Search
-
Recent Posts
- Theological sleight of hand 16/10/2025
- More on Christian politics for the times 06/10/2025
- Experiencing God 02/10/2025
- Christian politics 29/09/2025
- Why Pentecostalism is the universal Evangelical acid 26/09/2025
Recent Comments
Post Archive
Category Archives: Philosophy
Is wokeness a running-through-treacle dream?
A vegan Green explained to me over Christmas why eating eggs is bad. The problem, it seems, is that poultry bred for egg-laying is sexed at a day old, and the males, being non-productive, are mostly culled for animal feeding or fertilizer. This denies them the right to a meaningful life, which cannot be justified on animal welfare terms. Ergo eating eggs is immoral.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science
5 Comments
You can’t exclude human influence from science
The title of this blog could refer to a number of things I’ve discussed here over the years. It could mean the fact that science is entirely a human activity, which could be summarised as asking the near-infinite realm of nature particular questions of human interest, to which it will return equally particular and incomplete answers. Or it could refer to the mysterious effects of mind on quantum events. But in fact in this post it’s about something else: providence.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature
5 Comments
More on the human limitations of science (especially regarding politics)
My attention was drawn to an important, but rather predictably neglected, 2004 article How science makes environmental controversies worse, by Daniel Sarewitz (Environmental Science & Policy 7 (2004) 385–403). It’s essential reading.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science
Leave a comment
“Just Nature” – clarify “Nature,” please.
Chasing up, for interest, references to the 1908 “Tunguska Event” (now most commonly thought to be a meteroric or cometary air-burst), I came across this recent piece in Physorg.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature
Leave a comment
Nobel Prize pseudoscience v Classics orthodoxy
Returning to my long thread on science in the media over at Peaceful Science, at one stage the accusations of irrational climate denialism were expressed, by a classics graduate, no less, thus: This is the language of the science denialist. Which anti-science cause will you champion next, chiropractic and homeopathy?
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science
9 Comments
Pay attention
You may or may not have seen the following sports awareness test on YouTube. If not you can check your skills:
Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science
Leave a comment
The tree in Berkeley’s square (no nightingale)
George Berkeley is most famous for his immaterialist view of reality, which is nicely, if incompletely, summed up in Monsignor Ronald Knox’s limerick:
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theology of nature
6 Comments
Abstraction and the cover of God’s Good Earth
In my last post I drew on George Berkeley in the context of probability theory, to show how western thought’s tendency to make abstractions from reality actually leads to a misleading view of the world. The generalisations of science are particularly prone to the reification of abstract notions.
Posted in History, Philosophy, Science
Leave a comment
Abstraction and improbability
I’ve been dipping into George Berkeley’s philosophy recently, mainly because his mind-only view of reality resonates with some other thinkers whose ideas on the matter of matter have impressed me over the years, such as Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg and William Dembski.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theology of nature
1 Comment
Molinism again
A quick thought here, based on a heads-up to me on Peaceful Science on a thread that, for some reason, doesn’t give me the ability to reply. No matter, because I have more space to reply here.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature
4 Comments