A Little Background I haven’t been posting much over recent weeks because of a mild cold or sinus infection followed by a volunteer project at my parish. I’ve returned to serious reading and have started to write again, beginning with this brief introduction to what will be a series of essays describing my Christian understanding … [Read more…]
The Death of Plato The town was on edge that fateful day when stepped from the train a frightening sight. Qualities had arrived without a man for they were traveling fast and light. Intelligent and diligent, steadfast and true, successful and loyal, honest and brave, they were every good how but not quite a who. … [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…]
Human beings think and feel and act and do so in response to what lies around them. As various communities have advanced in the way of civilization, they’ve done so—thought and felt and acted—in response to some more or less plausible worldview covering created being in its abstract realms as well as this concrete realm. … [Read more…]
I’ve written of the desirability of using tensor-type thinking in qualitative fields where there is, even in principle, no way of particularizing the tensor equations to equations which could actually be used to calculate numbers. A reminder: by intelligent use of tensors (call it reasoning in more abstract spaces by way of differential geometry if … [Read more…]
In a short essay recently published on the Web, the political thinker Ken Masugi tells us about political scientists needing to recognize the validity of philosophical modes of thought. They’ve drifted away from reality as a result of their efforts to become quantitative empirical scientists. In that essay, Political Scientists Bow to the Laws 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…]
We’re born with certain physical characteristics, some good and some bad, some allowing us to excel and some limiting our possible accomplishments. Modern psychologists have shown that the physician Galen was largely right in his general principles which he taught nearly 2,000 years ago. We are born with relatively well-defined temperaments and with other relatively … [Read more…]
I was fascinated by a claim Jacob Neusner quietly made in Death and Birth of Judaism: The Impact of Christianity, Secularism, and the Holocaust on Jewish Faith. The assumption is found in this quote: [M]y view is that when, in the late eighteenth century with the French and American revolutions, Christianity lost its status as … [Read more…]