In the Promethean Allegory, Prometheus is both hero and villain. In one ilk, he molded humanity out of clay to aid the titans in their struggle against the gods. But Prometheus’ revolution against the divine order cost him dearly. In a similar vein, is science more and more the quest to advance human knowledge, [...]
Deep in the wellspring of science fiction is the ongoing struggle between mechanical monsters and holistic heroes. From bleak and dour tales of extermination and human destruction, to optimistic but nevertheless struggling and pathological battles to save life, science fiction has been battling with our modern monsters from the id boiling up inside of [...]
In Wade Davis’ “One River,” every issue that a sound-minded person most cares about is joined under a novel aspect: sanity and the way to illumination, visibility and the manifestations of the divine realm, physicality and the gateway to transcendence. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, by Wade Davis (New [...]
There is in our world a strong strain of relentless reductionism and blind rationalism whose inevitable complements are mechanical creativity-mongering and thoughtless image-proliferation. One antidote would be a revivified attention to the reason of images. Understanding Imagination, by Dennis L. Sepper (546 pages, Springer, 2013) When Professor Rosemann invited me to this colloquium—small in [...]
In 1989, the double-slit experiment revolutionized understanding of matter: The universe is not deterministic as promulgated by the worldview of Newtonian physics. Surprisingly, the meaning of quantum physics, a most arcane subject, remote from human experience, in light of these discoveries, raises the most profound question a person can ask—“Who am I?” In January [...]
Charles Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest remains a sacred idea in science—no indeed, in modern Western culture. The imagined war of every organism against every other represents a profound enculturation of science, prejudicing theories and obscuring the facts. The evidence, however, clearly shows that nature is not competitive but cooperative. “Charles [...]
In many ways, cultivating relationships into a thriving community looks like cultivating a garden. Human beings can tolerate uprooting from one place to another, but every time this happens we disrupt those tiny little fibers of attachment from which we draw life. For a long time now, our culture has faced a crisis of [...]
As Immanuel Kant says, the imagination is “a hidden art in the depth of the human soul.” It is a faculty which presupposes that somehow or other two worlds of objects are present to us, one of which seems to us to be outside, the other inside ourselves. The imagination is a puzzle not [...]
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. And as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. Editor's Note: President Kennedy delivered the [...]
We have arrived at an astounding conclusion, at a complete reversal of the customary way most scientists and laymen understand Homo sapiens and nature: Our entire life is a consequence of human mind and Divine Mind, not of the interactions of little bits of matter. Mind is primary, not matter. In scientific circles, the [...]
Instead of carved statues of Adonis or Venus, we have created for each person his own hand-held idol, designed with amazing ingenuity and carved with utmost skill from precious materials. Each one of us has a little god who offers us the world in the palm of our hand. While I was reading from [...]
Our capacity to grasp universals and natural laws sets us apart from the other animals, and, in that sense, we are apart from nature. Human beings in some mysterious way transcend space and time; through science, philosophy, and art, we rise above nature. We live in time, yet touch the timeless. Several years ago, [...]
We wonder whether smartphones have somehow fundamentally altered our human nature, but ask why we were so vulnerable to addiction when they arrived on the scene. Technology amplifies, but does not alter, who we are. We are creatures with a deep and abiding desire to avoid the real. We seek to escape awareness of [...]
For the scientist who knows how to read the face of nature, every object in our world can be explained by way of a cosmic dance. Given enough time and enough swerves, every mountain, every stream, every tree, every animal—even every human soul—will find its way from lifeless atom into living entity. And yet, [...]