The usual mantra amongst Christian thinkers is faith and reason, implying that faith should be united to and disciplined by products of the human mind. The problem is that Christians are bound to believe that God was not only free to create or not, but also that — once He chose to create — He … [Read more…]
“Larvae, the immature forms of many animals, are distinct from adult forms by definition. In many life histories–caterpillars and the trochophore larvae of clams and sea snails are examples–larvae and adults bear no resemblance to each other. Biologist Donald I. Williamson has proposed that larvae are juvenile forms acquired through hybridization–the fusing of two genomes, … [Read more…]
Recent centuries have seen a mysterious retreat from the mainstream of modern thought on the part of Catholic clergymen and also Catholic laymen whose intellectual work is oriented directly to the needs of Christianity. I’m far from being a well-read historian but I’ve read enough survey works to see the retreat of Catholic thinkers into … [Read more…]
While reading, Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, I realized I’ve been guilty of a major oversight in my discussions of ‘hellenistic metaphysics’. Cassirer doesn’t speak much of Christianity or the Church in that book, but he does speak of swings between various forms of Hellenistic metaphysics. And there are indeed … [Read more…]
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In the December, 2007 edition of Brain in the News published by the Dana Foundation, there is a reprint of an article from Salon.com: I Feel Your Pain. It seems that specific brain-cells have been found which respond to distress on the part of a nearby creature. True pain is felt. What is empathy? It’s … [Read more…]
We can’t visualize Heaven, that is, the world in which the resurrected will live with the Lord Jesus Christ for time without end, but we need to try just because of the sorts of creatures we are. We’re flesh-and-blood creatures needing images to believe in the reality of a place or an entity, yes, even … [Read more…]
The [dogmatic] declarations [of the early Church] were uttered in the language of Greek philosophy because the false statements were uttered in that language. [The Power and the Wisdom, John L. McKenzie, S.J., The Bruce Publishing Company, 1965, page 129] The opponents of the Church, both the ones with good intentions and the hateful ones, … [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…]