John Hawks, prominent anthropologist and leader of the Neandertal Anti-defamation League, made some interesting comments in reviewing the article Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(Early online) by Marina Bedny, et al. See John Hawks Weblog for his review, Language bootstrapping the … [Read more…]
All reason is from God and of God. There is no immaterial reasoning agency part of or attached to the human creature. There is no mind or soul as many imagine, nor can we directly access even the manifested truths underlying Creation, let alone any transcendental truths which exist beyond this particular Creation. All reason … [Read more…]
Relationships of a more abstract sort, such as those in politics and economics, are not so much different from concrete relationships as we might think. Not so much different as we’ve led ourselves to believe. Those concrete entities which are more complex, such as a man or a rhinoceros, are made of substances which have … [Read more…]
I haven’t read Stephen Hawking’s most recent book where he’s said to argue that a Creator-God is unnecessary nor have I read more than summaries of the efforts of certain Christian theologians to shoot down those arguments. I’ve read that Hawking argues gravity fills the need for such a God, but that’s irrelevant to the … [Read more…]
We have to learn to move forward in our thought by trying to honestly perceive reality and to openheartedly respond to it while becoming aware of the distortions of the preconceptions we always bring to such tasks. This is a logical development of the insight we have inherited from Aquinas and a few of his … [Read more…]
We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge … [Read more…]
I saw this quote on the Internet recently: I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton] Newton knew how to think. In Thomistic terms, serious thinking is an intentional process, that is … [Read more…]
I’ll be writing articles on some aspects of politics and the history of government which interest me and doing so in terms of my concepts of created being. I’ll concentrate on American politics and will cover some interesting phenomena often seen as indicative of conspiracies. These articles will reflect both some of my reading of … [Read more…]
I’ve come to the position that created being exists across a spectrum going from abstract to concrete or particular. A thing, a particularized form of being, still has its abstract being in it the way that a vase has still the raw materials of its clay and glazing. In fact, as you penetrate the stuff … [Read more…]
God has shaped a thing-like world out of more basic stuff. I’ve discussed this in various ways, especially in the category: Christian in the Universe of Einstein. We human beings form our minds by responding actively to that world and by penetrating to understandings of that more basic stuff. A particular thing is a manifestation … [Read more…]