philosophy Archives - Page 2 of 4

Seeing Imperfectly

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will…

Religious Nones and a Spiritual Remnant

Our world is becoming more secular; a disputable, but defendable statement. We are told that more people than ever have become religious nones. That is, there is an increase in the number of people who reject a belief in God, creation, spirituality, and purpose. They insist that the universe happened by chance, has no purpose,…

Physics, Philosophy, and Theology

Higgs-Bosons, Up, Down, Charmed, and Strange Quarks, Anti-matter, Dark-Matter, and Light as both wave and particle – at one and the same time. These are the present realities of physics which even the public has come to accept as incomprehensible, but real. How can one begin to understand a universe that contains this many uncertainties,…

JCVI-syn3.0

At a biological level, what is the minimal number of genes needed to sustain life in an organism? That is a question that is being asked by a group of scientists who have been engineering the genome of the bacteria known as Mycoplasma mycoides. For a few years, the team has been taking genes out and…

Neil Postman on Science

Neil Postman in his essay, “Science and the Story We Need,” has this to say, “But in the end, science does not provide the answers most of us require. Its story of our origins and of our end is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. To the question, “How did it all begin?”, science answers, “Probably by…

The New Atheists on Morality

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once. Moreover, there would be nothing immoral then, everything would be permitted. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880, p. I, 2, 6…

Angels, Galaxies, and Pins

How many planets would fit into a Milky Way galaxy? This is certainly not a classic philosophical question like, “How many angels would fit on the head of a pin?” Yet, this question does have philosophical implications if you consider why planet hunters hunt planets. Some, certainly search for planets in our known galaxy because…

Of Mulligans and the Love of Wisdom

For most of us, as we continue to think about who we are and the road that we have traveled, we find that there are both regrets and celebrations; there is obedience and inconsistency along the road. We find that we only partially live the philosophies by which we say we have chosen to live.…

Tiny Cells and Large Planets

In the last week, two articles caught my attention and contributed to my sense of wonder. One article spoke of new microscope techniques for viewing very small chemical processes inliving cells. The other article was about images taken of very large objects: the planets and dwarf planets in our solar system. We live in an…

Oblivion

Recently, I watched the science-fiction movie Oblivion (2013; starring Tom Cruise and directed by Joseph Kosinski). It is an entertaining movie with a good mix of action, philosophy, and romance. If anything, the writers and director may have been a little too ambitious, for one can readily see threads from several other movies embedded in…