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Gravity Is Love, And Other Astounding Metaphors : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
This NPR article mentions one of my professors, cosmologist Brian Swimme. Here is my comment: Dr. Swimme calls gravity love, and I think it is an apt metaphor. Anthropomorphic? Perhaps, but how else are we to really understand gravity unless we can relate it to our human experience of the universe? And it is not… Read more
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Belief in a Personal God
The following is my response to the theologian Jason Michael McCann’s blog post about the personal nature of God in the Christian tradition. Yesterday, he posted a critical response to one of my short essays on materialism and imagination that I will also respond to soon. JMM, The distinction between truth and fact (which I understand… Read more
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Idealism, Materialism, Non-dualism
A response to Owlmirror on Pharyngula, You suggest that idealism is incoherent because 1) it doesn’t explain “things acting under purely physical rules, rather than mental states.” -What is a physical rule, exactly? How are these rules or laws determined, and why, as in the case of our particular universe, are they so organized as… Read more
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Power and Presence in Theology
Another response to NRG’s questions for me on Pharyngula: I have trouble conceiving of God as all-powerful because of the problem of evil and my experience of human freedom. I associated God’s omnipresence with “will” even though, for God, there is really nothing to “do.” From the “perspective” of eternity, God is already everywhere and everywhen… Read more
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God did it, or aliens?
“NRG” posting over on Pharyngula asks me: Why impute an admittedly Unknowable Omni God to explain currently inexplainable phenomena, if it’s much more reasonable, based on what we actually know, to assume that other citizens of the universe, evolved like us but to a much greater degree, are responsible for such phenomena? To make it… Read more
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Christianity and Ecology: Response to Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck’s segment on Christianity and the environmentalist movement. My response: Read more
“In one sense philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use. In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.”
—Alfred North Whitehead
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