Chesterton once described the popular Atheistic rhetoricians of his day who waxed romantic about the size of the universe like a jailor trying to console a prisoner by saying ‘there, there, it is a rather large prison’. I couldn’t help but notice that so little has changed in the 80 odd years since he wrote it. (Last night apparently NASA’s space craft and explorer to Mars … [Read more...]
The Strangers in my Life
I just finised reading, for my existential philosophy class, a book called "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Camus was a famous existentialist atheist and this is one of his 'great' works. The one thing I like about the Atheist existentialists (probably the only thing I like about them) is their logical consistency / systematic thinking. For them, there really can be no … [Read more...]
The Invisible, Uncreated world of Being, Makes More Sense than the Material World of Becoming
Plato, Kant, Thomas, Augustine, and Jesus all posited a (post) hellenic worldview whereby behind everything in the physical world, there existed ideas, the non-material, the noumenal, God. Something Other, something not like what we see. From our life experience and our own human being/existence, we know that Being must exist. Plato posited that there was a realm of the … [Read more...]
What Exists? The Senses and Reason? Thomas, Berkeley, Kant
I'm trying to figure out whether I believe the world actually exists because I see it and experience it with my senses (Thomas Aquinas/Aristotle/Realism), or whether I think it exists and so it exists, and that the only real thing I can be sure of is that I think, and so existence can only really be linked to thinking. Thus for universal existence, there must be a mind … [Read more...]
Thoughts Before Work Tonight
“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” - Simon Schama (pictured above making cheese soufflet in his home)I had a fine day today. I … [Read more...]