In an earlier entry, Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening Horizons of Reason, I quoted the entirety of a Vatican Information Service news article. I’ll quote a stretch of that article about Pope Benedict’s speech to a symposium of philosophers: “Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a … [Read more…]
There’s a short but interesting summary of a survey about the effects of knowledge on the opinions that men and women hold about the moral legitimacy of some controversial medical/scientific procedures such as the use of various sorts of stem-cells. See Scientific Information Largely Ignored When Forming Opinions About Stem Cell Research. In a nutshell, … [Read more…]
A few days back, I uploaded an entry with the above title to my other blog: To See a World in a Grain of Sand. That was a mistake. It was written for this blog. I may eventually move it over, but interested readers can read it there for now: What We Can All Learn … [Read more…]
Over the past decade or more, neuroscientists have found strong evidence that we start to act before we’re consciously aware of our own actions. This is a problem to those who believe in free-will in the sense of a power of an autonomous agent. It isn’t much of a problem to one who accepts the … [Read more…]
Way back in the mid-1970s before the sexy term ‘chaos theory’ had ever driven books onto the best-seller lists, I took a course with a decidedly unsexy title: The Qualitative Analysis of Ordinary Differential Equations. In that course, we learned how to analyze potentially unstable systems such as a planet orbiting the sun so that … [Read more…]
I’m being somewhat unfair in titling this series of blog posts as if Pope Benedict were responsible for the lack of response by Christian thinkers to the opportunities and problems presented by modern empirical knowledge. It’s creative thinkers who’ve failed over the past five centuries or so, perhaps because of the general cultural decay narrated … [Read more…]
[Discipleship as Political Responsibility, John Howard Yoder, Translated by Timothy J. Geddert, Forward by Stanley Hauerwas, Herald Press, 2003] In speaking of the temptations which the crowds presented to Christ, to make Him King after He multiplied the bread on the mountainside and again after His triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, Yoder says: [T]he political temptation … [Read more…]
I’ve spoken about the nature of evil as related to the individual creature in my previous two entries: Good and Evil: Simpler Than We Pretend and Good and Evil: The Instability of Evil. But evil takes shape on a large scale far too often, especially in this modern age of genocidal wars, this age where … [Read more…]
In my prior post, Good and Evil: Simpler Than We Pretend, I noted that St. Augustine of Hippo taught that evil is a privation in being rather than a positive substance. I also noted that a creature in this universe, this phase of God’s Creation, is not a firmly defined being of immutable substance but … [Read more…]
More than 1500 years ago, St. Augustine of Hippo told us that evil was not a positive force but rather a privation in being. He reasoned that all being comes from God and has to be good. He had, so to speak, a devil of a time justifying the existence of Satan, a being who … [Read more…]