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Also check out Deconstructing Europe, Emanuel Paparella’s new weekly column in the Global Spiral. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————– “I am quite sure that the European crisis has its roots in a mistaken rationalism” (Edmund Husserl, University of Prague, 1935) Modern Western Civilization presents us with a Janus-like face: On one side Renaissance Humanism which begins in Italy…
For all its success in sounding Roland’s horn to save planet Earth, Al Gore’s multi-media ecology lesson An Inconvenient Truth may well have muffled other notable calls-to-environmental-action. Published simultaneously, E. O Wilson’s The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth —the author’s twenty-first book on evolutionary biology—is framed as an appeal to a Southern…
In everyday usage, magic refers to a trick or a clever illusion. But the term has a more serious connotation in the framework of ancient science. It refers to practices whose aim is to influence people and events without direct or obvious means. Magic has a rich history. It was an intrinsic component of ancient…
Following up on the CUA conference (see previous post), here’s some wisdom from Jacques Maritain, the “old peasant of the Garonne” who helped us understand the “true new fire” of the post-Vatican II church: We would be making a big mistake, as I said in a previous section, if we believed that men who are…
Last week I began comparing and contrasting computers and minds, examining both human intuitions and appetites regarding the prospect that our minds are governed by the same kind of direct one-to-one-correspondence kind of cause-and-effect we see in the physical world (Aristotle’s efficient cause). If minds are really like computers, just translating information from one form…
One of the most universal of ancient beliefs was astrology. The Chaldeans are sometimes said to have been the first to suspect that the sun, the moon, the planets and the constellations of stars affect human life and destiny, but most scholars would agree with what Otto Neugebauer wrote decades ago, that “we know equally…
The World Wide Web, it’s like a giant human mind the way it processes billions of pieces of information. Someday it will become so smart it takes over the world. It will be able to think instead of us. Or so some cognitive scientists say. Your new computer too, it thinks so fast. The better…
Just back from a 4-day conference held at the Catholic University of America, hosted by its Center for Law, Philosophy, and Culture, entitled, “A Common Morality for a Global Age: In Gratitude for What We are Given.” Conference speakers included Cardinal Angelo Scola (by video), Hadley Arkes, Kenneth Schmitz, Stanely Hauerwas, John Polkinghorne, Robert George,…
We all have our views on the world, on life, and on issues. If we trace their origins we will find that they have resulted, for the most part, from our interactions with others through our personal and cultural environment. These include parents, teachers, and friends, as well as the books and newspapers we read,…
Can it be true that the laws of physics hold, and that God acts in the world? I think so. And I think evolutionary biology (with a dash of physics) can help us see how.