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…]
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…]
In my previous posted essay, Elitism and Americans, I responded to an article by Steven Wasserman, In Defense of Difficulty and subtitled A phony populism is denying Americans the joys of serious thought.. I largely agreed with Wasserman but went further in maintaining that higher literary pursuits make sense only in light of a greater … [Read more…]
I wasn’t surprised that Roy Spencer wrote this blog entry, Science and religion: Do your own damn Google search, expressing his feelings at being treated shabbily in an article, What Catastrophe?: MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist , which describes “less credible skeptics, such as climatologist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama (signatory … [Read more…]
Most scientists, many supporters of science, don’t seem to believe that past works, outmoded works—even some with serious and avoidable errors, are worth the effort of study. This is probably at least partly due to the fact that science has been so important a part of the modern cultural mainstream that scientists have naturally come … [Read more…]
I have uploaded A Modern Understanding of Human Being, a book about human being from a viewpoint of a Christian accepting and making some sense of modern empirical knowledge. In this book, I lay a foundation by advocating respect for empirical reality, the reality into which we are born and in which we develop. Moreover, … [Read more…]
I’m going to slightly misuse a quote from Wittgenstein: Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt. [On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Harper Torchbooks, 1972, page 68e] He was writing about knowledge inside of a `language game’, which I think to be something like the active use of a hypothetical dictionary and grammar of what … [Read more…]
I’ve just started to read Hans Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time and lines of thought came to life before I’d even finished Hilary Putnam’s foreword for the 1991 reprinting of an English translation by the University of California Press. I’ll probably write multiple essays on this subject of the direction of time, though it doesn’t … [Read more…]
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…]