Matter, your own living flesh and blood or the bread and wine brought to the altar, is an essential element of any Christian Sacrament. More than that, it’s the most concrete part of a sacramental world. Even non-sacramental Christians accept baptism as a Sacrament though perhaps refusing to use the term, but I’m going to … [Read more…]
We think ourselves now so sophisticated because we know the world isn’t designed, at least not in the way of a human engineer. But there are patterns and the ways of thought which provide some serious understandings of those patterns arising from states of seeming disorder are difficult and are certainly not yet part of … [Read more…]
In my last three essays I posted, Mathematical Models of Human Communities: Parts and Wholes, Mathematical Models of Human Communities: We Live in Narratives, Not in Models, and Mathematical Models of Human Communities: Randomness, I acknowledged the usefulness and potential truthfulness of mathematical models but claimed we need to consider wider aspects of this world … [Read more…]
Peter Frost has published a good essay in which he deals with human moral nature. The essay can be found at Does Natural Law Exist?. I vaguely anticipated this discussion in my previous essay, The Interior Richness Which Lies in a Civilized Man. Frost defines natural law as teaching: All people are born with a … [Read more…]
In a recent essay, What is an Explanation?: The Context of Thought and Language, I opened up a line of discussion which might provide a new view of some of my basic ideas, a view which might lead me to more fruitful explorations and perhaps others to better understandings of what I’m trying to do … [Read more…]
I use the term `empirical science’ to include any field of disciplined study of Creation, physics and chemistry and engineering sciences but also including mathematics and history and literature. The modern empirical sciences have advanced ahead of philosophy and very far ahead of Christian theology. Philosophers and theologians would be wise to start borrowing from … [Read more…]
According to a couple of dictionaries, an `explanation’ is “Something that explains” or equivalent definitions of the sort which would gain a failing grade on a junior high school test back in the days when American schools were so tough we had to write essays explaining how it was possible to walk uphill going to … [Read more…]
In an earlier essay, A Brain Shaped to Geometric Thought?, I responded to evidence that the brain does abstract from physical distance to derive, for example, an idea of emotional distance. This isn’t a matter fully understood, though the scientists seem to believe, as do I, that human beings have learned to unconsciously and consciously … [Read more…]
In my most recent post, the essay: How a Christian Finds Metaphysical Truths in Empirical Reality, I argued that Christians should respond confidently to what lies around us, to our concrete and thing-like realm of Creation and to all the other realms which remain yet in our universe which is our world when seen in … [Read more…]
I confess to failing the tests of being a `professional’ philosopher, having been forced to face up to that criteria during a reread of Etienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers. I don’t really care since I see serious advantages in being non-professional, advantages similar to those of the highly energetic semi-barbarians (da Vinci, Michelangelo, etc) … [Read more…]