Far too often, Christians—including some who should know better—claim that: Christianity is simple; just follow Christ’s teaching of loving your neighbor and doing good for him. Baloney. For reference, this is the link to the creed, Profession of Faith, used in the Catholic Mass on Sundays and other Holy Days: Profession of Faith used in … [Read more…]
Unfortunately, we don’t have a public Christian intellectual elite which is re-understanding Creation and its Lord-Creator by way of courageous and honest responses to what is known from various fields of human exploration and speculation. We have a Christian intellectual elite more inclined to try to fit new knowledge into old schemes. We have ecclesiastical … [Read more…]
I take knowledge seriously. I take seriously the problems we human beings have in gaining data, checking it, putting it into some sort of shape where it can be considered information and maybe even knowledge. After all, we human beings as individuals and communities are finite creatures biased to survival and reproduction; our individual and … [Read more…]
We of the modern West can’t deal with the complexity of human communities nor with the complex world implied by our modern empirical knowledge. We can’t produce proper `global’ understandings of human being, individual and communal, nor of this world with all its realms only partly reconciled and made coherent at even the `purely physical’ … [Read more…]
Let’s do a Plato-update. Mathematics is the key, as it was for that heavyweight wrestler (according to some rumors which even hint at championships). Very roughly speaking, philosophy to Plato was a generalization of the thinking done in geometry and arithmetic. It may not be true that Plato’s school (the Platonic Academy Academy) had a … [Read more…]
What is truth? Where is truth to be found? There are a few starting points for a Christian willing to consider the opinions of Thomas Aquinas and all the great thinkers before him as well as opinions derived directly from the works of the modern scientists including sometimes just their empirical or mathematical findings and … [Read more…]
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…]
In a recent essay, Science and Naive Anthropocentricism, I wrote: Somewhere—I believe in The Perfectibility of Man, the philosopher, John Passmore, points out the real problem with belief in an all-powerful God: Such a God is consistent with any conceivable world. Only sloppy and ill-disciplined thinkers could seriously believe that the existence of a coherent, … [Read more…]
Our delusions about the world being subject to understanding by an out-of-the-box human mind and our allied delusions about human control over that world lead us into various specific errors. We ignore what doesn’t fit into our favorite schemes, that is, we are blind and deaf to what doesn’t fit into our delusionary schemes of … [Read more…]
We modern human beings have illusions of control; as a consequence, even our ways of approaching human freedom look not so much different from the ways of implementing systems of hierarchical control, even totalitarianism. We think to have some sort of great power over reality, if only in ways of thought and attitude. On the … [Read more…]