Lying about Santa: The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit

[via Religion Dispatches]

The Geometry of Love, If You Imagine...

And so there I was, awkwardly trying to convey why I find this reassuring, why I find "We can't know" so much more pregnant with hope than "We don't know," when I suddenly realized that I hadn't yet named the reason or the source for that hopefulness, and that trying to do so might sound like nothing more than one more hollow, funeral-week platitude.

Flatland is a fine little parable as far as it goes, an invaluable illustration of geometry and physics and of finite creatures' inability to grasp the infinities that surround them, but it has little to say about love. And while there is much that we do not and cannot know, if you want to know what I think or guess or believe or hope, it is this: The universe is governed by love.

"Love?" the tesseract says. "That's nonsense. There's no such thing as love, only ..." {full post}

[via slacktivist]

Star Trek: Science Fiction for Progressives

[via Levellers]

Matrix Revisited

[via xkcd.com]

The New Atheism as Inadequate Theodicy

[via TheOtherJournal.com, HT: Rumblings]

Time travel, Providence, and Lost

[via ThinkChristian.NET]

How We Are?

We have just seen the last of a terrible century with, quite possibly, worse to come. Why is it so hard for us to be good? Why is it so hard for us to be happy?

One thing, at least, has been pretty widely agreed: we can’t expect much help from science. Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition. {more...}

[HT: Prolegomena]

Personal Sacrifice, or Cheating Infidelity?



[via Blue Christian on a Red Background, from this post]



[noted via Opinion- USA Today, HT: MUSE MACHINE]

Your Future Has Detail

and

The Lens That Sees Its Flaws

[via Overcoming Bias]

Strange bedfellows: the Evangelicals and the Aquarians

[via Think Christian.NET]

My Need For Another’s Artistic Expression

[via daydreamer]

Eternal Expiration

Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that the first cells were indeed designed and used to seed this planet. What would this look like to someone who was convinced that this planet instead spawned those seeds? A gap. That is, if one is committed to the hypothesis that the planet’s geochemistry is sufficient cause for the origin of these cells, yet their origin depends, at least in part, on some form of intelligent design, the non-teleological perspective interprets its difficulty in bridging the discontinuity in epistemological terms – a gap.

Now, once we realize that such a design event will be perceived by non-teleologists as a gap, two other interesting insights follow....

Things get more interesting when you realize that most non-teleologists believe that a design inference necessarily depends on the ability to identify and describe independent information about the designer(s). Without such information, the teleologist is left with nothing more than gaps. If it can thus appear the gaps are slowly being filled, the non-teleologist will never suspect that life was designed (remember we are making this assumption for the sake of argument).

But there is one major problem with the Promissory Note Argument – it has no expiration date. Since, FAPP, we can indefinitely generate new speculations and lines of inquiry that provide new sets of circumstantial evidence, the perception of a discontinuity as a gap can be maintained long past my lifetime. And this takes us to Dawkins' argument about the origin of life – the OOL event was so ancient and improbable that we should NOT expect an ability to completely close the gap. In other words, the Promissory Note has been given an expiration date after all – eternity.

[via Telic Thoughts]

Related: PUC in the Gaps

Is Truth Your Valentine?

[via daydreamer]

Disguising the path of death as a hidden and secret path towards divinity is the oldest lie around.

[via EternaLee]

Selfish Genes, Selfless Redemption

David Deane’s Nietzsche and Theology is a difficult, brilliant but perhaps flawed engagement with Nietzsche and his philosophical descendants from the standpoint of Christian theology....

The dichotomy of violence and peace we see in Augustine is given real biological structure by Deane who offers a model of the self driven by self genes being infected with the viral ‘meme’ of Christianity which causes all manner of anti-natural acts like loving our enemies and turning the other check. Using Nietzsche (and Barth) Dean offers a forensic anatomy of the City of God....

Dean has provided a “grammar” for Christian engagement with Nietzsche and the traditions he represents which both affirms the truth of Nietzsche and is totally orthodox. Let me put that another way, he shows how Christianity, postmodernity and Neo-Darwinism are totally compatible! And showing them as such will allow the Christian alternative of peace to be seen in a way it hasn’t been seen since Augustine! This is an amazing achievement. He does it with flair and subtlety but his theological ability, the ability to think theologically seems to be in the tradition of a Barth or Von Balthasar. {the full review}

[via Prolegomena]