Category Archives: Philosophy

Here’s a quick summary of how we normally see the relationship of words and language to the physical world. The real world is “out there”, and words are arbitrary (and so ultimately meaningless) labels for what we perceive of it. Further, as several previous posts have discussed, what we perceive is far from the physical reality (what Owen Barfield calls “the unrepresented” or “the particles”). As he puts it, “There is no such thing as an unseen rainbow.” And so we live in a world of illusions, which we describe using arbitrary sounds. And if the reductive materialists have their way, we experience all that with minds that are also illusory … Continue reading →

Carrying on my reading of an inherited set of Charles Dickens’ works over the weekend, I read an account in his travels of a walk up Mount Vesuvius. In itself, interesting enough. But there was a unique layer of meaning for me, since when I first ascended the volcano in 1968, an Italian guide got into conversation whilst I was waiting for the chair-lift (demolished now, sadly). He asked, “Do you like Charles Dickens? I have been reading Nicholas Nickleby. Is England really like that?”

Over the last couple of months I think I’ve hammered the message that not only science, but even our very basic sensory experience of the world, is inseparable from the world of mind. This ties into the “personal knowledge” concept of Michael Polanyi, the information-based metaphysics of William Dembski and the mind-based one of Arthur Eddington. It relates to the holistic approach to science of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his followers. And I’ve even suggested that the world of reality we share with all other life-forms has the character of a common symbolic language giving meaning to an otherwise rather chaotic universe, and so raising the question of whether … Continue reading →

An unexpected, but very welcome, contributor to my recent post on spectral colour was David Briggs, whose excellent website on colour theory, primarily intended for artists, is an invaluable educational tool for us all (or me, at least). I particularly liked his section on colour vision, which shows just what an incredibly sophisticated visual system we enjoy, as well as how disappointingly little of its workings get into the educational curriculum of either arts or sciences. Check out, for example, the set of “illusions” David uses to show how much neurological processing is involved in maintaining our sense of the constancy of colours under different lighting conditions. 

One of the accusations that modern Aristotelians (like Ed Feser) throw at Intelligent Design is that it has an engineering view of biology, and an engineering Deity, the issue being that organisms are actually whole entities that cannot be divided, like human artifacts, into disconnected parts assembled for a function. Interestingly, a good number of Evolutionary Creation voices at BioLogos have echoed that critique (to the point of getting Ed Feser to write some columns).