Where do I go from here? I probably should go more slowly than I did in my previous entry: Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Ascent of the Human Mind. In that posting, I was unleashing my mind and imagination, trying to map the entire path from here to there in one image. … [Read more…]
Minutes after posting a critique of Pope Benedict in which I claimed he needs to develop a stronger appreciation for modern empirical knowledge (see Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Need for Respectful Criticism), I received a newsletter from the Vatican News Service in which the Holy Father spoke in complimentary terms about … [Read more…]
As I noted in a previous entry, I believe that Pope Benedict is open to respectful and meaningful criticism of the sort which might be given by one competent scholar to the work of another or by one devout Christian thinker to the thoughts of another — else why would he go out of his … [Read more…]
I’m currently reading The Principles of Quantum Mechanics by P.A.M. Dirac, though I’m missing more than I’m getting. With a weak educational background and a lack of the toughness to dig in and learn how to learn on my own, I’d abandoned my physics major in college more than 30 years ago. I made up … [Read more…]
I’m puzzled by those who think it wise to be Christians without having a way to think of God’s Creation on its own terms but from a Christian viewpoint. They worship and then move back into a society more skeptical than pagan. The big problem is that we modern men have piled up huge mountains … [Read more…]
Pope Benedict has an appropriate respect for the human mind and its products, cultural and intellectual and spiritual. Yet, there’s a big gap in his thought that could be filled only by a proper appreciation for modern empirical knowledge, including in a very explicit way the problem areas of mathematics, physics, and evolutionary biology. I … [Read more…]
A news story about an international meeting of the Jesuits, [ Cardinal Rode Exhorts Jesuits to Love Church], includes these paragraphs: [Cardinal Rode, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life at the Vatican] also mentioned the “feeling of ever growing separation between faith and culture, a separation which … [Read more…]
Alastair Rae adds a wrinkle to a famous comment by Einstein: When Einstein said that ‘God does not play dice’, Bohr is said to have replied, ‘Don’t tell God what to do!’ [Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality, Alastair Rae, Cambridge University Press, Canto Edition, 1994, page 22] He notes that there’s some doubt as to … [Read more…]
After discussing a use of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to understand the results of experiments in the fairly straightforward case of the polarization of light-waves and of individual photons, Alastair Rae speculates: [If] we understood properly what the concepts of position and momentum mean on an atomic scale we might find it…illogical to possess definite values … [Read more…]
The reader might wish to read my earlier posting, A Christian’s view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality, for some background on this general issue. I follow the philosopher Kurt Hubner (see his book Critique of Scientific Reason) in claiming that Einstein’s position was that things have relationships with other things … [Read more…]