Monthly Archives: September, 2007
On the Intertwining of Science and Religion
The undeniable fact is that all through the ages, in practically all cultures, human beings have behaved in modes that assume the existence of invisible forces and intangible factors governing their lives and destinies. Some of these convictions became organized, codified, and formulated in what we call the religions of the human family. Religions have …
On the Intertwining of Science and Religion
The undeniable fact is that all through the ages, in practically all cultures, human beings have behaved in modes that assume the existence of invisible forces and intangible factors governing their lives and destinies. Some of these convictions became organized, codified, and formulated in what we call the religions of the human family. Religions have …
On the Intertwining of Science and Religion
The undeniable fact is that all through the ages, in practically all cultures, human beings have behaved in modes that assume the existence of invisible forces and intangible factors governing their lives and destinies. Some of these convictions became organized, codified, and formulated in what we call the religions of the human family. Religions have …
On John Casti’s The Cambridge Quintet: A work of Scientific Speculation
In this slender volume, John Casti takes the reader to an imaginary dinner party in Cambridge (England) some fifty years ago at which five intellectual stalwarts who had unknowingly laid the foundations for what has come to be known as AI (Artificial Intelligence) exchange views and ideas on the nature, uniqueness, and possibility of non-biological …
On Lorne Ladner’s Th Lost Art of Compassion: Discovering the Practice of Happiness in the Meeting of Buddhism and Psychologist.
We live in an extraordinary age of wonderful scientific breakthroughs and marvelous technological achievements. Possibilities for cure of pernicious diseases and for health and longevity keep increasing. But ours is also an age of spiritual anguish and moral confusions, of promiscuous sex and savage violence. Crudeness, combativeness, and religious intolerance seem to be on the …
On September 11, 2001
[Written on September 11, 2002] It happened a year ago, in the morning of 11 September 2001: an episode that lasted for a couple of hours and changed the heartbeat of history. It was as if an asteroid had landed somewhere on our planet, a mindless, mammoth, unannounced intrusion that disrupted everything around and much …
On the Concept of Self
Do you think the concept of “self” is an emergent phenomenon of our neural complexity and if so is it continuously emerging throughout our lifetime? I am inclined to consider the self as an emergent property of the neural complexity through the following analogy: Paper is the end product (through several complex processes) of wood …
Freewill and Divine Omniscience
The question, “If God is omniscient, then how can there be freewill?” is an ancient theological paradox. For freewill implies that the next move by a conscious entity is as yet undetermined, and could be one of many possibilities, depending on the FREE exercise of judgment by that entity. If this “capacity for free exercise …
On Jimmy Carter’s “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.”
A nation’s life is like that of a person: it has its ups and downs, successes and defeats, days of glory and of shame, times for jubilation and times for grief. These contrasting states may arise from external factors that tilt one’s fortunes, but equally from the decisions one makes, consciously or unwittingly, with wisdom …
On Ursula Goodenough’s “The Sacred Depths of Nature.”
Though some have cautiously kept science and religion apart, remembering the theme in Ecclesiastes that “To everything there is a season, and a time in every purpose under the heaven,” there has been, in recent decades, a spate of books that try to build bridges between the two. Of these, some seek to find science …
