Page 5: Introduction—gravitation is the touch of god
The birth of Christianity
This story began in the 1960s when I read Bernard Lonergan's work Insight, A Study of Human Understanding.
Insight grew out of Lonergan's study of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as presented by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225 –1275). Aquinas and his contemporaries instigated the first significant scientific revolution in theology for a thousand years by introducing the work of Aristotle (384 –322 bce) into Christianity. Thomas Kuhn (1962, 1996): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1: Is there procession in God?, Bernard Lonergan (1997): Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, Lonergan (1992): Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
The human catalyst for the transformation of Hebrew theology into Christianity was Jesus of Nazareth, who claimed to be the Son of Yahweh. Jesus simplified the complex legislation dictated by Yahweh and recorded in the Hebrew Bible into two simple statements: Love God; Love your neighbour. He used the parable of the good Samaritan to illustrate what he meant by neighbour. This simplicity made his message easy to understand, and it propagated rapidly through the Roman Empire, becoming the official religion of the Empire in the 4th century. Parable of the Good Samaritan - Wikipedia, Keith Hopkins (2001): A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity
The details of Christian theology were first drawn from Hebrew Bible which Jesus knew well. In the first few hundred years of its existence Christians accepted the Hebrew Bible as the prehistory of Christianity and renamed it the Old Testament. They gradually developed a literature of their own, some of which became the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible had been translated into Greek in the third century bce (the Septuagint). Ancient Greek philosophy was still thriving in this period and the Greek Bible and Platonic philosophy merged to form Neoplatonism which became closely associated with Christianity in its early centuries. Hebrew Bible - Wikipedia, Old Testament - Wikipedia, Septuagint - Wikipedia, Neoplatonism - Wikipedia
A dramatic instance of insight
Lonergan's book begins with a dramatic incident in the life of Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 – c. 212 bce). King Hiero II of Syracuse had given a goldsmith a quantity of gold to make a crown. The king suspected that the smith had substituted silver for some of the gold to make up the weight. He commissioned Archimedes to discover whether the new crown was pure gold: not an easy problem in the absence of modern non-destructive analytic methods. Archimedes - Wikipedia
The story goes that while he was lying in his bath he realized that the upward force upon a body immersed in water is equal to the weight of the water displaced, an idea now known as Archimedes principle.
Perhaps we can imagine what went through Archimedes' mind lying in his bath. It sounds as though he must have been a wealthy man, maybe a bit chubby, well able to float on water. As he slipped into the bath, he noticed the level rising, and when he as fully immersed and floating a quick calculation suggested to him that the amount of water he had displaced matched his own weight. Step by step he converged on a procedure to fulfil the king's commission. If he weighed the crown in and out of water, and a piece of pure gold in and out of water the ratios of the in and out weights should be the same in both cases. If not, the crown would be suspect. He was so excited by his discovery that he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting eureka 'I have found it'.
Archimedes excited outburst has since entered our language. The Oxford English Dictionary defines heuristic as a process or method for problem-solving, decision-making, or discovery; a rule or piece of information used in such a process.
Lonergan recounts the story of Archimedes' discovery as a dramatic instance of the phenomenon of insight, our experience of discovery when the meaning of some set of information becomes apparent. Insights are immediate when we are talking to one another about routine matters, but they may take years to occur. It has taken me 60 years to appreciate the metaphysical role of gravitation. The mathematical and scientific community has a history of insights a dating back for thousands of years. People had been aware of the atmosphere for a very long time but it was not until 1643 when Torricelli invented a barometer that we learnt that it is massive. Evangelista Torricelli - Wikipedia
Is the Universe divine?
