Just What I Needed To HearI’ve got a whole heap of posts brewing right now, but none of them are quite ready to pour. So, seeing as how I’ll be undergoing surgery Friday and probably unable to post until next week, I figured I’d at least throw something out there for readers to digest in the meantime.
A few weeks back, Matt left this comment, which contained a link to Victor Reppert’s blog, Dangerous Idea. I had seen the name around, but hadn’t spent any time on the blog. Since the link in Matt’s comment was directly related to our Responding To Universalism discussion, I had to investigate. What I found was one of the better Christian philosophy blogs around. I added it to my links sidebar, and have made a habit to check in semi-regularly. In a nutshell, I’m a fan of Victor’s approach: he has a tendency to parse through the details and clarify things, and—more importantly—he tends to let the reader think for themselves. Victor’s style is more, “having an intelligent discussion with oneself,” than, “let me interpret the facts for you then belittle you if you disagree,” the latter being unfortunately prominent amongst (a)theist blogs.
What Is Reality: Reviewing The Grand Design, IIIAfter the general patterns established last chapter, I was surprised to see a change of pace in Chapter 3. One might get the impression that scientists drawing a dichotomy between natural and supernatural explanations are headed inexorably towards a declaration of scientism and a denigration of religion. That wasn’t the case here, well… at least not as explicitly as in some other books of similar nature. Of course, we’ve still got five chapters to go.
The Rule Of Law: Reviewing The Grand Design, IIChapter 2 of The Grand Design is titled The Rule of Law, and the authors give us a brief history of the concept of natural laws. If nothing else, it was an excellent vacation from what would have been an mundane bus ride otherwise. It was a good chapter, with a little bit of everybody: Aristarchus, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Galileo, Epicurus, Pythagoras, Democritus, Kepler, Newton, Descartes… even Thomas Aquinas and William Dembski get a brief mention [okay, I’m kidding about Dembski, and that’s no offense to him]. The authors gave a valiant effort at summarizing the history of natural law in a few pages, and they do a mighty fine job if you ask me.