On 2019/02/24, Roman Catholics who attended the Mass for Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time (Cycle C) heard St Paul telling the Corinthians: It is written, `The first man, Adam, became a living being,’ the last Adam a life-giving spirit. But the spiritual was not first: rather the natural and then the spiritual. The first man … [Read more…]
There are writers on the Internet, some maybe just scribblers but many are thinkers of some capacity, who criticize other peoples, including most Latin Americans, for being too dumb to handle complex, American-style economic and political systems. To be sure, many of these criticisms are quite true, though we should realize that current immigration patterns … [Read more…]
Christians in the past century or more have failed utterly to face up to the biological reality: God has created a world where family-lines of organisms are kept in good condition by Darwinian selection processes leading to death or reproductive failure of organisms with `inadequate’ traits—often caused by mutations. Complex traits, such as intelligence or … [Read more…]
In From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun wrote about a gradual and long-term decay of the West. He wrote that only about 50% of French peasants in 1500 were literate but also noted that those peasants were reading novels far too complex for most (nearly all?) modern-day college professors. Quality of … [Read more…]
The basic idea is simple. For decades, geneticists have been able to chemically separate and analyze genes. This made possible a fruitless search for the magic gene which `causes’ schizophrenia or depression or intelligence or other human qualities or disorders of human being. A lot was learned, perhaps most importantly—there are no such magic genes. … [Read more…]
The doctrine of “free-will” and the similar doctrine positing an immaterial “mind” or “soul” seem to be an attempt to avoid the limitations and constraints of biology, of an organism in this world which is a highly particularized realm within Creation. We wish to rise above such mere physical processes as hormonal flows and—at a … [Read more…]
This split between the practical and the ideal is generally acknowledged by modern thinkers and `common folk’ alike. But what is the `practical’ and the `ideal’? I think they are very much different from both the traditional and modern prejudices. I don’t think that prejudices are wrong as such; often, they carry good and useful … [Read more…]
Simplicity is quite useful and even necessary in understanding God’s Creation, just as it was useful to such thinkers as Riemann and Einstein in developing the mathematics and the specific theories of spacetime. Yet, full understandings in many such matters comes only by way of analyses using concepts and words and ways of thinking which … [Read more…]
I’ll first provide links and summary quotes to two of my earlier posted essays: In Is God’s Creation Compatible with Centralization of Authority and Power?, I concluded: …that God’s Creation isn’t compatible with anything approaching complete centralization of power and authority, though centers of power and authority do exist and have their own role, often … [Read more…]
Mostly. That is, decentralization creates lots of opportunities for dynamic efforts of various sorts, some of which might well be very successful. By “successful in human history”, I write of both history proper (written narratives based upon facts) and also prehistory (the reconstructed narratives of pre-literate men and even of apish ancestors of men). By … [Read more…]