Although Jesus of Nazareth was a real man and Christians believe that he was really God, both Hebrew and Christian religions maintain that God is invisible, in no way subject to the ordinary human activities of seeing and believing. After establishing the existence and nature of of theology as a science at the beginning of his Summary of Theology, Aquinas's next step is to prove the existence of his invisible subject, God. He provides five proofs. Aquinas, Summa: I, 2, 3: Does God exist?, Five Ways (Aquinas) - Wikipedia
The first argument is taken directly from Aristotle's proof for the existence of an unmoved mover. Aristotle understood the unmoved mover to be part of the Universe, a pure intelligence residing in the heavens. Aquinas, true to his faith, claimed that Aristotle's argument shows that God is outside the Universe. His application of Aristotle's argument is not particularly convincing. Unmoved mover - Wikipedia
Lonergan sets out develop a more convincing proof built around his ideas of insight and intelligibility:
The existence of God . . . is known as the conclusion to an argument, and while such arguments are many, all of them, I believe, are included in the following general form.
If the real is completely intelligible, God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore God exists.
This premise seems to be a theological assumption arising from the ancient notion that God is omniscient, maximally intelligent and intelligible because they are maximally immaterial. Aquinas, Summa: I, 14, 1: Is there knowledge in God?
. . . the five ways in which Aquinas proves the existence of God are so many particular cases of the general statement that the proportionate Universe is incompletely intelligible and that complete intelligibility is demanded. (Insight, page 700)
The proportionate Universe contains proportionate being: proportionate being may be defined as whatever is known by human experience, intelligent grasp, reasonable affirmation. (Insight, page 416)
Lonergan claims that the proportionate Universe is incompletely intelligible because it contains empirical residue.
The empirical residue (1) consists of positive empirical data; (2) is to be denied any immanent intelligibility of its own; and (3) is connected with some compensating higher intelligibility of notable importance. The Universe is not God because it is not completely intelligible. (Insight, pp 43-56)
The important consequence, if we assume that God does really exist, is that they are outside the Universe, a transcendental being.
Lonergan falls down, I believe, in his affirmation of the empirical residue. It is an historical accident that we do not yet fully understand the Universe, but this is no reason to assert that it is not fully intelligible.
In Chapter 9: Evolution, genetic memory, variation and selection we will see that even though the creativity of evolution depends on random variation, the process of selection tests each variation exhaustively, perhaps through thousands of generations, meaning that every feature in the structure of the Universe, from nose hairs to intelligence, is given meaning by its role in successful reproduction.
Lonergan's approach eventually led me to the idea that the proper way to understand the creation of the world is a to see it as a mind gradually populating itself with ideas. I feel that this logical approach avoids many of the difficulties that arise when we try to apply arithmetic to physics. (See Chapter 26: An alternative to field theory?)
We therefore imagine that the hypothesis that the Universe is divine has a good chance of being true. This means the last two chapters of Insight, 19: General Transcendent Knowledge and 20: Special Transcendent Knowledge may be applied to the observable Universe.
Metaphysics is the foundation of transcendent knowledge
Lonergan sets out to explain transcendence with a discussion of metaphysics.
The branch of science known as metaphysics was founded by Aristotle, although he did not call it metaphysics. He left very extensive lecture notes which are often cryptic and difficult to understand. Later editors, trying to organize his work, placed a collection of particularly difficult passages just after his work on physics. Since the Greek word meta can mean after, this collection of notes became Meta-physics. Physics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, Metaphysics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia
Just as the notion of being underlies and penetrates and goes beyond all other notions, so also metaphysics is the department of human knowledge that underlies, penetrates and transforms and unifies all other departments. (Insight: page 415)
The reason for this, he says, is that the principle of metaphysics lies in his oft repeated phrase the detached and disinterested drive of the pure desire to know.
Here I would like to interrupt the story for a moment and take the opportunity to express the whole thesis of this site in a few words. The desire to know is the desire to communicate. All forms of life and the physical world communicate through millions of different languages, but there is one, gravitation, which serves as the universal means of communication, linking everything to everything. I call it naked gravitation. It is, I feel, isomorphic to Lonergan's detached and disinterested drive of the pure desire to know.
Back to Lonergan's story.
He writes:Now let us say that explicit metaphysics is the conception, affirmation and implementation of the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being (page 416).
