The picture of a dead lion and the videos of Planned Parenthood workers went head to head this past month. Who won? Time will tell. One thing we do know is that evidence, the type of evidence you can see and hear, doesn’t always change a person’s mind. “How can anyone, any human being, see that poor defenseless lion and feel no moral outrage?” some people said. “No one with any moral scruples can watch the Planned Parenthood videos and remain a supporter of such an organization,” others cried. Yet, for some reason, many people defy the supposedly obvious evidence. Are they mad, irrational or psychopathic? I suppose many people…
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Sermon: Haggai
Once I sat on a beach and watched my wife, Sarah, fly a kite. The kite was broken and was wet (it had fallen into the sea several times). I had long since given up, but Sarah kept going. She kept picking it up, fixing it, throwing it into the air, and watching it break that little bit more. I had no hope. This thing is dead, I thought, why bother with it? We’d be better off getting a new kite. Perhaps you feel like the kite. You are broken, tired, and wet from whatever troubles life has thrown your way. In a sense you have quit, given up on…
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It Depends on What You Mean By “Marriage”
When marriage is debated the disagreement comes down to definition. I don’t mean what the definition of marriage is (that is what we disagree about). I mean how we get a definition in the first place. Is there some independent standard by which our definitions are proved good? Can we point at some authoritative definition and say, “see, there, that’s what marriage is.”? Can we look at a couple and say, “marriage is that”? Or is marriage something we purely stipulate? Does the Supreme Court have the power to construct a definition from scratch or should they merely recognize a preexisting entity and enshrine it in law? And is there any…
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Meaning and Material
Does matter have meaning? Aquinas thought that it is impossible to understand some instance of a material entity solely by the entity impinging on the senses. One needs to abstract sense data through the use of concepts. At the formation of concepts there is understanding. The object of understanding is an ‘intelligible species’ and resides within us. One understands a material entity, X, by understanding what it means to be X, but the object of knowledge is transformed from the material entity, X, to the mental entity, X: “a thing is knowable in so far as it is separated from matter” (De Veritate 2. 2.) Aquinas thought that only mental entities…
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Human Love
God is love, but love is not God. So wrote C.S Lewis in The Four Loves. When we make love a god, Lewis thought, then whatever we love is legitimate: Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done “for love’s sake” is thereby lawful and even meritorious. (C.S Lewis, The Four Loves p. 216) When love is…
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Little Hatreds
Prejudices are hatreds formed by conditioning. We are brought up a certain way around people who were brought up a certain way. We watch other people turn their noses up at a person. They don’t mean to show us, but we can read their faces. Often they give us their run down out loud. They organize the world for us, telling us in what relation things, and people, stand to each other. Over time we develop prejudices, little hatreds. My little hatreds? No, you don’t have to know what they are. I know. And they are truly hate…reds. They are not justified, not just the way things are, not someone…
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Divine Simplicity and Truthmaker Theory
What does it mean to say that God is simple? Usually put, for God to be simple is to say that God is identical to his properties. For example, God is identical to his property of goodness. And since every property is identical to God, every property is identical with every other property. God is good and God is love implies that God’s goodness is identical to God’s love. Many have found this doctrine to be strange and have rejected it. If God is identical to each of his properties and each property is identical to every other property then God has only one property. But God is said to…
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Notes on Hempel’s Dilemma
Hempel’s dilemma purports to present an intractable problem for physicalism: (H1) If physical properties are by definition the properties expressed by the predicates of a current physical theory, physicalism is false. (H2) If physical properties are by definition the properties expressed by the predicates of an ideal physical theory, we don’t know what physicalism says. (H3) Either it is the case that physical properties are by definition the properties expressed by predicates of a current physical theory, or it is the case that the physical properties are by definition the properties expressed by predicates of an ideal physical theory. (HC) Either physicalism is false or we don’t know what it…