The concluding paragraphs of this article: God Or Science? A Belief In One Weakens Positive Feelings For The Other, are: “What is really intriguing is that the larger effect happens on the opposite belief,” she said. “When God isn’t being used to explain much, people have a positive attitude toward science. But when God is … [Read more…]
There’s a question which has bothered me for a while: How could the ancient and Medieval thinkers have seen clearly so many truths about human nature and the rational nature of this universe (though they didn’t have this modern concept in quite this form) when they had such an incomplete view of basic physical reality? … [Read more…]
Reason is typically defined as if it were an object or faculty separable from the human body, much in the way that many define the soul. I don’t believe in souls as being entities residing alongside or apart from our physical substance and I don’t believe in reason as defined by traditional thinkers. It’s not … [Read more…]
On my other blog, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I’ll be trying to post a series of weekly entries throughout the 2008-2009 Christian liturgical year which begins on 2008/11/30. This is a major effort for me as my worldview aims at viewing Creation as unified, coherent, and complete. To a Christian, … [Read more…]
Wikipedia tells us that metaphor is: language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: “The [first subject] is a [second subject].” More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second object in some way. Thus, the first … [Read more…]
This entry is a supplement to Not Monism and Not Dualism but Unity of Creation. One form of dualism, strongly supported by Aristotle, is particularly attractive at first contact: the idea that things come into being when form is impressed upon substance. What’s wrong about this, and perhaps the real error underlying all dualisms, is … [Read more…]
I really don’t know much about neural networks which are organized in space and certainly can’t make much comment upon the discovery that they can be organized through “multiple timescales” as well, yet, I’m hardly surprised. See this article, Robots Show That Brain Activity Is Linked To Time As Well As Space, for a summary … [Read more…]
In a number of writings, I deny both the monisms of matter and spirit or thought. I also deny the dualism of body/soul, brain/mind, etc. Yet, I use the terms ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ on a regular basis. What gives? I think of being as richer than ‘mere’ matter, yet, I see no reason to speak … [Read more…]
Pilgrims travel paths, journeying from one location on earth to another, sometimes those places are fictional but usually quite concrete. To be sure, Dante’s pilgrim found (as some of the more recent translations of The Inferno attest) that the path could wander away from him, a strange event from a fully concrete view of paths. … [Read more…]
The lead paragraph of this article, Genomic Changes Found In Brains Of People Who Commit Suicide, asks questions which I’ve been handling in my first book and my blogs for the past two years: Are genes destiny? Alternatively, are we simply the products of our environment? There is a growing sense that neither of these … [Read more…]