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Monday, May 13, 2002 |
I've removed the comment facility from this site. It is not a very well supported feature in Radio, having been added as sort of an afterthought. There is no way for me to know when someone has left a comment except to look through all of the pages. (Thank-you Bill for your two comments.)
So, if you want to respond to something I've written, either send me an email (by clicking the envelope on the right), or follow Dave Winer's philosophy and put it on your own weblog, linking back to mine.
11:50:27 PM 
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Stephen Wolfram claims to have discovered simple principles that account for the complexity of the universe. He has published a 1,197-page book entitled A New Kind of Science which documents the work he has been conducting in secret. I seem to be running across weird science news items, but Dr. Wolfram has somewhat better credentials than the folks who have been building lifters.
Mr. Wolfram, who was born in Britain, published his first paper on particle physics in 1975 at age 15, and obtained a doctorate at Caltech at 20 (where Richard Feynman called him "astonishing"). He won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship at 21, reshaped the ways in which complex phenomena (like the movements of fluids) were analyzed before he was 26, founded an institute for the study of complexity at the University of Illinois, and then left academic life and research science, starting a software company, Wolfram Research Inc., in 1987. His main commercial product, a program called Mathematica, has become an international standard, used as a mathematical tool by over a million scientists and students and engineers in areas ranging from medical research to the analysis of weather.
At the core of his work are cellular automata: simple computational units that generate complex patterns as they interact with each other.
8:07:09 PM
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This article documents two different streams that are bringing back philosophical support for traditional Christian beliefs. Richard Swinburne of Oxford, who is Greek Orthodox, is an "evidentialist". Calvinists Alvin Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame and Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale represent the "reformed epistemologists" approach.
Thanks to the efforts of Mr. Swinburne and a handful of other nimble scholarly minds, including Alvin Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame and Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale, religious belief no longer languishes in a state of philosophical disrepute. Deploying a range of sophisticated logical arguments developed over the last 25 years, Christian philosophers have revived faith as a subject of rigorous academic debate, steadily chipping away at the assumption, all but axiomatic in philosophy since the Enlightenment, that belief in God is logically indefensible.
[Thanks Fr. Bob and Fr. Reid]
2:08:25 PM
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I read Isaiah 37 today in Morning Prayer. It begins with King Hezekiah in mourning because Jerusalem is besieged by Assyria, and the king of Assyria is mocking the God of Israel saying, "Do not let your God on whom you rely deceive you by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. Behold, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the lands, destroying them utterly. And shall you be delivered? Have the gods of the nations delivered them, the nations which my fathers destroyed..."
The king of Assyria made the mistake of thinking that the God of Israel was like the gods of the other nations he conquered. He also looked at the might of his army and saw that the odds of victory were overwhelmingly in his favor. However, I believe that the true God would agree with Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back when he says "never tell me the odds". God is not subject to probability. We can never say that a given outcome is impossible when God is involved, just because the odds are against it.
The sudden resolution of this conflict is sobering in the simple way that Isaiah relates it.
And the angel of the LORD went forth, and slew a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.
Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went home and dwelt at Nineveh.
And as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, Adrammelech and Sharezer, his sons, slew him with the sword, and escaped into the land of Ararat. And Esar-haddon his son reigned in his stead.
1:44:09 PM
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I don't mean to keep picking on Calvinism, but I read Luke 10:21-24 in Evening Prayer and the phrase in verse 22, "no one knows ... who the Father is except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" jumped out at me. This seems to be a classic Calvinist election passage, but the preceding verses could affect the interpretation.
In verse 21, Jesus says "I thank thee Father ... that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes". This raises the following question in my mind: are those who are chosen in verse 22 a list of individuals who were predestined to salvation, or are they a class of people whose childlike nature enable them to receive salvation?
In the parallel passage of Matthew 11:25-30, the verse about Jesus revealing the Father to those He chooses is followed by "Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Again, Jesus is making a choice of who he is calling. He is only calling those who labor and are heavy laden, which is a certain class of people.
How does someone become the kind of person that Jesus would choose? I believe it is by grace, because the whole salvation process is by grace, but the exploration of that will have to wait for another time.
1:26:01 AM
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"My aim is to provide a single source for all of Chesterton's works which are available as etexts."
12:28:12 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Gregory Graham.
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