Let me oversimplify in a useful way: Facts are local. Understanding is global. Knowledge is something of a bridge from facts to understanding. And, yet, we should not imagine that facts and knowledge exist only to serve understanding. Nor should we imagine that understanding is fully, or even mostly, what can be found in a … [Read more…]
Razib Khan, is a geneticist who is an atheist but not a naively anthropocentric atheist nor one blind to the reasons why others hold or seek a faith he doesn’t hold and doesn’t desire. He has published an essay, Can a Religious Person be a Good Scientist?, in which he says: In the culture of … [Read more…]
See Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American for my take on the topic of one important aspect of American moral character. Solzhenitsyn had a similar take and summarized the situation as: Americans are a uniquely evil people. He was speaking of large-scale American crimes against Russian POWs and refugee peoples in the … [Read more…]
The modern man of the West knows in his bones that he is an individual, born an individual, a clearly defined entity which stands in some sense above not only the confusing and often chaotic world around us but also above our bodies, our organisms which are also confusing and chaotic at times. An individual … [Read more…]
That Brazilian globetrotter, Pepe Escobar, has summarized the New Cold War in a recent article, The new European “arc of instability”. In that article, he published a paragraph from an email he received from the Saker, a former military intelligence analyst who lives outside his homeland of Russia but defends her strongly and intelligently in … [Read more…]
In my last two essays I posted, Mathematical Models of Human Communities: Parts and Wholes and Mathematical Models of Human Communities: We Live in Narratives, Not in Models, I acknowledged the usefulness and potential truthfulness of mathematical models but claimed we need to consider wider aspects of this world and of all of Creation. In … [Read more…]
In the last essay I posted, Mathematical Models of Human Communities: Local and Global Processes, I discussed briefly my oft-stated opinion that we need to model human nature, personal and communal, by a model (qualitative and quantitative) which is much like those of the theory of general relativity where local regions of space and time … [Read more…]
In Sociodynamics: A Systematic Approach to Mathematical Modelling in the Social Sciences (Dover Publications, 2006), the physicist Wolfgang Weidlich develops a model of some aspects of human communities; his model is developed bottom-up in a manner similar to the development of a model of an industrial process or of (allegedly) well-defined human activities. Weidlich is … [Read more…]
Christians are bound to recognize that the God of Jesus Christ is truly Lord and truly Creator. We are bound to do our best to honestly and courageously and faithfully respond to God’s Creation as we can best know it and as we come into contact with it. To turn away from Creation or to … [Read more…]
According to a couple of dictionaries, an `explanation’ is “Something that explains” or equivalent definitions of the sort which would gain a failing grade on a junior high school test back in the days when American schools were so tough we had to write essays explaining how it was possible to walk uphill going to … [Read more…]