What is truth? Where is truth to be found? There are a few starting points for a Christian willing to consider the opinions of Thomas Aquinas and all the great thinkers before him as well as opinions derived directly from the works of the modern scientists including sometimes just their empirical or mathematical findings and … [Read more…]
I’ve pondered a problem for years. How is it that premodern thinkers, such as the 4 A’s: Aristocles (`Plato’ is a nickname which might mean `Chubby’) and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas, produced so many true insights into the nature of reality, the nature of contingent being and even of the empirical and concrete realms … [Read more…]
The answer is: communities are real entities, just as real and just as strange as the abstract forms of being, quantum wavefunctions, from which concrete being is shaped. But no more real nor more strange. To see the reality of communities (and some other `abstract’ entities), we can return to my basic claim about being, … [Read more…]
I’ve made the claim in various ways that all of our knowledge and thought comes from God’s thoughts as manifested in Creation, including this universe with its concrete thing-like being. This claim implies the further claim which I would strongly support: even the structures and basic elements of our most abstract systems (say those of … [Read more…]
Basic relationships and not complex things or ideas are the true Platonic Reals in the sense of being the basis of created being. So to write. So to speak, if I were discussing these matters with a like-interested friend over some good whiskey or stout or port. If we were to try to imagine a … [Read more…]
Let me oversimplify in a useful way: Facts are local. Understanding is global. Knowledge is something of a bridge from facts to understanding. And, yet, we should not imagine that facts and knowledge exist only to serve understanding. Nor should we imagine that understanding is fully, or even mostly, what can be found in a … [Read more…]
In a recent essay, Science and Naive Anthropocentricism, I wrote: Somewhere—I believe in The Perfectibility of Man, the philosopher, John Passmore, points out the real problem with belief in an all-powerful God: Such a God is consistent with any conceivable world. Only sloppy and ill-disciplined thinkers could seriously believe that the existence of a coherent, … [Read more…]
Our delusions about the world being subject to understanding by an out-of-the-box human mind and our allied delusions about human control over that world lead us into various specific errors. We ignore what doesn’t fit into our favorite schemes, that is, we are blind and deaf to what doesn’t fit into our delusionary schemes of … [Read more…]
We modern human beings have illusions of control; as a consequence, even our ways of approaching human freedom look not so much different from the ways of implementing systems of hierarchical control, even totalitarianism. We think to have some sort of great power over reality, if only in ways of thought and attitude. On the … [Read more…]
Based on greatly expanded knowledge about human being, individual and communal, even Christian churches which have passed through periods of excessive claims to authority have come around to acknowledge there are many realms of a complete and perfect human life which lie beyond their institutional understanding and authority. I’ve discussed this in various places in … [Read more…]