We have to learn to move forward in our thought by trying to honestly perceive reality and to openheartedly respond to it while becoming aware of the distortions of the preconceptions we always bring to such tasks. This is a logical development of the insight we have inherited from Aquinas and a few of his [...]
We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge [...]
While thinking of the suffering endured by patients in the modern medical quest for miracles, I grew depressed and sought to cheer myself up by thoughts of hospices which allow human beings a bit of dignity as they approach death. And so it was that I turned to Flannery O’Connor’s insightful and Thomistically funny introduction [...]
I’m proposing this principle: A Creation meeting the plausible criteria of unity, coherence, and completeness, would most likely behave in a manner consistent with the manner in which it was created. In other words, if the evidence strongly tells us that the world and the entities within it develop at the level of individuals and [...]
I’ve claimed that the human mind is the sort of entity capable of encapsulating the world though an individual mind isn’t capable of fully understanding so much as a gnat. I’ve also quoted the historian Carroll Quigley about the nature of the traditional Christian philosophy of methodical realism: The truth unfolds in time through a [...]
We do need to pass by those limitations of scientific materialism and to do it without falling into the temptation of dualisms which invoke hand-waving to explain immaterial phenomena. My very working method, as well as my respect for the totality of human experience and human knowledge, rejects any possibility of scientific materialism or reductionistic [...]
Truth unfolds in time through communal processes. I’ve realized there is possibly a very clear example of what this means in an area where I’ve perhaps misspoken a little. Maybe I’ve simply been in error. In any case, I’m also willing to claim that new truths might emerge in time through various processes, new truths [...]
Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, and our relationship to God? Americans in particular, for all our claims to honesty about facts and our claims to have a hardheaded respect for reality, find it difficult to accept empirical evidence that we’re not quite the creatures we [...]
The point I’d like to make is a general one, but I’m mostly targeting my fellow-Christians who have the greater responsibility if they truly have the belief they claim in God as the all-powerful Creator of this world. First, a poem by Emily Dickinson: Faith is a fine invention For gentlemen who see, But microscopes [...]
In the January, 2009 issue of Brain in the news ( The Dana Foundation), there’s an interesting article, In Search of the God Neuron, by Steven Rose which reviews some recent books on the alleged problem of mind and brain. The reviewed books include several that take a materialistic position and one that takes a [...]