Let me state a certain political position as: The United States of America are but Massachusetts is. This is a grammatical statement of the classic States’ rights doctrine which was one of the matters so violently dealt with in the American war between the states. It was, in fact, a matter of contention from the … [Read more…]
I stretch the truth when I sometimes talk as if I were the only one who sees being as a spectrum from the abstract to the concrete. Clearly, there is a sense in which Platonic and Neoplatonic Realists see being in two forms, abstract being (what they call the Real) and concrete being (the real … [Read more…]
Without a doubt, we are children of our age. There have been indications that the young folk with higher IQs tend to drift away from Christian and Jewish belief and practice. The interesting exception in some of those studies is the Church of the Latter-day Saints. I’ve read lightly, but substantially by current standards, in … [Read more…]
In a recent short post, Not Probabilistic Smudges but Relationships, I jumped the gun and said: In James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, he refers to an early theory developed by Feynman and John Wheeler as “a classical theory, not a quantum one. It treated objects as objects, not as probabilistic smudges.” Mr. Gleick … [Read more…]
In James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, he refers to an early theory developed by Feynman and John Wheeler as “a classical theory, not a quantum one. It treated objects as objects, not as probabilistic smudges.” Mr. Gleick is speaking in terms of concepts of mainstream thinkers in physics and I’m not criticizing him, … [Read more…]
Slowly do I move forward in my efforts to develop words and grammatical structures and concepts adequate to describing the social and moral setting of man as he learns to shape himself, his societies, his technologies, to better reflect and take advantage of the richness and complexity of God’s Creation. This richness and complexity can … [Read more…]
[The original version of this essay was published as Ways of Speaking and True Being. It was finished and uploaded on 2008/11/22.] Wikipedia tells us that metaphor is: 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 … [Read more…]
[The original version of this essay was published at The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 5. The Einsteinian Universe. It was finished and uploaded on 2007/02/24. This version includes some changes made for the approaching publication of a collection of most of my weblog entries over the past 5+ years.] Einstein gave a great … [Read more…]
I’ve drawn some insight from Norman Cantor’s Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization on the subject of the destruction by Catholic philosophers and theologians of respect for the mind. There’s still more to be said on that topic but I’m commenting on another topic where Cantor had some views which would not … [Read more…]
As matters currently stand in theories about physical reality and in philosophical analyses of those theories, there are no signs of homogeneity in the nature of spacetime at various scales of time and space though some assume and others hope. In general, created being at the quantum level (think of ‘subatomic’ levels of energy changes … [Read more…]