According to Friedrich-Georg Jünger, modern man’s veneration of technology reveals his distant kinship to the Titans of myth. This ‘titanic’ impulse to dominate and consume expresses itself through our technology-driven industrial economy, which now determines every aspect of life from the air we breathe to the food we eat. Ongoing debates concerning the growing power [...]
Those who read as Shakespeare wrote, seeing the facts in the light of the truth they serve, will be servants of that greater science animated by a love of wisdom (philosophy) and of the greatest of all sciences which leads to a knowledge of God (theology). Those who read reality in this way are never [...]
Can we imagine that a good and loving God would allow the presence, in a world degraded due to human sin, of other rational beings who would have suffered, although innocent, its consequences? Formulated around 1950, the paradox bearing the name of Enrico Fermi was sparked by a rhetorical question: why haven’t we encountered intelligent [...]
The extreme improbability of the “very perfectly precise” conditions needed for a sustainable universe capable of sustaining life within it was calculated by Oxford mathematician-physicist Roger Penrose in 1989. The number that Penrose calculated with respect to the conditions necessary for sustaining life is astronomical. At the beginning of his book, Science at the Doorstep [...]
There was a time, not so long ago, when science was perceived to be the enemy of religion or, to put the matter the other way round, that religion was perceived to be the enemy of science. The popular perception was that a choice had to be made. Those who “followed the science” must refuse [...]
Like the Greek tragic heroes of Oedipus and Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer used his almost superhuman intellect and ability to achieve something that led not only to his own suffering, but also to the suffering of others. Americans today would do well to heed the lessons passed down from the Greek tragedians about the reckless [...]
By the early decades of the twentieth century, at the very moment when physicists were dismantling formerly irrefutable truths about nature and the universe, science had become the foundation of the American faith in stability, order, and progress. Darwinian science had confirmed that the advent of the United States marked the apex of human evolution. [...]
Eric Forsbergh writes with insight, compassion, and humor, as he describes in well-honed vignettes the human condition, anchored in our DNA: love, identity, sex, families, babies, war, and death, as we go about our multifaceted lives, making music, solving crimes, surfing the internet, and coping with aging parents as we face our own mortality. This [...]
Scientists studying the effects of great trauma more closely now find that deep suffering can transform individuals and improve their lives. It is time to take a second look at the Cross. Everyone knows about those who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This condition develops when a person witnesses or experiences a shocking, terrifying, [...]
In the world of statistics, sufficiency plays an important role in estimation. But what about sufficiency in other aspects of our lives? What about God? What about my eternal destiny? What is sufficient, here and now, to know all that I can know about my purpose in this world and my fate when my time here [...]
The burden of Theodore Roszak’s “Where the Wasteland Ends” is to explode the myth that the problems attendant upon the technocratic society can be resolved by technology. Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics And Transcendence In Postindustrial Society, by Theodore Roszak (492 pages, Doubleday, 1972) The burden of this book is to explode the myth that [...]
Francis Bacon imagined a glorious future for us once our ancestors made themselves the masters and possessors of Nature; however, the ever-ascending arc of science and technology turned out to be not under human control. Physicists, neuroscientists, and computer and genetic engineers are the new sorcerer’s apprentices, having summoned great forces they can now not [...]
Because of the strong secular faith instilled in us by education, most of us trust that science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, the three legs of Modernity, can bring about only good ends and fail to see that these three triumphs of humankind can diminish the human person. With the publication of the book The [...]
The obvious question is rarely asked: what is the end of this enlargement of human control and this endless technological reaching? I sense a communal dread about it. Are we building the Tower of Babel—a recurring trope this week? Are we headed for the annihilation of humankind? This past week, adults from across the country [...]