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Complementary Catholics and Evangelicals

There is a kind of complementarity between Catholics and Evangelicals today. Very briefly, accepting the authority of the Pope is the key to being a Catholic today. There seems to be little else that unites the bewildering variety of Catholics, from Latin mass hard-liners to Marxist liberation theologians and from the superstitious to the intellectuals. Accepting […]

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The real scientific method

The real scientific method is the inductive method invented by Socrates and elaborated by Aristotle, Bacon, and Whewell. It is different from the hypothetico-deductive method invented by JS Mill in the 19th century which is passed off as the method of modern science. Consider Francis Bacon. He called immature concepts “notions”. Induction starts with notions

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Philosophical realism

Philosophical realism, or simply realism, is a philosophy that begins where we all begin: with our common sense, our common everyday experience. When Samuel Johnson famously dismissed Berkeley’s idealist philosophy with his “I refute Berkeley thus” and then kicked a rock, he was asserting realism in contrast with idealism. There are basically two kinds of anti-realist

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Morality and same-sex civil marriage

Same-sex civil marriage has become legal in various jurisdictions and states. What should those do who do not recognize the moral validity of these marriages? This has become an issue for people personally and in business. Consider the latter first. There have been cases of a photographer and a baker: what should they do if customers

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From Newton to Darwin

Ancient Greek astronomy distinguished the ordered cosmos of the superlunary world from the disordered chaos of the sublunary world [see Remi Brague’s book The Wisdom of the World, English translation 2003, University of Chicago Press]. Isaac Newton undermined this distinction with his laws of physics published in 1687 by showing that universal gravitation accounted for

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Evolutionary theology

The problem with evolutionary theology — theology that accepts universal evolution — is not that it denies the creation of the universe (it doesn’t) but that it minimizes the role of the creator. From the evolutionary position that’s exactly the point: explain as much as possible without reference to God, the supernatural, or the miraculous.

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The origin of species terminology

Creationism in a philosophical/scientific context was first propounded by Socrates (David Sedley, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity, 2007). Socrates did not provide specifics but it is often said that Plato and Aristotle did: biological species were like logical species and so did not change — species were fixed — and purportedly this is what creationists have

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Fact, value, and science

The modern distinction between fact and value goes back to David Hume who argued that “is” does not imply “ought” — there is no way to get from facts to values. This contrasts with the Aristotelian philosophy in which everything has a nature so that what something is and what it ought to be is defined by

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Politics Left and Right

The political Left and Right began with the French National Constituent Assembly of 1789. The Left supported the revolution and democracy, the Right opposed the revolution and supported the aristocracy, and the Democratic Royalists supported a constitutional monarchy. Today there is no aristocratic Right to speak of, at least not in countries such as America.

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