5 Human Desires that Point to God

The presence of our enhanced human consciousness not only differentiates humans from animals, it also aids in making the case for the existence of God. That’s because through our human consciousness we desire five transcendental experiences, none of which are necessary for survival. These five transcendental desires are our yearning for: (1) perfect knowledge/truth, (2) perfect love, (3) perfect justice/goodness, (4) perfect beauty, and (5) perfect home/being. Most interestingly, any... Read More

On Those Circular Proofs of God

I remember the first time I read St. Thomas Aquinas’ proofs of God’s existence. Although I was already a believer and although I found them a wonderful adventure in Catholic theology, I thought they were circular. Sure, I thought, if you believe in God and you expect the proofs to prove the existence of God, then the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause, the Argument from Contingency, the Argument from Degree, and the Argument from Design all convincingly follow from postulates to conclusion.... Read More

Why Materialism and Dualism Both Fail to Explain Your Mind

NOTE: This is a follow-up article to Patrick's post on Wednesday titled, "Body, Soul, and the Mind/Brain Question".     Having laid the foundation of the human soul in Wednesday's post, let us now turn to its proper character and function. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, man’s soul comprises all those powers proper to lower organisms, namely metabolism, sensation, and locomotion; however, a still higher power remains that is non-existent in all other soul-possessors—intellection.... Read More

Body, Soul, and the Mind/Brain Question

In addition to my recent article, “Atheism and the Personal Pronoun,” Strange Notions has featured several related pieces, “Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine” by Matthew Allen Newland, and more recently “Exorcising Epistemology” by Matthew Becklo. True to the spirit of the Areopagus and mission of Strange Notions, these authors and I have approached the much-debated topics of the mind-brain problem and consciousness from different perspectives, arriving at subtle and nuanced... Read More

Irreconcilable Differences: The Divorce of Materialism and Truth

According to many today, the advance of the natural physical sciences continues to shrink the “space” for God. The “gaps” where someone can place God are decreasing, and therefore the “God hypothesis” will one day be swallowed whole by the progress of the scientific endeavor. Even more, the “space” where one could posit the human person as something more than just a complex, organized collection of matter and energy is said to have disappeared. While I find a materialist... Read More

Whatever Happened to the Soul?

Bad news, friends. You have no soul, according to a few professors at Fuller Theological Seminary. I say this after happening upon a copy of Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, edited by Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, all full-fledged Fullerian professors. They say the soul is now scientifically, and hence theologically passé. What happened to the poor soul, that it should suddenly be shuffled away? According to Murphy,... Read More

The Self-Defeating Argument About Intelligence

Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, have developed an equation to describe intelligent or cognitive behaviors. They suggest that intelligent behavior can be explained as an impulse to control events in the environment. The mathematics are rooted in the theory of thermodynamics. The model relies on entropy, the mathematically-defined thermodynamic... Read More

Love and the Skeptic

"The greatest of these," wrote the Apostle Paul, "is love" (1 Cor. 13:13). Many centuries later, in a culture quite foreign to the Apostle to the Gentiles, the singer John Lennon earnestly insisted, "All we need is love." Different men, different intents, different contexts. Even different types of "love." You hardly need to subscribe to People magazine or to frequent the cinema to know that love is the singularly insistent subject of movies, songs, novels, television dramas, sitcoms,... Read More

Exorcising Epistemology

Two fantastic articles at Strange Notions in recent weeks have turned from the question of God to the question of the human self. In “Atheism and the Personal Pronoun,” Patrick Schultz explores what he calls a “doorstop” argument for the soul: under materialist atheism, we are mindless machines, but given that every one of us is inescapably a subjective “I,” materialist atheism looks false. In “Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine,” Matthew Newland counters this argument... Read More

Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine?

Not too long ago Patrick Schultz wrote a most interesting article for StrangeNotions.com on the nature of the “self” (or rather, the lack of one) if we attempt to describe human beings in material terms. Specifically, he says, when materialists try to explain the human person, “something quite puzzling (and frightening) occurs—human subjectivity disappears; that which makes humans human is explained away. The personal pronoun ‘I’ is swallowed up.” Shultz then illustrates... Read More

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