This definition is supported by another which defines heuristic:
A heuristic notion, then, is the notion of an unknown content, and it is determined by anticipating the type of act through which the unknown would become known. A heuristic structure is an ordered set of heuristic notions. Finally, an integral heuristic structure is the ordered set of all heuristic notions.
On this site I propose a heuristic of simplicity. It suggests that since the Universe arises from a structureless initial singularity, we can expect the first steps in its differentiation into the modern universe, (which is horrendously complex) to be quite simple and easy to understand.
This idea conflicts with much of what we read about fundamental physics, particularly the theory of gravitation. Because the current Standard Model of physics cannot embrace gravitation we have seen an explosion of ever more complex theories of this force even though it is a very simple universal relationship that says that energy communicates with energy. We are always aware of this attraction holding us onto our planet and the whole structure of the Universe is shaped by it. Here I wish to identify God, gravitation and the Universe to seek a solution to the biggest problem we face in our daily life, the ubiquity of evil. Standard model - Wikipedia
Metaphysics is generally considered to be the study of being as such, being as being. In other words it deals with anything that can be said to exist. Lonergan's definitions above limits explicit metaphysics to the study of proportionate being by which he means things that human beings are capable of understanding. From the Catholic point of view, which Lonergan is duty bound to take, this excludes the whole category of divine being which is considered to be beyond the understanding of earthbound humans. They say we will only really see God when we reach the post mortem vision of the essence of God promised to good Catholics. Aquinas, Summa, II, I, 3, 8: Is human blessedness the vision of the essence of God?
Lonergan takes up the subject of transcendent being in the final two chapters of Insight, The first chapter, General transcendent knowledge asks whether there is an immanent source of transcendence in other words, is there something in the metaphysics of proportionate being that leads us beyond the proportionate? We have already met it often—the the detached and disinterested drive of the pure desire to know:
The immanent source of transcendence in man is this desire to know. As it is the origin of all his questions, it is the origin of the radical further questions that take him beyond the defined limit of particular issues. (page 659).
An obiter dictum: this desire may exist in women too, although the Catholic Church maintains that women are so spiritually deficient that they are incapable of priesthood. John Paul II (1994): Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: Apostolic Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone
The problem of evil: The Christian versus Scientific solutions
Lonergan's final chapter, 20 Special Transcendent Knowledge takes up the problem of evil, traditionally know as theodicy (Greek: god-justice). How can a good, omniscient, omnipotent God who is alleged to love us allow (or cause) so much evil in the world?
It is rather distressing to see that this account of the Christian response to the evils besetting the world, written by a leading Catholic theologian, is so weak. He makes no mention of the myriad evils we face: war, genocide, murder, rape, starvation, sexism, racism, slavery, disease, accident, cyclones, floods, fires and other natural disasters. Instead his solution is transcendental: basically God will take care of everything and lead us through all our troubles to a well earned heaven. For Lonergan, the problem seems purely intellectual. All we have got is blind faith in a Church with a long history of perpetrating disastrous military evils, directly and through proxies. Christopher Tyerman (2019): The World of the Crusades, Albigensian Crusade - Wikipedia
On page 741 he writes (part of a long summary of his transcendental dream of peaceful paradise):
In the seventeenth place, the new and higher collaboration will be not simply a collaboration of men with one another, but basically man's cooperation with God in solving man's problem of evil. For if men could collaborate successfully in the pursuit of the truth that regards human living, there would be no problem and so there would be no need of a solution. But the problem exists, and the existence of a solution is affirmed because of divine wisdom, divine goodness and divine omnipotence. It follows that the new and higher collaboration is, not the work of man alone, but principally the work of God.
He speaks as though he holds the Catholic mindset, that we are all sinners and have a duty to admit it; as though we do not have the vast enterprise of science that brings us so close to the reality of our world. It is true that a large proportion of our science is dictated by political and military predation. Much of this is motivated by autocratic and theocratic politics by powers who wish to maintain their own welfare by oppressing others. Nevertheless the scientific and technological means are available to give everyone a good life if we could just get the theology and politics right.
