I wrote about Jordan Peterson in Psychological Avatar, in particular his understanding of God. Or “God,” as he might say. The question is whether there is a “God Who is There,” in Francis Schaeffer’s phrasing, or whether “God” is only a representation of ultimate human aspiration, an avatar for the ground-up Darwinian psychological development to […]
Read more...Tag: consciousness
Napkin Religion
Atheist visual joke: Ha ha. The Bible doesn’t prove anything about God, an atheist might contend, because it is not self-authenticating. Whatever it says about God is just something someone wrote down. Even if its words include the assertion that the words are God-inspired, how do we know that to be true? Anyone could […]
Read more...Origin of Life
The question of the origin of life poses a far more formidable challenge to materialism than does the inconsistent evidence for evolution. This is important to remember, because evolution and origin of life are often lumped together as though they were parts of the same question. They aren’t. Irreducible Complexity One of the reasons for […]
Read more...Agnosticism and Belief in Nothing
Physics If we begin to think of “nothing” as being, really, some sort of something, then we can convince ourselves that all of material reality came into being spontaneously. How? If the nothingness before material reality was really a kind-of-sort-of something, then the present universe could be only the result of a physical phase transition. […]
Read more...Review (Part Four): The Experience of God—Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Consciousness The mechanistic vision of reality holds that material forces are inherently mindless; intrinsically devoid of purpose. Consciousness, on the other hand, is everything that matter is not: directed, purposive, essentially rational. Materialism and the fact of consciousness cannot be reconciled. The materialist point of view means making no accommodation for any spiritual reality. But […]
Read more...Review (Part Two): The Experience of God — Being, Consciousness, Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
In part one, we considered Hart’s explanation of what it is meant by “God,” in order to avoid the distraction of puerile attacks on straw-man stand-ins for the real God. In this post, we consider Hart’s discussion of the philosophical backdrop against which his argument will be received. This will help us to avoid prejudices that we […]
Read more...