So goes the claim in an antiphon somewhere in the “Christian Book of Prayer” (one-volume version of the liturgy of hours, Catholic version). Man was made to glorify God. This statement points to a great truth for sure, but we have to understand that all truths, even the greatest of truths revealed by God are … [Read more…]
I haven’t read Stephen Hawking’s most recent book where he’s said to argue that a Creator-God is unnecessary nor have I read more than summaries of the efforts of certain Christian theologians to shoot down those arguments. I’ve read that Hawking argues gravity fills the need for such a God, but that’s irrelevant to the … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
God has shaped a thing-like world out of more basic stuff. I’ve discussed this in various ways, especially in the category: Christian in the Universe of Einstein. We human beings form our minds by responding actively to that world and by penetrating to understandings of that more basic stuff. A particular thing is a manifestation … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
Ten years ago, I’d read a book about the modern understanding of human color vision: A Vision of the Brain by Semir Zeki, a prominent neuroscientist. This book also provides a summary of the history of theories of color vision. Recently, I realized this subject provides a good example of why there is no knowledge … [Read more…]
More than a year ago, I wrote some articles on the relationship between Thomistic existentialism and Jamesian pragmatism as developed by William James himself and further developed in recent years by two neuroscientists, Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman. There is a great overlap between Thomistic existentialism and Jamesian pragmatism in the initial steps of … [Read more…]
Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it … [Read more…]
There’s little or no reason to believe there is any ‘mind-stuff’, material or supernatural, unless you simply wish to dogmatically assert that matter isn’t adequate as the foundation of our thoughts and feelings. Brain-scientists, geneticists, and evolutionary theorists are researching the workings of the human mind (and human nature more generally) and are producing remarkable … [Read more…]
[This entry is part of a work-in-progress which will deal with the evolution of the human mind as we can see it in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, Albert Einstein, and other great thinkers — an entity capable of shaping itself to empirical reality in such a way that it can draw forth abstract … [Read more…]