O Radix Jesse

in ,

One of the fun family traditions we keep during Advent is the Jesse Tree. A couple of weeks prior to Advent (i.e. during St Martin’s Lent), the kids gather up a few branches, which I decorate with some cheap, battery powered star-shaped lights that I got from Amazon. Then for each day of Advent, we read a kid-friendly bible story and the kids take turns hanging an ornament on the thee, which depicts that story. This is a great way to anticipate Christmas by counting the days of Advent (actual Advent, which starts four Sundays before Christmas and has 22 to 28 days, not the secular Advent, which always has 24). The children really look forward to this each evening after supper and it has the added bonus of introducing them to the Christian narrative in scripture, despite much of society’s reservations about imposing a belief structure upon a child…

Read More

Being, Consciousness and Bliss (Part 2 of 2)

in

The book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness and Bliss by David Bentley Hart lays out a rational description of God. And while I deliberately refrain from using a rational argument for God in the Apology, I have to say that Hart’s thorough argument is pretty compelling, if not unequivocally triumphant. His first premise, that God is the non-contingent source of all being, is the strongest one and is discussed in the previous post here. The second hinges on the premise that there will never be a material/naturalist description of consciousness, which I honestly find a little weak. Hart essentially dismisses the notion that there will ever be a self-aware AI (which I could buy), but annoyingly never addresses the different levels of consciousness/awareness in nature: From the simple amoeba, which senses the world through simple mechanistic processes, to a dolphin, which is most certainly “conscious”, there is no clear line between which organisms are conscious and which are not, so doesn’t that mean that consciousness does result from increasingly complex physical processes? Putting aside the “Consciousness” argument then, allow me to summarise the “Bliss” argument, which isn’t directly addressed in the Apology at all and is actually pretty hard to refute…

Read More

Being, Consciousness and Bliss (Part 1 of 2)

in

Naturalism is a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure Credence logically immune to any verification (after all, if there is a God he can presumably reveal himself to seeking minds, but if there is not, there can be no ‘natural’ confirmation of that fact.) -- David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, pp 77

I just finished the book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness and Bliss by David Bentley Hart. Written as a rebuttal of sorts to the “New Atheists” (or any atheists for that matter), Hart’s book is meant to simply define God in classical theist terms, and not as the anthropomorphic “god” attacked by atheism and even espoused by many fundamentalist Christians. In so doing, he also provides a pretty sound logical “proof” of sorts along three lines of reasoning: God is being, God enables consciousness, and goodness for goodness’s sake (i.e. bliss) must be transcendental. This first line of reasoning, that God enables and is existence itself, shares a lot in common with a lot of the ideas in the Apology but has some really compelling nuances…

Read More

The Self-Discipline Lifehack

in ,

What do you seek? Is it to be thinner? To not drink so much? To see friends more? To be less angry? To spend less money? To study more? We’re all after some goal that constantly eludes us. And what do all of these goals have in common? At their root, they’re about self-discipline. Every one of these goals, if they’re worthwhile, relies upon our ability to put aside our short-term pleasure and look forward to a more abstract, less tangible end-state. I’d like to lose weight, but man I could murder a bacon double cheeseburger right now… and Uber eats is just a few clicks away…

Read More

The Trinity Octave

in

Today is the fourth day of the octave of Trinity, which is an “extended” celebration for this very important feast (Pentecost had one too). Sunday was the main celebration but the entire week afterwards repeats the very same Daily Office of prayer and meditations, albeit with some variations, in order to more fully appreciate the deeper meaning of the spiritual lesson of the Trinity…

Read More

Pentecost and the Divine Discourse

in ,

Pentecost is this Sunday, 23 May, 2021 and is the last day of Eastertide. There’s actually a pretty profound relationship between the feasts of Easter, and The Ascension and Pentecost, so it’s worth celebrating them all. I’ll provide some suggestions to acknowledge the sacredness of the day based on our family’s Pentecost celebrations later, but first let me explain what Pentecost is and how it relates to the Easter story…

Read More

Consciousness and Construction

in

I was watching my 2-year-old son playing a few months ago and noticed how easy it was for him to take things apart. He dumped his toys on the ground, scattered everything around and pulled apart all the Lego pieces. He wanted to influence his surroundings by interacting with the world, and with his limited understanding, the only way that he knew how was to “deconstruct” things. As most parents know, a toddler can leave a wake of destruction and chaos in their path. While I’m sure this is a very common stage of human development, it led me to think about the relationship we have with the world and by extension, what God is to the world…

Read More

Nothing is final because nothing is first

in

I made mention earlier about the relativity of simultaneity. Take a minute to reflect on what that means: If two things happen at the same according to one observer… but event “A” happens before event “B” according to a different observer… and event “B” happens before event “A” according to someone else… then all three people have experienced a different timeline, yet each is completely correct in their experience. Admittedly, this description applies to people travelling close to the speed of light relative to the events they’re observing, but it’s correct nonetheless: The sequence of time, the order of events, and cause and effect are all relative.

Read More

A Christian Apology

in ,

Apology - “A reasoned argument or writing in justification of something, typically a theory or religious doctrine.”

For the spiritual seeker, the dissatisfied atheist, for posterity and for my own self-examination, I’ve systematically outlined some of what I believe and how I came to believe it. For more details on the aim of this apology and the blog, visit the About page. Note that it’s written in reverse chronological order so you can more easily follow the progression of ideas by scrolling from top to bottom or from newer to older posts. Or you can use the links below and the back button of your browser to read the entries that are most interesting to you.

"I believe in Science"

in ,

You’ve probably heard that sentence used to dismiss everything from QAnon-type conspiracy theories to belief in a higher power, but what is the speaker really saying? After all, science is really just a method of gaining knowledge, and one that isn’t accessible to everyone for every question. Science is the practice of proposing a theory, then systematically testing that theory by changing variables. That’s it. And while it works well for my toddler son to figure out how gravity works in his daily life, neither you nor I have personally applied it to determine that the gravitational pull of the sun keeps the Earth rotating around it every 365 days…

Read More

We're all right, alright?

in ,

Science has a huge blind spot: It can never be fully objective due to the influence of the society that produces it. But what if there is no “objective” and universal truth that’s accessible to science? If you’ve already come to this conclusion feel free to skip to the next (previous) post. If you haven’t, maybe this will blow your mind: The “scientific consensus” is that two observers can have a completely different understanding of the universe, and yet still both be perfectly correct. And that an observer (read: consciousness) can affect the outcome of an event simply by observing it. Or said another way, we influence reality by “seeing” it. Warning! I’m about to come down pretty hard on one side of the “if a tree falls in the forest, etc. etc.” debate…

Read More

We will NEVER know it all, smartypants.

in ,

There’s a compelling argument to make that we can never know everything about the universe. There are physical laws preventing anything travelling faster than light (the aforementioned Theory of Relativity) and therefore limits to observing the far-reaches / origins of the universe (they’re actually the same, see Cosmic Inflation below), and limits to the amount of energy that’s required to observe the microscopic (the aforementioned quantum world). The best theories we have for each are Cosmic Inflation and String Theory respectively, which will (arguably) never be able to be empirically tested…

Read More