The Human Question

The first two recommended by Fr. Michael Simone: http://www.amazon.com/Two-Edged-Sword-Interpretation-Old-Testament/dp/0385069693 http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Old-Testament-Lawrence-Boadt/dp/0809126311/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326574643&sr=1-1 The last by David Armstrong Alleged Bible "Contradictions" and "Difficulties": Master List of Christian Internet Resources for Apologists (Including a Lengthy Bibliography) Also check out  The New Jerome Biblical Commentary 

Apart from the desire to enjoy communion with God specifically in the life of the Trinity, the desire to live forever is not much more than the desire to be rather than not to be.  But merely being forever without such enjoyment would not be fulfillment: it might even be painful.  So  any non-Trinity-centered desire to live forever is the end, amounts to the fear of death.  But the revelation of the Trinity shows us that living forever is desirable...intensely desirable.  And it makes living in the present more beautiful, dramatic, fulfilling.

Could it be that they long for the Real Presence?

Is that standard itself a product of evolution?  If so, then could it have evolved otherwise than it has? If it could have, then if there is a God, God would be its judge rather than vice-versa. If it could not, then perhaps it points to God, correctly understood, and the atheist's criticism is directed towards something more like a demi-god.

That time is of infinite duration is a claim that is in principle never confirmed by experience, yet accepting the claim as both meaningful and true is a necessary condition for being a materialist... the sort who would subject theism to the verificationist principle for meaningfulless and/or truth.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=closing-gap-between-psychology-and-god

This based on the same wonderful conversation with my friend J___: He initially proposed that the alleged miracle at Fatima could be explained by natural laws that we don't know. My initial reply was that this is ad hoc.  Another point would be that appealing in an ad hoc manner to hidden natural laws to defeat rather compelling claims regarding miracles, can after a point, amount to belief in magic.  Or rather, one who is quite ready to postulate unknown natural powers to explain apparent miracles lacks a principled basis for rejecting magic.

This is a response to an objection posed to my use of a Platonistic intuition of number to advance some part of natural theology (I forget which part).  My buddy J_ objected by pointing out that while there have often been a good number of Platonists in mathematics, the last few decades mathematicians have seen a greater number of mathematicians who embrace a naturalistic view of math... one which maintains that the truths of math are merely reliable rather than something epistemically extraordinary. My reply is to embrace a reliabilist epistemology but point out that it is quite consistent with a Platonic ontology.  That is, my reason for positing supra-natural / meta-physical reality is not quite the fact that I know that 3 + 7 MUST equal 10 and that all other rational beings must agree that it is  true .  On the contrary, my reason is the fact that what I know when I know 3 + 7 = 10 is the same as what anyone else knows--even if neither of us is absolutely sure ...

http://mylordkatie.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/margaret-sanger-provider-of-death/

Thank you, ____________, for your cordial reply.  Even though your remarks are often over my head, I am gratified by what I do understand, and I entertain the hope that some of those things will become at least a little clearer as time goes on.  I enjoyed learning how my remarks re China resonated with you.   You said: Although it breaks my heart to do it, I'll admit that there are some voids or limitations in our experience which religion might help occupy Ah, it shouldn't break your heart: it's the guarantee that the ultimate Reality, being in some sense infinite, will never leave you bored.  What if that Reality--that Mystery--is so great that we should continue to be enraptured by it... even if we existed for eternity?  What's not to love? You continue by proposing the view of Einstein, who said: "I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind...

There's the famous thought experiment in which a scientist named Mary is said to know everything about the color blue that can be conveyed through science.... but she has never seen the color blue (either because she lives in a black and white world or because she's color-blind)... until that blessed day when she sees blue for the first time: does she know something that she didn't know before?  Why yes. That's the famous thought experiment.  Now here's my own variation on that theme. Suppose someone is able to do a complete physical analysis of Mary's brain while she is either looking at or remembering blue.  Will they find any blue in there?  Why no, unless your talking about a part that was blue already. Soooooooooooo. That thought experiment + question shows that it's just fanciful  to say that Mary has an image of blue in her brain: how can you have an image of a color that is not itself the color that it's supposed to represent? You can't...

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/

According to those who advocate methodological naturalism, we must presume that no process is an exception to the laws of nature: otherwise, (in those cases in which natural causes lay deeply hidden) we would fail to seek and eventually discover those causes.  This presumption is methodological; nevertheless, the  danger is that method will become dogma.  That is, one may end up thinking that one who wishes to foster scientific rationality must assert that there is no God who intervenes: "Law (and chance) account for everything; otherwise, nature can be regarded as a function of divine caprice." But if the fruitful search for laws of nature requires ontological naturalism (i.e., the assertion  that there is no supernatural intervention), then it requires determinism as well. For if everything in nature is the result of the confluence of chance and law, then human freedom cannot exist; and if humans are not free, then  no science is possible! It follows ...

"When a man makes his way through a piece of wood, he alone has made something new." Where did he say that?

Simply positing a multiverse doesn't get rid of theism: for if every "verse" has life as well as the conditions for life and does so in a manner that seems improbable, then you have a repetition of the same problem.  You have an intensification of the anthropic principle.

The claim that one cannot make a statement about the totality is self-destructive, for it has the totality itself as its background.  That is, it couldn't be true unless its true always and everywhere.

Perhaps it is better to ask questions about human creativity before asking about human freedom.  That is, how is it that we can produce something new?  What does it mean to say that we produce something new?  Do we really ever produce something new? The answer will involve the awareness of more than the individuals before oneself, more than what one can imagine, but of essence/being/stuff like htat.  There is an ordering of the lower that one can see or imagine toward the higher that is beyond the imaginable.  Perhaps the "meaning" of our acts must be framed in terms of this ordering of lower to higher.  And perhaps freedom of action is best understood in terms of this ordering.  Perhaps actions are free inasmuch as they possess this "meaning."  Perhaps this meaning is invisible to an ideological materialist in the same way that written words are meaningless to someone who doesn't speak the language in which they are written Perhaps the best e...

I wonder if it would be fruitful to contrast Heidegger's notion of finitude with the fact that a tendency to think of the infinite is involved in each abstract thought....

This post is part of a thought experiment I'm conducting, using emergentism as a  pivotal position.... one that opens the door to a view of nature that undercuts materialism, is perhaps to an Aristotelian understanding of matter/form and leads to theism. Materialists would look at human activities as more complicated versions of those done by lower animals.  Such a position is reductionistics inasmuch as it implies that what-seems-higher is just a more complicated version of the lower (we are just a pile of chemicals, etc.) Emergence affirms that higher level activites are not reducible.  It also maintains that higher operations build upon lower (I would want to correct that position  in part). My point is that "higher" always has to do with higher levels of unity.  Think of the knowledge of universal truths; and of the notion of the common good.  These involve objects that are one and the same for many different folks at different times.  Object...

Insist on ontological reductionism while granting that explanatory reductionism is false?  Isn't there something akin to fideism in that position?