br />
attempts to square metaphysical explanations<br />
with this effective yet troubling<br />
system —“from the more or less<br />
weird to the patently absurd,” DeLano<br />
asserts in the film.<br />
(One explanation,<br />
for example, claims<br />
that a countless<br />
number of universes<br />
exist that contain<br />
every possible event<br />
that could have happened,<br />
but has not,<br />
in our own observed<br />
world.)<br />
Smith faced the<br />
same paradoxes until<br />
the 1990s, when he<br />
came to a simple yet<br />
pivotal realization<br />
about the theories<br />
of quantum physics:<br />
All of them assumed<br />
what he called “the<br />
Cartesian split,” referring<br />
to the work of René Descartes.<br />
The 17th-century French Enlightenment<br />
philosopher, famous for<br />
asserting, “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think,<br />
therefore I am”), built his philosophy<br />
on the premise that man’s access to<br />
truth is limited to intellectual understanding.<br />
When taken to its full extent, argues<br />
Smith, it reduces what is accepted as<br />
true to what can be proven with mathematical<br />
certainty. Everything else,<br />
including the perception of qualities<br />
in the world, belongs to the subjective<br />
world, or the realm of the mind, and<br />
cannot be relied upon in scientific<br />
analysis.<br />
Descartes’ work has long been<br />
acknowledged as one of the most influential<br />
on modern philosophy, and<br />
as the film highlights, that influence<br />
has given rise to a moral dilemma in<br />
both science and society at large.<br />
“Qualities pertain to essence, and to<br />
Philosopher René Descartes.<br />
being no less,” DeLano asserts in the<br />
film. In other words, if we disregard<br />
qualities, we refer to a world of just<br />
potentiality, not the world we know,<br />
experience, and live in.<br />
All of this tells us that while quantum<br />
physics can give a mathematical description<br />
of something like our world,<br />
it cannot capture the actual nature of<br />
the real world.<br />
What the quantum theorists missed,<br />
in other words, is that you need something<br />
else, something substantial and<br />
not merely potential, to give form and<br />
make that transition<br />
from not being to<br />
being. And that<br />
something, Smith<br />
realized, must come<br />
from above.<br />
“Qualities have<br />
primacy,” he states.<br />
“[They are] the light<br />
of higher spheres<br />
shining into this<br />
world.”<br />
FRANS HALS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />
This discovery is<br />
what led Smith to<br />
turn to philosophy<br />
in the first place.<br />
First, he turned<br />
to Indian writers,<br />
whom he admired<br />
for acknowledging<br />
a higher realm and<br />
revering it in their lives. Still, something<br />
was missing.<br />
After traveling to India and making<br />
many inquiries, Smith found himself<br />
unsatisfied with the Indian philosophers’<br />
assertions that the supreme,<br />
spiritual state of being necessarily<br />
abandons the particulars of human<br />
nature.<br />
Was there no view of the world that<br />
reconciled the material with the<br />
spiritual? Finally, Smith concluded<br />
that the answer was yes, and he found<br />
it in the Catholic Church.<br />
“God became man so that man<br />
can become God,” says Smith in the<br />
documentary. Through the mystery<br />
of the Incarnation, he found, “Our<br />
humanity is not disintegrated but can<br />
be deified.”<br />
With this new inspiration, Smith<br />
hurriedly returned to the Faith he had<br />
abandoned long before. As Smith’s<br />
story continues to unfold, the film<br />
<strong>August</strong> 2-9, <strong>2019</strong> • ANGELUS • 29