The Scientific Revolution and Contemporary Ethics
Discussions about ethics and the kind of public policy that should follow from sound ethical principles can appear to be endless when there is fundamental disagreement about the first principles from...
View ArticleLandscapes of Nothingness
Is the ancient adage—that from nothing, nothing comes—true? Must there always have been something, existing in some way, in order for there now to exist anything at all? Ancient Greek scientists and...
View ArticleThe Sperm of Sea Urchins and the Directedness of Natural Processes
The March press release from the Max Planck Institute in Germany was certainly provocative: "Sperm can do calculus!" Not least because the sperm in question is that of the sea urchin—engaging in...
View ArticleNeither Darwin Nor God?
Can we have a comprehensive view of nature if we do not include an adequate account of consciousness, cognition, and value? Central to the orthodoxy of reductionist materialism is that these features...
View ArticleIs Religion Outdated in the Twenty-First Century?
The annual meeting in January of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, brought together an elite group of world leaders to consider the “state of the world” and to offer various...
View ArticleWho Am I? The Building of Bionic Man
London's Science Museum has an entire gallery—dubbed “Who Am I?”—dedicated to the latest advances in genetics and neuroscience. In early February the gallery welcomed Rex, the bionic man. Rex is short...
View ArticleIllusions of Unity? Mind, Value, and Nature
There have been few books in recent years that have created as much discussion, in the academic world at least, as Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature...
View ArticleMetaphysics and the Experience of God: The Meditations of David Bentley Hart
One can imagine the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) sitting at night in his tent, pitched on one of the far-flung frontiers of the Roman Empire, making yet another entry in what would become his...
View ArticleThe Limits of Life: Biology and the Philosophy of Nature
What are the limits within which life can exist? What are the limits of the natural sciences in explaining life and its origins? I recently attended a fascinating lecture at Oxford on the existence of...
View ArticleScholastic Metaphysics: Edward Feser’s Introduction
Upon entering a popular bookstore, it is not unusual to find a section devoted to “New Age Spirituality” located next to one labeled “Metaphysics.” Indeed, in the popular imagination, the word...
View ArticleReligion in the Age of Evolution: Shaking the Pillars?
In a culture that sees science as the pinnacle of human knowledge, there continues to be lively discussion about the place of religious belief. Some believers think that their faith is threatened by...
View ArticleThomas Aquinas in China
The number, depth, and rapidity of changes in Chinese society over the last decade may obscure an unusual change within the academy: a markedly increased interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas....
View ArticleSouls Matter
For one who thinks that there is nothing more to reality than what can be detected and explained by the empirical sciences, discourse about the soul, especially the human soul, remains at best a quaint...
View ArticleMind the Gap: Neuroscience, Transhumanism, and Human Nature
Contemporary developments in neuroscience and other natural and cognitive sciences can illuminate our understanding of the brain and its operations. They can also inform wide-ranging speculations about...
View ArticleScience, Philosophy, and God
Understanding what natural entities are—and how they are the kinds of things that they are—is a central goal of all scientific endeavor. It is an endeavor that cannot be undertaken without at least an...
View ArticleBird Brains and Cross-Species Empathy
Evolutionary biology tells us that dinosaurs are the distant ancestors of birds, who existed well before the arrival of human beings in the grand scale of life on Earth. Increasing evidence about the...
View ArticlePoetic Naturalism and the Way Things Are
Can one find a way to describe the world in all its features—including references to consciousness, thinking, purpose, meaning, and morality—while maintaining that there is nothing more to the...
View ArticleReason and the Existence of God
In his famous 2006 address at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the importance of academic inquiry into the “reasonableness of faith.” The Pope noted that a former colleague had...
View ArticleThe Evolution of Minds
Love it or hate it, phenomena like this [DNA] exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate...
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Virgil, Pope Francis, and the Wisdom of Memory
In early April, Austen Ivereigh published an interview with Pope Francis in which he asked for some reflections on the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The text appeared in the Spanish newspaper ABC, and...
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Darwin, Marx, Aquinas, and China
Over the past several years I have visited more than a dozen Chinese universities, speaking on “Thomas Aquinas, Creation, and Contemporary Science.” One of my goals has been to show how Aquinas’s...
View ArticleCould God Have Created a Multiverse?
As scientists have learned more about the universe’s massive scale, combined with the vast improbability that life could have been supported in it, they’ve had to develop theories to help explain these...
View ArticleEppur si muove: The Legend of Galileo
There are few images of the modern world more powerful than that of the humbled Galileo, kneeling before the cardinals of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, being forced to admit that the Earth...
View ArticleThomas Aquinas: Revolutionary and Saint
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is one of the two most famous Catholic theologians and philosophers; the other is Augustine (354–430). Seven hundred years ago, on 18 July 1323, Pope John XXII presided at...
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