Author: Tim

• Self As Cosmos

  Since Freud, the psyche is complicated, both to oneself and to others.   It may have been C.S. Lewis who observed that pre-modern man looked out upon a universe peopled with powers and personalities and mysteries, and modernity supposedly erased these forces, only to have them descend into the soul.   The world is disenchanted and stripped…

• Why science in the West?

  Science is Aristotle. The unique contribution of the Christian church is that the church was open enough to thought and debate to produce thinkers who liked Aristotle, assimilated him, and went on. This says more about the CONFIDENCE LEVEL of the church than anything else, as opposed to, say, Islam. And this confidence level rises…

• American Supreme Court And Global Law

  Steven Breyer once said  (I’m paraphrasing of course) that in South Africa there is a wall that used to be a wall to a prison and is now a wall to the court house.   This is a symbol of a larger truth:   that their society has evolved wonderfully, has now a written constitution,…

• Hollywood’s artistic problem

  There is no plot without a protagonist, and the protagonist is not interesting unless he is a hero. He cannot be a hero if he is not good. Hollywood long ago rejected the idea of objective moral law, and severed its own artistic nerve when it did so. The corpse twitched awhile and so moguls…

• Conspiracy Theory

  There is an unmistakable flaw in the logic of all conspiracy theories. The sane and normal pattern in evaluating evidence is to speculate one level, but then test that first  speculation for veracity before building a second-order speculation on top of it.   The conspiracy thinker is simply someone who can’t think clearly enough to distinguish…

• Unnecessary arguments

  I believe in miracles, but if I were a scientist I would have to assume no miracles, then proceed.  It is the sensible working principle. Of course, as a person (which is a bigger category than the category “scientist”), the assumption  no miracles is a philosophical position,  not just a working principle.   The first…

• Regulation as Paternalism

  Regulation for the purpose of limiting risk is paternalism. It is easy for statists to point to bad results as a result of de-regulation, because there will always be some bad results when risk is real.    It is hard to point to foregone good results as a result of regulation, because, well, they are…

• Inerrancy or Silence

  When the church abandons the belief that the New Testament is inerrant, it eventually runs out of anything to talk about.  This slippery slope has no bottom; you fall forever. I acknowledge lots of problems with the traditional discussions of inerrancy, mostly for the same reason the effort to define _how_ Jesus is present in…

• The Ugliest Building In Town

  One day I noticed that the ugliest buildings in town are at the art gallery, so I began pondering modern design.  How could the people most aware of the Beautiful veer so forcefully into making things ugly?   Since modernism is all about shifting blame to root causes,  I wanted to be fair to the artist…

• Politics Is Inevitably Slander

  Thesis 1:  Jesus is the end of ethics.  I mean, the summit of ethical deliberation is in the New Testament principle  “All the law is in this one saying: love your neighbor as yourself.”   The purpose of God’s love in Jesus is to restore the human soul for an ethical end — to love.…