For some Christians evil appears to be a feature of the world, a happy fault. It gives the Christian churches a reason for being. Evil was not an element of the world when it was first created. It was imagined as a paradise where the wolf lives with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6) and the sucking child shall plays on the hole of the asp (11:8). Childbirth was painless and death did not exist. There was then no need for religion, redemption, salvation or any of that. Felix culpa - Wikipedia
The Christian fiction became necessary, they say, because God respected the freedom of humans and angels. They sinned and God was forced to punish them by introducing work, pain, death and fracturing human integrity by turning the world of matter against the world of spirit. The Gnostic Paul of Tarsus emphasises this fact, blaming the victims rather than the God that did the damage. Robert Crotty (2016): Jesus, His Mother, Her Sister Mary and Mary Magdalene: The Gnostic Background to the Gospel of John, Paul Of Tarsus: Galatians, 5:16-24
Later in the Christian story God relented, tortured their Son to death to make themself feel better, and promised that eventually the original plan would be implemented and paradise would be regained. All this is pure fiction, a fantasy intended to explain why life is difficult. There is a happy ending for those who do what we are told. Does God have immediate providence over everything?History suggests that a significant proportion of wars are holy wars, often fought between states and nations that adhere to different faiths, all seeking supernatural help for their cause.
In the absence of supernatural help to overcome the evils we face, we must do it for ourselves. All the evils in the world are vestiges of the evolutionary process of creation. Apart from random accidents the generic source of evil in an evolving world is predation, individuals taking resources from other individuals to increase their chances of survival. We can see this as normal in the natural world. Sometimes, in symbiotic relationships, we see it as fair trade. Kieran Tapsell (2014): Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse
This is very common among humans. We find it repulsive and immoral when we see humans doing it to one another without consent, that is by violence. One cause of violence is desperation: it may be rational for me to die fighting to get resources from someone else rather than to die by starvation.
The way to avoid this is to organize society so that nobody gets desperate. Civilized societies manage this with various forms of social welfare and immune systems, police forces, occupational health and safety, health care and all the other systems designed to prevent evil. In this book we model an ideal society on the way all the living bodies in the world take care of their constituent cells, universal income, adequate security and a fair, transparent and efficient taxation system to pay for the upkeep of the whole system.
In the following chapters we build a Universe based on the notions of omnipotence, evolution and consistency which cover the whole vast space of possibility. Then, armed with this story, we return in the last chapter to the practical question of minimizing evil in all its forms: Chapter 27: The political consequences of physical theology.
(Revised Sunday 28 July 2024)
Copyright:
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Notes and references
Further reading
Books
Crotty (2016), Robert, Jesus, His Mother, Her Sister Mary and Mary Magdalene: The Gnostic Background to the Gospel of John, David Lovell Publishing 2016 ' The Gospel of John has always been a difficult book to interpret. The differences between John and the Synoptics have always been a stumbling block for students. . . .
This book takes up these problems. It demonstrates that the present text has followed a long and tortured journey from Jewish Gnosticism to a Christian Gnostic compendium, later extensively edited by Roman Christianity.
The result is a surprising re-reading. The book throws light on a different Jesus to the canonical one (he is not human). . .
The Roman Christians disagreed on all these interpretations and heavily edited the gospel in order to silence its Gnostic statement. This book will show how the gospel of John should be read at the present time to take account of this complex tradition history.'
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Hopkins (2001), Keith, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity, Penguin Random House 2001 ' In this provocative, irresistibly entertaining book, Keith Hopkins takes readers back in time to explore the roots of Christianity in ancient Rome. Combining exacting scholarship with dazzling invention, Hopkins challenges our perceptions about religion, the historical Jesus, and the way history is written. He puts us in touch with what he calls “empathetic wonder”—imagining what Romans, pagans, Jews, and Christians thought, felt, experienced, and believed-by employing a series of engaging literary devices. These include a TV drama about the Dead Sea Scrolls; the first-person testimony of a pair of time-travelers to Pompeii; a meditation on Jesus’ apocryphal twin brother; and an unusual letter on God, demons, and angels.'
