What Mad Pursuit

Over at the New Atlantis site, Ivan Kenneally gives a brief and damning summary of the contents of emails hacked from University of East Anglia’s Climactic Research Unit (CRU).  He writes, “Perhaps the most damning e-mails concern CRU deputy director . . . . Continue Reading »

Absolut Absolutism

Our Ivan Kenneally unloads on Obamacare in The Weekly Standard: If one were to take seriously the central premise of Obama’s ersatz science of politics—the distinction between political facts and moral values—the inescapable conclusion is that our president turns out to be a . . . . Continue Reading »

Universality Is Not the Issue, Dude

I hoped I could prove this with a link, but back during the presidential primary race, I told at least one person that, when it came to the health care debate, not universality but comprehensiveness was the issue. You can imagine that a pomocon has an ingrained or inherent dislike for . . . . Continue Reading »

End of materialism

A funny thing happened on the way to mapping the genome, says James Le Fanu ( Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves ).  Humans have 25,000 genes.  That’s enough to get the job done, of course, but scientists were surprised to discover so few.  To transform . . . . Continue Reading »

Demystification and Legend

Bryan Wandel has a good blog post here . Short, insightful, and well worth the read. One quibble however: Without accounting for the relationship between these two, Weber’s demystification (and ours) only regards the logical explanation of things, and not the participation and commitment that . . . . Continue Reading »

Scientific Americans

My review of Yuval Levin’s excellent and thought-provoking book, Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy , is up now at First Principles. Yuval’s closing exhortation to conservatives, to write more clearly, probingly, and persuasively about human dignity, is problematic, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Real is the Relational

In expounding on the coherence of Trinitarian theology with contemporary physics, Polkinghorne notes htat “it is striking that so methodologically reductionist a subject as physics has pointed us in this relational and holistic direction. This tendency is surely reinforced by chaos . . . . Continue Reading »

Rational universe

Polkinghorne is better when he points to the import of the remarkable fact that we can understand the inner structure of the universe: “our human ability to understand the universe far exceeds anything that could reasonably be considered as simply an evolutionary necessity, or as a happy . . . . Continue Reading »

Newton and Bacon

My rabid pro-Leibniz partisanship notwithstanding, I have to give kudos to Thomas Levenson for his article on the faith of Isaac Newton over at Killing the Buddha. The article closes with a somber reminder: Hence the pathos, the danger that I think Newton himself glimpsed. There is a serious . . . . Continue Reading »