classics digests, reflections and reviews
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him? Psalm 8:3-4 The Creation Debate All Christians believe that God designed and created the universe and all living things. However, there is a wide range of opinions on how the process unfolded, based on […]
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Who is this who darkens counsel By words without knowledge? Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Job 38:2-5 The Argument of Design The Intelligent Design (ID) argument was first put forth by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and […]
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The Origin of Evolution The word “evolution” came from the Latin word evolutio, meaning unrolling or unfolding, as in unrolling a scroll. Before the codex was developed, the scroll had been the major form of written text in the ancient world. The scrolls were typically rolled up for storage and transportation. So one must first unroll the scroll to peruse the text. For sacred texts revered by adherents of religions […]
Read moreRethinking Evolution Having been raised as an atheist by scientist parents, and spent most of my life in and around scientific research institutes, I’ve always taken the theory of evolution for granted, although I’ve never read Darwin’s book The Origin of Species. Mark Twain rightly defines classic as “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read”. However, the recent widespread debate on the relationship between religion […]
Read moreAs the author of an obscure blog, I sometimes become discouraged by the lack of engagements and dialogues. I learn more by engaging in discussions and debates on the subjects that fascinate me, than by reading and writing about them. For this reason, I envy the most those bloggers who attract a dozen comments following each and every one of their posts. At times like these, I find inspiration in […]
Read moreTruth is Its Own Evidence The word evidence comes from the Latin root meaning “to see”. When we demand evidence of something, we want to “see” it in some sense, although the thing itself may be absent by circumstance, or invisible by nature. The scientific method is evidence-based. It presupposes a correspondence between true abstract theories and natural phenomena. This is why theories in physics must be corroborated by experiments […]
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Philosophical Foundation of Science When quantum theory and the theory of general relativity shook the foundation of physics at the dawn of the 20th century, many physicists, such as Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, explored and revisited ancient Greek philosophy. For they suspected there might be something wrong with the philosophical foundation of classical physics. They attempted to retrace the steps in the labyrinth and find out where the wrong […]
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