Saudade

I've just come across the Portuguese word "Saudade". The Wikipedia entry states that:

"It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return."

Apparently it is no precise translation but it also appears that many languages have a similar concept, perhaps the closest being the Welsh term "Hiraeth".

An echo a time before the Fall, maybe.

Facts Don't Dispel Belief in Creation Myths...

James Chastek's post on Science and Creation Myths on his ever interesting Just Thomism blog has been picked up by some of the big guns in the philosophy of science and religion blogs that I read (for example, Mike Flynn has a nice response here).  Something quite interesting happened in the comments of the original article: we were treated to a number of rather scientifically-questionable assertions by one overreaching commentator (... population genetics has proved the story of Adam and Eve to be false, original sin, etc, etc, etc) which is the standard, if mathematically illiterate, response of certain so-called gnu-atheists, as well as the usual disclaimer that scientism is a straw-man because no-one holds those views. This was followed by a very entertaining take-down of these views by one of Ed Feser's regularly commentators, a (Mr?) Crude.

Basically, it is a call-out of atheistic psychological projection and I can't do better than to quote some of it:

"Now, here’s where things really get interesting. Everything I just told you absolutely undercuts one myth – the one you’re propagating. It does so demonstrably, and it’s not even an exhaustive list of why you’re wrong. No, population genetics does not undercut a literal, historical fall. Not of Adam and Eve, and not generally. No, there are a variety of reasons that you’re utterly wrong about your claims on this topic, and a variety of ways to maintain a real and literal fall given our scientific knowledge.

But I have a prediction: You will not sacrifice your myth.

It’s too important to you, and really, that importance is just one facet of the scientism you claim does not exist, and is not actually a problem. You need, absolutely need, science to have put a stake through the heart of this religious claim – or, at the very least, it has to be capable of doing it in principle (preferably ‘any year now!’). Because if it doesn’t – if science really is not just limited, but limited in such a way that makes it incapable of giving you the intellectual certainty (and with it, authority) you desperately want it to… well, what a tremendous disappointment that would be. It’s so disappointing, that it’s an understanding that simply cannot be accepted."

This seems to me to be the underlying motivation for a lot of the new atheist rant about religion.

Update: Brandon Watson from Siris performs a clinical dismantling of the argument here and here.

What to say...in the subsequent posts, our new atheist friend retreats to an implicit fideism characterised by a refusal to engage with the arguments or withdraw statements which are shown to be false. I presume this is what geologists get when they talk to Young Earth Creationists. There's a curious symmetry about it. In any case, the rest of the commentary follows exactly the progression presicted by Crude who also gives a nice summary of the situation here. 

Creation Ex Nihilo?

This is quite a good puzzle.

Creation Myths

Over at Just Thomism, James Chastek has a nice post on scientific creation myth - in the sense of the stories that scientists tell themselves about the creation of the discipline and how it has apparently finally put paid to religious mythology as a source of truth. As he points out:

"Science in the popular imagination is idealized (science cannot explain everything or solve all our problems now, but just give it time!); and only its successes are seen as integral to it (i.e. vaccinations, space travel, and computers are seen as the direct and proper work of science while Hiroshima, Tuskegee, Mustard gas, scientific eugenics and sterilization programs, Josef Mengele, climate change, industrial pollution, etc. are never seen as the necessary products of “science”). IOW, this is obviously not a scientific view of science but one that makes it into an exalted, inerrant  messiah that will set everything right if we only give it our total devotion.  Ultimately, it’s not that we want to destroy creation myths with science but that we want to replace an ancient creation myth with a modern one."


This seems to me to be spot on. Anyone familiar with the history of the Galileo controversy cannot fail to appreciate how powerful the scientific creation myth has now become. despite being pretty much completely rejected by both historians and philosophers of science, it is nevertheless deeply embedded in the subconscious of almost all working scientists despite clear and historically compelling arguments to the contrary. (See the comments to this post on Geocentrism and the Galileo Affair by Thony Christie at The Renaissance Mathematicus for a hilarious example of this.) 

From Random Polygon to Ellipse

Here is a fascinating and quite unexpected result from Shape Analysis.

I came across it at Matthen's blog which is great resource for visualising simple but intriguing mathematical results.

"Draw some random points on a piece of paper and join them up to make a random polygon. Find all the midpoints and connect them up to give a new shape, and repeat. The resulting shape will get smaller and smaller, and will tend towards an ellipse".

The visualisation is here and the paper demonstrating the result is here.

Fr Emil Kapaun

DarwinCatholic has a report on the recent posthumous award of the US Medal of Honour to the chaplain, Fr Emil Kapaun, who died in the Korean War. It is a moving story of heroism and probable saintliness and all the more pertinent given current tensions on the peninsular.

Sunshine on Leith

With all due respect to Liverpool and Celtic, there's only one winner when it comes to football anthems and that is Hibs' rendition of "Sunshine on Leith" by the Proclaimers.

This is them at their CIS Cup victory in 2007 against Kilmarnock. I'm not a Hibs fan but it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

I remember that the BBC coverage of the event stopped the player interviews to listen to the crowd singing. The sound is better but you don't get the feeling of being in the crowd that the video clip has.

The Proclaimers' version is here.

It's a beautiful song and I want it sung at my funeral.

Titanium

A recommendation from my kids.

Titanium - David Guetta ft. Sia - Official Acoustic Music Video - Madilyn Bailey

Adam an' Ev'ing It

Over the week, I re-read Mike Flynn's Essay on Monogenism.

I have to say that I have never entirely understood the difficulty here. I know that the Maverick Philosopher, who also wrote about this topic, would demure from the assertion, but there is clearly much to agree with in Chesterton's view that original sin is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

I was partly thinking of this as I read that Iain Banks or (Iain M. Banks if you prefer) had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I don't mean to speak ill of the dying and I quite like some of his science fiction although I think his "ordinary" fiction, e.g. The Crow Road or The Wasp Factory,  is pretty poor. I do, however, recall a quote from an interview he once gave in which he courageously defended his decision to make the terrorists in one of his books Christians rather than, say, Muslims 

"I thought [Christianity] was a great religion for terrorists. You can do anything as long as you confess, in Catholicism anyway. And together with the idea of 'original sin', Christianity seems to have a better set-up for terrorism than Islam. It would have been too easy to do Islamic terrorism".

To which the appropriate response is "Yeah, ... right!" 

Our Chatterati are sooo brave and never take the easy way out... except when they need to do some research to actually find out what Catholics believe before informing us of said beliefs.