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Kuhn (1962, 1996), Thomas S, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, U of Chicago Press 1962, 1970, 1996 Introduction: 'a new theory, however special its range of application, is seldom just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man, and never overnight.' [p 7]
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Lonergan (1992), Bernard J F, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'
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Lonergan (1997), Bernard J F, and Robert M. Doran, Frederick E. Crowe (eds), Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan volume 2), University of Toronto Press 1997 Jacket: 'Verbum is a product of Lonergan's eleven years of study of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The work is considered by many to be a breakthrough in the history of Lonergan's theology . . .. Here he interprets aspects in the writing of Aquinas relevant to trinitarian theory and, as in most of Lonergan's work, one of the principal aims is to assist the reader in the search to understand the workings of the human mind.'
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Tapsell (2014), Kieran, Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse, ATF Press 2014 Back cover: 'For 1500 years the Catholic Church accepted that clergy who sexually abused children deserved to be stripped of their status as priests and then imprisoned. . . . That all changed in 1922 when Pope Pius XI issues his decree Crimen Sollicitationis that created a de facto 'privilege of clergy' by imposing the 'secret of the Holy Office' on all information obtained through the Church's canonical investigations. If the State did not know about these crimes, then there would be no State trials, and the matter could be treated as a purely canonical crime to be dealt with in secret in the Church courts.'
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Tyerman (2019), Christopher, The World of the Crusades, Yale UP 2019 ' Throughout the Middle Ages crusading was justified by religious ideology, but the resulting military campaigns were fueled by concrete objectives: land, resources, power, reputation. Crusaders amassed possessions of all sorts, from castles to reliquaries. Campaigns required material funds and equipment, while conquests produced bureaucracies, taxation, economic exploitation, and commercial regulation. Wealth sustained the Crusades while material objects, from weaponry and military technology to carpentry and shipping, conditioned them.
This lavishly illustrated volume considers the material trappings of crusading wars and the objects that memorialized them, in architecture, sculpture, jewelry, painting, and manuscripts. Christopher Tyerman's incorporation of the physical and visual remains of crusading enriches our understanding of how the crusaders themselves articulated their mission, how they viewed their place in the world, and how they related to the cultures they derived from and preyed upon.'
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Links
Albigensian Crusade - Wikipedia, Albigensian Crusade - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'When Innocent III's diplomatic attempts to roll back Catharism met with little success and after the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered (allegedly by an agent serving the Cathar count of Toulouse), Innocent III declared a crusade against Languedoc, offering the lands of the schismatics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms. The violence led to France's acquisition of lands with closer cultural and linguistic ties to Catalonia (see Occitan). An estimated 200,000 to 1,000,000 people were massacred during the crusade.' back |
Aquinas, Summa, I, 22, 3, Does God have immediate providence over everything?, ' I answer that, Two things belong to providence—namely, the type of the order of things foreordained towards an end; and the execution of this order, which is called government. As regards the first of these, God has immediate providence over everything, because He has in His intellect the types of everything, even the smallest; and whatsoever causes He assigns to certain effects, He gives them the power to produce those effects. Whence it must be that He has beforehand the type of those effects in His mind. As to the second, there are certain intermediaries of God's providence; for He governs things inferior by superior, not on account of any defect in His power, but by reason of the abundance of His goodness; so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures.' back |
Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1, Is there procession in God?, 'As God is above all things, we should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to its exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as existing in God.' back |
Aquinas, Summa, II, I, 3, 8, Is human blessedness the vision of the essence of God?, ' I answer that, Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence. To make this clear, two points must be observed. First, that man is not perfectly happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek: secondly, that the perfection of any power is determined by the nature of its object. . . . Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consists ' back |
Aquinas, Summa: I, 2, 3, Does God exist?, 'I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . ' back |
