In my recent review of Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt, I closed with a quote from a letter that John Henry Newman wrote to one of his friends in 1870, summing up his problems with the Argument from Design. It’s a great quote, one that was first brought to my attention by Father Edward Oakes,… Continue reading Newman vs Paley
By the term ‘soul’ (anima) Augustine meant the highest immaterial element in man, the art of man to which mind (mens, more rarely animus) is but a function. Exactly what ‘soul’ is and how God creates souls he regarded as beyond human knowledge. It would make for simplicity, he once remarked apropos of infant baptism,… Continue reading Augustine and the Evolution of the Soul
Those rules of argument became increasingly complex. Many, after several centuries, now seem almost banal: it is perhaps a testimony to the effectiveness and importance of the foundations laid down in the twelfth century that stages in argumentative processes which then had to be carefully thought through and elucidated are now taken for granted, with… Continue reading The Middle Ages … and Your Latest Laptop
My two posts on genomics and the challenges to traditional theology, here and here.
