Another culturally embedded phrase in addition to “just as nature intended” refers to “letting nature take its course.” Excuse me? …its course?? Again, nature has no intentions… as if it had some magical ability to transcend itself and perceive the course of its own history… in other words, as if nature were supernatural.
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Ethics has been on the brain for a while – particularly how ethics are formed and shaped by value-judgments about the quality of a given thing. I’ve did a little image a while back mapping my current understanding of how ethics works philosophically: ontology (what is it?) precedes teleology (what is it for?), which precedes ethics (what is right or . . . → Read More: toothpaste & philosophical ethics Never a more sterling case of a bull-full, left-over cultural slogan – nature hath not even a single hint of an intention. From Lewis, Letter’s to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 38-39. It is true in one sense that the mark of a genuine science is its power to predict. But does this mean that a perfected science, or a perfected synthesis of all the sciences, would be able to write reliable histories of the future? And would the scientists even want to . . . → Read More: lewis on science & prediction Some quotes from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s ‘The Three Meanings: Prayer, Faith & Service’ – Chapter 1, on the ‘naturalness’ of prayer:
On prayer and Modernity… Modern scepticism has done all that it could to make prayer unreasonable. It has viewed the world as a machine, regular as an automaton, uncontrollable as sunrise. It has made whatever . . . → Read More: modern prayer Gotta love ole Bill Shatner‘s hosting – cheesy as ever – for this new show. An interesting mix of stories tonight. A surfer saved from a shark attack by dolphins – dogs and cats that seem to know people are dying – a scrawny boy who picked up a car that had fallen on his uncle. 1 Interestingly, the show speculated . . . → Read More: weird or what? Words are only so good. What words do we use to distinguish the kind of cause God must be from the kind of causes we see in nature and cosmology, etc.? As long as we have the ability, resources, time, interest and basic assumptions about nature, we will always be able to look ‘further out’ and ‘deeper into’ our universe. . . . → Read More: distinguished Cause Of all the theistic proofs, the cosmological argument is clearest and simplest: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The Universe began to exist. The Universe has a Cause. A helpful deductive version is stated as follows: A contingent being (a being that if it exists can not-exist) exists. This contingent being has a cause of or explanation for its . . . → Read More: logical argument dedicated to Aristotle & science/faith blogging: This post – in less overtly philosophical language… We can talk about what something factually is and we can also talk about what it is worth. Science can tell us factually what a foetus is, but not what it is worth. We can talk about the way things ‘do’ behave, and we can also talk about the way things should . . . → Read More: it’s going good |
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