In Absence, I concluded with this: The end of this life comes gently or harshly, but it comes, and the question then will be whether we overcame the silent absence of ourselves from God with understanding and patience; whether we have been successful at seeing God in His creation despite our absence from Him while we are […]
Read more...Category: Being
Rugby, Youth, Loss
I was sitting at my desk minding my own business when I went on facebook and learned that a friend had died. I haven’t sorted this out yet. He was right at my age. We played rugby together back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I haven’t seen him in almost 40 years. I think we were […]
Read more...Being and Time
Roger Scruton is a great contemporary philosopher. You should run out and read everything he ever wrote. His specialty is aesthetics, but he is versatile. I read him in part for his handle on developments in philosophy over the last few hundred years, including especially the influence of Friedrich Hegel, the preeminent late-18th century philosopher. On the key philosophical subject of […]
Read more...Numinous Light
Remember that sense you had as a child, of endless possibility and endless texture and depth to the reality of existence all around you? We commented on it in a post on Christmas, as being relevant to the attempt to pause and contemplate the astonishing fact of existence. As children we felt the significance of […]
Read more...If There is No God
Atheists’ Affirmative Beliefs Your friend has rejected religion. There is not a God, he believes. There is not a Creator of the universe. There is not a Sustainer of it. There is not a God present among us in some way. There is not a God component to our conscious self-awareness. There is not a transcendent […]
Read more...Philosophy Presented as Science
More Confusion about “Nothing” In the post First Cause, we mentioned a book by Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, (Free Press 2012). The basic point of the post was that Krauss seemed not to have adequately grasped what “nothing” is, when he argued that material things came from nothing. One has to read more […]
Read more...The Thirst of the Soul
Sound-bite Atheism One of the frustrating things in the ongoing theism/atheism debate is that theism and especially Christianity is built on centuries of careful methodical thought, but the new materialism is based on sound bites, and those sound bites lack the context of a coherent belief system. They’re potshots at one system of belief (usually Christianity), not a […]
Read more...The Intelligible Universe
In the atheist’s imagination, all of reality is reducible to matter and energy and time. Science, the study of that matter and energy and time, is thought to render it intelligible. This is a mistake of thinking, however. Intelligible order existed in the universe before the first scientist began to inquire into it. Science is […]
Read more...Review (Part Seven): The Experience of God – Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
The dream and the reality Right after his introduction, Hart took a couple of pages to tell the story of waking from a pleasant dream, but with a sense of foreboding. Now, near the end of the book, he continues that story. The dreamer is now awake. He considers the ingenious intricacy of the distortions […]
Read more...Review (Part Six): The Experience of God – Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Having explained how we approach the natural only over the interval of the supernatural, Hart turns to the incoherency of materialism. Absolute truth The human longing for truth involves a loyalty to an ultimate ideal, and that ultimate ideal beckons to us from beyond the totality of beings. We would not care at all about […]
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