Saturday, January 08, 2011
Zenit: On the New Year
"Religious Liberty Is the Privileged Way to Build Peace"
Religious liberty as a necessary political condition for evangelization.
"Religious Liberty Is the Privileged Way to Build Peace"
We are witnessing today two opposed tendencies, two extremes both negative: on one hand laicism that, in an often deceitful way, marginalizes religion to confine it to the private sphere; on the other fundamentalism, which instead would like to impose itself on all with force. In reality, "God calls humanity to himself with a plan of love that, while it involves the whole person in his natural and spiritual dimension, requires that he correspond in terms of liberty and responsibility, with his whole heart and with his whole being, individual and communal" (Message, 8). Wherever religious liberty is recognized effectively, the dignity of the human person is respected at its roots and, through a sincere search for the true and the good, the moral conscience is consolidated and the institutions themselves and civil coexistence are reinforced (cf. Ibid., 5). Because of this, religious liberty is the privileged way to build peace.
Religious liberty as a necessary political condition for evangelization.
Reductionism in contemporary science
I wanted to append one more thought to my most recent post dealing with Stephen Barr -- I'd have to look this up, but it seems to me that if Aristotelian-Thomists allege that contemporary science/scientists neglect formal causes it is done in conjunction with the claim that they affirm that complex entitites can be understood completely through their parts -- their material causes. This is most obvious when they attempt mathematical descriptions and other forms of modelling of complex entities. If they talk about causes which might be deemed formal, then, they are doing so with regards to the parts and not to the whole.
No one can give an explanation of things without giving formal causes -- but what happens is that a committed reductionist who is trying to do good science will end up contradicting his philosophical beliefs.
Edit. I was notified that someone had left a comment, but apparently it has been deleted? I was going to say in response that the common judgment of Aristotelian-Thomists that modern physics is subalternated to physics, this would seem accurate with respect to Newtonian physics or celestial mechanics, but is it an adequate characterization of contemporary physics as it is understood by its practitioners? They may be confusing some beings of reason with real beings, but this may not be true of every cause they posit?
I think I had an actual copy of this book somewhere: Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of measure and the international system of units (SI) by Charles B. Crowley and Peter A. Redpath
No one can give an explanation of things without giving formal causes -- but what happens is that a committed reductionist who is trying to do good science will end up contradicting his philosophical beliefs.
Edit. I was notified that someone had left a comment, but apparently it has been deleted? I was going to say in response that the common judgment of Aristotelian-Thomists that modern physics is subalternated to physics, this would seem accurate with respect to Newtonian physics or celestial mechanics, but is it an adequate characterization of contemporary physics as it is understood by its practitioners? They may be confusing some beings of reason with real beings, but this may not be true of every cause they posit?
I think I had an actual copy of this book somewhere: Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of measure and the international system of units (SI) by Charles B. Crowley and Peter A. Redpath
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