Whatever Happened to the Soul?
by Dr. Benjamin Wiker
Filed under Anthropology, Christianity and Science
Bad news, friends. You have no soul, according to a few professors at Fuller Theological Seminary. I say this after happening upon a copy of Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, edited by Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, all full-fledged Fullerian professors. They say the soul is now scientifically, and hence theologically passé. What happened to the poor soul, that it should suddenly be shuffled away? According to Murphy,... Read More
The Self-Defeating Argument About Intelligence
by Dr. Stacy Trasancos
Filed under Anthropology, Science
Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, have developed an equation to describe intelligent or cognitive behaviors. They suggest that intelligent behavior can be explained as an impulse to control events in the environment. The mathematics are rooted in the theory of thermodynamics. The model relies on entropy, the mathematically-defined thermodynamic... Read More
Love and the Skeptic
by Carl Olson
Filed under Anthropology, Atheism
"The greatest of these," wrote the Apostle Paul, "is love" (1 Cor. 13:13). Many centuries later, in a culture quite foreign to the Apostle to the Gentiles, the singer John Lennon earnestly insisted, "All we need is love." Different men, different intents, different contexts. Even different types of "love." You hardly need to subscribe to People magazine or to frequent the cinema to know that love is the singularly insistent subject of movies, songs, novels, television dramas, sitcoms,... Read More
Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine?
by Matthew Allen Newland
Filed under Anthropology
Not too long ago Patrick Schultz wrote a most interesting article for StrangeNotions.com on the nature of the “self” (or rather, the lack of one) if we attempt to describe human beings in material terms. Specifically, he says, when materialists try to explain the human person, “something quite puzzling (and frightening) occurs—human subjectivity disappears; that which makes humans human is explained away. The personal pronoun ‘I’ is swallowed up.” Shultz then illustrates... Read More
Atheism and the Personal Pronoun
by Patrick Schultz
Filed under Anthropology, Atheism
The overwhelming majority of atheists today are also materialists. Ousting God implies an evacuation of all things “spiritual,” leaving behind only blind, brute, bits of matter. Whichever one arrives at first—whether materialism or atheism—is really inconsequential; one usually follows the other. Concerning galaxies and stars, materialism seems unthreatening. After all, these are material, natural phenomena that we can understand, explain, and model according to material causes;... Read More
Science Reveals Who We Are is Determined by How We Are
by Dr. Benjamin Wiker
Filed under Anthropology, Science
According to scientific orthodoxy, all living things were entirely determined by their genetic code. Hence the neo-Darwinian motto: DNA is destiny. But the latest news from researchers is that DNA is not destiny. As an article in Discover Magazine makes clear, the science of epigenetics has some humbling news for predestination scientists of genetics. Neither human beings nor any other animal is reducible to the nucleotide sequence in DNA. Instead, who we are is also determined by how... Read More
Monogenism or Polygenism?: The Question of Human Origins
by Dr. Edward Feser
Filed under Anthropology, Evolution
NOTE: Today we finish our two part series by Dr. Edward Feser exploring questions about evolution, creation, faith, and human origins. You can read the first part here. How can the doctrine of original sin be reconciled with what contemporary biology says about human origins? For the doctrine requires descent from a single original ancestor, whereas contemporary biologists hold that the genetic evidence indicates that modern humans descended from a population of at least... Read More
Knowing an Ape from Adam
by Dr. Edward Feser
Filed under Anthropology, Evolution
NOTE: Today we begin a two part series by Dr. Edward Feser exploring questions about evolution, creation, faith, and human origins. We'll share the second part on Friday. On questions about biological evolution, both the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and Thomist philosophers and theologians have tended carefully to steer a middle course. On the one hand, they have allowed that a fairly wide range of biological phenomena may in principle be susceptible of evolutionary... Read More
What is a Soul?
by Dr. Edward Feser
Filed under Anthropology
What is a soul? Or to be more precise, what is a human soul? Or to be even more precise, what is a human being? For that is really the key question; and I sometimes think that the biggest obstacle to understanding what the soul is is the word “soul.” People too readily read into it various erroneous notions (erroneous from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, anyway)—ghosts, ectoplasm, or Cartesian immaterial substances. Even the Aristotelian characterization of the... Read More
Pascal in “The Rum Diary”
by Matthew Becklo
Filed under Anthropology, Movies/TV
The Rum Diary is a rollicking farce based on Hunter S. Thompson's novel of the same name written in the early 1960s. It focuses on a young American journalist named Paul Kemp who ventures into sweaty, inebriated San Juan, Puerto Rico to write for an ill-fated newspaper, and stumbles into the middle of a major land acquisition deal.Thompson said that his "long lost" novel (which wasn't published until 1998) had "a romantic notion," and that it was simply "a good story." I haven't... Read More