Mathematics, no matter how abstract and symbolic it can be, is founded upon numbers, the number line for those who have taken a geometry or algebra course. Even with the abstractions of group theory and projective geometries, our understanding of mathematics follows our understanding of numbers. About 15 years ago, Gregory Chaitin of IBM proved [...]
The Bible makes it clear: we must be poor in spirit. Poverty of this sort, the true poverty which can be found in the lives of some who are poor and also in some who are prosperous, doesn’t dictate some sort of extreme asceticism, voluntary or forced upon us. Our Lord Jesus Christ lived in [...]
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]: Covenant: 3. (Theol.) The promises of God as revealed in the Scriptures, conditioned on certain terms on the part of man, as obedience, repentance, faith, etc. [1913 Webster] I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for [...]
The web-site of New Scientist magazine has an interesting article on parasites and children with auto-immune diseases, but you can understand this blog-entry without reading that article. Investigations of third-world children with auto-immune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, have indicated that they sometimes do better against their diseases if they are infected with parasites. As [...]
It sounds strange to speak of God creating truths — even God, but I have two lines of reasoning that lead to this conclusion that God has created the truths of our universe, mathematical and metaphysical, as well as the things of our universe. I discuss this claim in my book To See a World [...]
In my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I used the term ‘universe’ to mean pretty much the Einsteinian universe: all that is bound by the same gravitational field as each mortal man, the Sun, the others stars in the Milky Way, the other observable galaxies, and so forth. This is [...]
Darwin is no problem to Christian thought. The facts gathered by biologists — including evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and brain-scientists — are themselves no problem. Certain thinkers, evolutionary biologists and so-called philosophers, have interpreted those facts in terms of a skepticism of a sort charitably described as reductionistic materialism. Such thinkers, as well as more rational [...]
I’ll speak of negative theology in a specific context — that of the form of Thomistic Existentialism which I’ve been struggling to develop. This sort of God-centered existentialism begins with the negative-theological insight that God is not This, where This can be any sort of thing or living creature. Some who try to read the [...]