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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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]