Archimedes - Wikipedia, Archimedes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 – c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Generally considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time, Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying concepts of infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems, including the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, and the area under a parabola.' back |
Aristotle, Metaphysics XII: vii, The divine life of the prime mover, ' On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. And it is a life such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time (for it is ever in this state, which we cannot be), since its actuality is also pleasure. . . . Therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.' 1072b14 sqq. back |
European wars of religion - Wikipedia, European war of religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The conflicts began with the minor Knights' Revolt (1522), followed by the larger German Peasants' War (1524–1525) in the Holy Roman Empire. Warfare intensified after the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation in 1545 against the growth of Protestantism. The conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years' War, which devastated Germany and killed one-third of its population, a mortality rate twice that of World War I. The Peace of Westphalia broadly resolved the conflicts by recognising three separate Christian traditions in the Holy Roman Empire: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.' back |
Evangelista Torricelli - Wikipedia, Evangelista Torricelli - Wikipedia, the free enyclopedia, '15 October 1608 – 25 October 1647) was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles. The torr is named after him. |
Felix culpa - Wikipedia, Felix culpa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Felix culpa is a Latin phrase that comes from the words felix (meaning "happy," "lucky," or "blessed") and culpa (meaning "fault" or "fall"), and in the Catholic tradition is most often translated "happy fault," as in the Paschal Vigil Mass Exsultet O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem, "O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer." The Latin expression felix culpa derives from the writings of St. Augustine regarding the Fall of Man, the source of original sin: “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” (in Latin: Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere, quam mala nulla esse permittere.' back |
Five Ways (Aquinas) - Wikipedia, Five Ways (Aquinas) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Quinque viæ (Latin for "Five Ways") (sometimes called "five proofs") are five logical arguments for the existence of God summarized by the 13th-century Catholic philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas in his book Summa Theologica. . . . [Summary of the first way] In the world, we can see that at least some things are changing. Whatever is changing is being changed by something else. If that by which it is changing is itself changed, then it too is being changed by something else. But this chain cannot be infinitely long, so there must be something that causes change without itself changing. This everyone understands to be God.' back |
Hebrew Bible - Wikipedia, Hebrew Bible - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Hebrew Bible . . . is a term referring to the books of the Jewish Bible as originally written mostly in Biblical Hebrew with some Biblical Aramaic. The term closely corresponds to contents of the Jewish Tanakh and the Protestant Old Testament (see also Judeo-Christian) but does not include the deuterocanonical portions of the Roman Catholic or the Anagignoskomena portions of the Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments. The term does not imply naming, numbering or ordering of books, which varies (see also Biblical canon).' back |
Jeffrey Nicholls (1967), How universal is the universe?, ' 61 The future is beyond our comprehension, but we can get an idea of it and speed its coming by studying what we already have. Contemplating the size and wonder of the universe as it stands in the light of its openness to the future must surely be a powerful incentive to men to love God. We have come a long way since the little world of St Thomas. Ours is open to all things, even participating in god. This is what I mean by universal. ' back |
Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I might have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death. |
John Paul II (1994), Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: Apostolic Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone, 'When the question of the ordination of women arose in the Anglican Communion, Pope Paul VI, out of fidelity to his office of safeguarding the Apostolic Tradition, and also with a view to removing a new obstacle placed in the way of Christian unity, reminded Anglicans of the position of the Catholic Church: "She holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God's plan for his Church".' back |
Metaphysics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, Metaphysics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Metaphysics is considered to be one of the greatest philosophical works. Its influence on the Greeks, the Arabs, the scholastic philosophers and even writers such as Dante, was immense. It is essentially a reconciliation of Plato’s theory of Forms that Aristotle acquired at the Academy in Athens, with the view of the world given by common sense and the observations of the natural sciences. According to Plato, the real nature of things is eternal and unchangeable. However, the world we observe around us is constantly and perpetually changing. Aristotle’s genius was to reconcile these two apparently contradictory views of the world. The result is a synthesis of the naturalism of empirical science, and the mysticism of Plato, that informed the Western intellectual tradition for more than a thousand years.' back |
