Did Dinosaurs Die Before the Fall?

  St. Paul tells us:   "For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:21-22).   Does this mean that there was no death--of any kind--before the Fall of Man? Would that mean that no animals, plants, or microbes died? What about animals that are carnivores? Were lions vegetarians? How about alligators? Or sharks? How about carnivores like Tyrannosaurus Rex? Let's... Read More

Andrew Sullivan’s Non-Threatening Jesus

A recent cover story for “Newsweek” magazine, penned by political and cultural commentator Andrew Sullivan, concerns the “crisis” that is supposedly gripping Christianity. Weighed down by its preoccupation with doctrines and supernatural claims, which are incredible to contemporary audiences, compromised by the corruption of its leadership, co-opted for base political ends, Christianity is verging, he argues, on the brink of collapse. The solution Sullivan proposes is a repristinizing... Read More

Did Pope Benedict Really Dismiss Evolution as ‘Science Fiction’?

In a recent letter to Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Italian atheist and mathematician, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI used the term "science fiction." Odifreddi is the author of the 2011 book Dear Pope, I'm Writing to You, a critique of Benedict's theological writings. Benedict's letter is a response to that book, extracts of which were recently published in the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica. In Odifreddi's book he referred repeatedly to theology as "science fiction." Benedict pointed out... Read More

Black and White and Misread All Over

NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.     Philosopher Dale Tuggy recently quoted a famous passage from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola:   "To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord,... Read More

Searching Beyond Darwin: Exploring “Mind and Cosmos”

The controversy Thomas Nagel set off a year ago when he published a slim volume called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012) is still echoing through the halls of academia. The question is: Was that the sound of a great career crashing to the ground we heard, or the first whacks of a sledgehammer against the Berlin Wall of materialist philosophy? Nagel has taught for 33 years in one of the country’s... Read More

Know Thyself: The Insolvable Puzzle

Though agape [i.e. selfless love] comes from God, it resides in our free will as human beings. Its home is not the body or the feelings, or even the intellect, but the will. True, the intellect has to work with it. But it is not the intellect that loves, any more than it is the light in the operating room that performs the surgery.Agape may be aided by seeing, accompanied by feeling, and accomplished by doing, but it is essentially an act of choosing, an act of free will. If God exists,... Read More

Hannah Arendt and the Shadow of Evil

The appearance of an art house film on the philosopher Hannah Arendt has sparked renewed interest in an old controversy. In 1961, Arendt went to Jerusalem as a correspondent for the New Yorker magazine to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi colonel accused of masterminding the transportation of millions of Jews to the death camps. Arendt was herself a Jew who had managed to escape from Nazi Germany and who had been, years before, something of an ardent Zionist. But... Read More

Debunking the Mythical Conflict Between Science and Religion

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of giving a talk at the Royal Society in London on medieval natural philosophy. During the course of my talk, I mentioned that the great conflict between science and religion is a myth. I also covered a few of the more egregious legends that feed the myth, such as the claim that medieval people thought that the Earth is flat. Afterwards, not expecting to hear anything more on the conflict myth, I took questions. But one of the first was about... Read More

The Science Delusion: An Interview with Atheist Curtis White

Many of today's most popular atheists, including Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, encourage their listeners to give up religion and submit to science. They believe scientific method provides the best understanding not only of the physical world but also of art, culture, economics, and anything left over. More recently, neuroscientists and their fans in the media have delivered a variation on this message: the mapping of the human brain will soon be completed, and we will know what we are... Read More

Does Quantum Physics Refute the Kalam Argument for God?

In a previous post I argued that a common atheist intuition about what would count as proof for the existence of God also provides a foundation for the intuition that something cannot come into existence from nothing without a natural cause. If this intuition is true, then it would provide much more support for the first premise of the Kalām Cosmological argument (KCA). For those who are unfamiliar with this argument for the existence of God, it goes like this: P1. Whatever begins to... Read More

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