Americans who claim to be traditionalist Catholics are fighting on two sides holding irreconcilable views on the most fundamental of questions, such as “What is man?” and “What is truth?”. Most seem oblivious to the battle though they stand in the middle, one sword in their right hands to slash at their own left sides … [Read more…]
Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, and our relationship to God? Americans in particular, for all our claims to honesty about facts and our claims to have a hardheaded respect for reality, find it difficult to accept empirical evidence that we’re not quite the creatures we … [Read more…]
We have no choice but to use mathematical analogies in even our most subtle thoughts about moral and spiritual issues since mathematics, by definition, is the proper way in this universe to describe paths. We move over paths even in the events of our innermost lives, we develop over paths. Our current moral talk and … [Read more…]
The point I’d like to make is a general one, but I’m mostly targeting my fellow-Christians who have the greater responsibility if they truly have the belief they claim in God as the all-powerful Creator of this world. First, a poem by Emily Dickinson: Faith is a fine invention For gentlemen who see, But microscopes … [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…]
For more than two years, I’ve been engaged in an intense effort to explore new understandings of being and of truths which seem forced upon us by modern empirical knowledge. I was publishing the results of that effort on this blog, Acts of Being. I was also publishing a related series of entries on my … [Read more…]
I’m still trying to sketch out better ways to view causation and the human moral situation, ways that recognize both Christian truths and modern empirical knowledge. The first step is to start a refounding of our understanding of our own human nature and of concrete being in general, a refounding based upon the richer understandings … [Read more…]
In the January, 2009 issue of Brain in the news ( The Dana Foundation), there’s an interesting article, In Search of the God Neuron, by Steven Rose which reviews some recent books on the alleged problem of mind and brain. The reviewed books include several that take a materialistic position and one that takes a … [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…]