Metaphysics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, Metaphysics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Metaphysics is considered to be one of the greatest philosophical works. Its influence on the Greeks, the Arabs, the scholastic philosophers and even writers such as Dante, was immense. It is essentially a reconciliation of Plato’s theory of Forms that Aristotle acquired at the Academy in Athens, with the view of the world given by common sense and the observations of the natural sciences. According to Plato, the real nature of things is eternal and unchangeable. However, the world we observe around us is constantly and perpetually changing. Aristotle’s genius was to reconcile these two apparently contradictory views of the world. The result is a synthesis of the naturalism of empirical science, and the mysticism of Plato, that informed the Western intellectual tradition for more than a thousand years.' back |
Neoplatonism - Wikipedia, Neoplatonism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Neoplatonism (also Neo-Platonism) is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century CE, founded by Plotinus and based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists. . . . Plotinus was also influenced by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Numenius of Apamea. Plotinus's student Porphyry assembled his teachings into the six sets of nine tractates, or Enneads. Subsequent Neoplatonic philosophers included Iamblichus, Hypatia of Alexandria, Hierocles of Alexandria, Proclus (by far the most influential of later Neoplatonists), Damascius (last head of Neoplatonist School at Athens), Olympiodorus the Younger, and Simplicius of Cilicia. Neoplatonism strongly influenced Christian thinkers (such as Augustine, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, and Bonaventure). . . . ' back |
Old Testament - Wikipedia, Old Testament - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Old Testament (abbreviated OT) is the first part of Christian Bibles based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh), a collection of ancient religious writings by the Israelites believed by many Christians and religious Jews to be the sacred Word of God.' back |
Parable of the Good Samaritan - Wikipedia, Parable of the Good Samaritan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopdia, 'The parable of the Good Samaritan is a didactic story told by Jesus and is mentioned in only one of the gospels of the New Testament. According to the Gospel of Luke (10:25–37) a traveler (who may or may not have been a Jew) is stripped of clothing, beaten, and left half dead along the road. First a priest and then a Levite come by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan comes by. Samaritans and Jews generally despised each other, but the Samaritan helps the injured man.' back |
Paul Of Tarsus, Galatians, 5:16-24, '16 But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. 19 Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, 21 envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.' back |
Physics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, Physics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Physics (Greek: Φυσικὴ ἀκρόασις Phusike akroasis; Latin: Physica, or Naturales Auscultationes, possibly meaning "lectures on nature") is a named text, written in ancient Greek, collated from a collection of surviving manuscripts known as the Corpus Aristotelicum, attributed to the 4th-century BC philosopher Aristotle.' back |
Septuagint - Wikipedia, Septuagint - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint is the earliest extant Greek translation of books from the Hebrew Bible. It includes several books beyond those contained in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible as canonically used in the tradition of mainstream Rabbinical Judaism. The additional books were composed in Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic, but in most cases, only the Greek version has survived to the present. It is the oldest and most important complete translation of the Hebrew Bible made by the Jews.' back |
Standard model - Wikipedia, Standard model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that describes three of the four known fundamental interactions between the elementary particles that make up all matter. It is a quantum field theory developed between 1970 and 1973 which is consistent with both quantum mechanics and special relativity. To date, almost all experimental tests of the three forces described by the Standard Model have agreed with its predictions. However, the Standard Model falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions, primarily because of its lack of inclusion of gravity, the fourth known fundamental interaction, but also because of the large number of numerical parameters (such as masses and coupling constants) that must be put "by hand" into the theory (rather than being derived from first principles) . . . ' back |
Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, lit. 'that which moves without being moved' or prime mover (Latin: primum movens) is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause (or first uncaused cause) or "mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek: Λ) of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. He equates this concept also with the active intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the unmoved mover in the Quinque viae. ' back |