Excerpt of God and the New Atheism
The new atheism is simply unchallenging theologically. Its engagement with theology lies at about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature.
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Theism, Atheism and Non-Theism in Buddhism
There are several opinions on the theistic status of Buddhism with the descriptions of Buddhism ranging from atheistic, non theistic to theistic. The fundamental philosophy of Buddhism seems to deny the concept of a personal God, although it is controversial whether Buddhism denies an impersonal form of God. Buddhist scholar Nyanaponika Thera1 suggested that conceptions…
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Lateral Clause
I wish to bridge the perceived gap between logical, materialistic analysis and intuitive, mystical experience. My directive as an artist is to engage and communicate the meaning that lies before our eyes, and yet we do not see. I attempt to point to the ‘numinous’, which is characterized by the quintessential qualities of the sacred:…
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Continuing Legacies of Ancient Science
Science, in the sense of serious efforts to understand and explain the world, has existed in all cultures. The ancients offered explanations for natural phenomena and for origins. Sometimes their explanations were in terms of invisible beings. Sometimes they were in terms of non-anthropomorphic forces and principles like water, fire, and breath. Technology has also…
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Cause and Effect: Not black and white, but read all over as if it were
Cause and effect–we all believe in it and think we know how it works, but when we stop to think about it, some inconsistencies suggest there’s a lot more to it. And yet who studies the actual workings of cause and effect? Researchers in the philosophy of science–not a specialization you’ve probably heard or thought…
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An Imaginary Conversation on Mount Olympus between Poets and Philosophers
We have seen that the uniqueness of Vico’s philosophy within the Western tradition lies in its pointing out that the poetical, far from being unfriendly to reason, is complementary to it and necessary for the grasping of a holistic view of Man’s humanity. Without it rationality degenerates into the rationalism of ideological fanaticism, unable to…
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Three Types of Errors
We are apt to fall victims to three kinds of errors in our evaluation of scientific achievements. These may be called temporal error, cultural error, and nostalgic error. Temporal error consists in the impression that our generation is somehow superior to previous ones, because in matters of scientific understanding we know a lot more. It…
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Statement on Winning the 2008 Templeton Prize
The 17th-century German mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, is my philosophical hero. I am proud (but not quite happy) that I share with this great philosopher at least one feature. He was a master in spreading, not to say dissipating, his genius into too many fields of interest. If he had a greater ability…
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Some Concluding Reflections at the End of the Journey into Vico’s Mind—Part 2
Way back in the seventeenth century, the Cartesian mind-set envisioned the machine as a tool to systematically order human experience through a rationalistic division and conversion into procedures of all the processes of the human world. Vico intuited that in that kind of technological world little room is left for works of humanistic imagination (e.g.,…
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Co-dependence: When do two wrongs make a right?
I’m trying a new way to deal with effronteries. When someone does me harm, I have an old habit of compensating myself with the grant of retaliatory superiority. I automatically think, “This proves that I’m different from (and better than) them. I hold to the high standards better than they do, and I’m therefore entitled…