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Pascal’s Fire 4: Plato’s revenge
Pretty much everything I know about quantum theory I learned from reading Stephenen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and I’ve always been wary of people who attempt to draw broad philosophical implications from it. To Keith Ward’s credit, though, he is pretty circumspect in his treatment of the topic. Unlike earlier major scientific revolutions…
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Pascal’s Fire 3: Evolution, suffering, and omnipotence
Ward takes the theory of evolution as established, at least in its main outlines, but he does question some of the interpretations often given of evolution, especially by “evangelical atheists” like Richard Dawkins. While it’s possible to see evolution as simply an interplay of randomness and the pressures of survivial, it’s also possible, he thinks,…
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Pascal’s Fire 2: The disenchantment of the cosmos?
In Part One, “The Formation of the Scientific Worldview,” Ward examines four major advancements in scientific thinking whose impact extended well beyond the fields in which they originated. These are the heliocentric theory of the solar system, associated with Copernicus and Galileo, Newton’s laws of motion, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the advent of quantum…
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Pascal’s Fire
A while back I posted some thoughts on Keith Ward’s What the Bible Really Teaches, which was a rejoinder of sorts to Christian fundamentalism. His newest book, Pascal’s Fire, might be seen as a rejoinder to scientific fundamentalism. Ward’s goal in this brief book is to rebut the notion that the advance of science has…
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Lessons from London
Alan Bock tries to draw some. In a nutshell: solid police work, um, works. Police state tactics aren’t necessary. And invading and occupying Muslim lands is counterproductive. He also makes a frequently neglected point, that over the long term the U.S. stands a better chance of encouraging cultural change in the Muslim world by being…
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Wikipedia rules
I was looking for some information on Joseph Butler and had to laugh at this on the Wikipedia page for him: “You might also be looking for Joseph Campbell Butler, founding member of The Lovin’ Spoonful.”Indeed.
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Left, right, whatever
The summer issue of The American Conservative consists of a symposium on the meaning of “right” and “left” in our current context and what value, if any, these distinctions retain. You can now read the entire thing online. I venture to say that this may be the only time the writing of left-anarchist Kirkpatrick Sale…
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Anscombe, Truman, and the bomb
Brandon has a good discussion of the decision to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in light of G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr. Truman’s Degree” (which is, as far as I can tell, not available on the web). Brandon is right to distinguish Truman’s moral culpability from the question of the justness of the act itself.…
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Glorious Assumption
As we saw in the previous post, Macquarrie argues that the Immaculate Conception is both a preparation for and an implication of Christ’s redeeming work. This can be the case because the redemption wrought by Jesus isn’t confined to time and space and his “saving work reaches backward in time as well as forward.” In…
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The Golden Rule approach to proportionality
I complained a while ago about the imprecision, if not downright impossibility, in determining “proportionality” in cases where innocents are foreseeably, but not directly, killed in warfare. The usual way of formulating the proportionality criterion is to say something like the evil of any innocent deaths must be outweighed by the good accomplished by the…
