We modern human beings have separated our minds and hearts from reality, our hands not nearly so much. We’re strange creatures who believe the Christian Creeds long enough to recite them at a Catholic or Orthodox Mass or to keep some of the creedal teachings in mind at other sorts of Christian worship services and … [Read more…]
There is a good possibility for interesting science in the field of astrophysics and the closely related field of physical cosmology. It seems that something exists that couldn’t possibly exist under current theories: a structure of quasars that extends to distances which seem far greater than possible under current understandings of the expansion of this … [Read more…]
This is a very good discussion of some important aspects of our national political mess in the United States: Liberal Constitutionalism and Us. At the same time, something is missing and that something is a more general understanding of our world, in fact, of Creation as a whole. Until we have that understanding, one which … [Read more…]
In my soon-to-be updated collection of weblog writings, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2011, I separated those essays into seven categories including Love and Stuff and, the largest of the seven by a good margin, The Narrative We Know as a World. I’ll not slight the other five sections in their … [Read more…]
A Non-dummy’s Guide to Understanding God’s Creation I’ve written before of Ortega y Gasset’s prophecies of the collapse of modern Western man into a condition of barbarian childhood. See Civilization for Dummies for a fairly recent essay on the subject. In that essay, I spoke about the importance of books to Western Civilization in particular … [Read more…]
Freedom as we idealize it is not at all an instrument or an agent to achieve our desires, good or bad. The lesser freedom of the tiger or the grazing deer can do that for us. Freedom as we idealize it is an aspect of the state of personhood, a state in which we are … [Read more…]
In Cosmology: A First Course, Marc Lachieze-Rey writes: The best definition of the cosmos is possibly the ensemble of relations between the constituent parts of the cosmos. First of all, I’ll point out that the larger context, the entirety of the introductory chapter, makes it clear that the cosmos is the parts as well as … [Read more…]
In, Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes, John Earman, a philosopher of science, warns believers of some errors in efforts to localize God in spacetime. The first warning has to do with causation: So for Craig [W.L. Craig, a theistic philosopher apparently attempting to use the Big Bang to prove … [Read more…]
In a recent essay, Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, I wrote: Reduce reality to its various components and aspects but stop reducing when you reach components or aspects which cannot be used to fully explain or to `reconstruct’ each other. At that point in the process of … [Read more…]
Some readers might access this blog in ways that don’t display the main page and might not be aware that I have a variety of books, nonfiction and fiction, available for free download. I’ll be putting this message up on a monthly basis or so, each month spotlighting a different book as well as giving … [Read more…]