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.

Genetics and Environment

Interesting article by Mike Flynn on the relationship between genetics and environment - part of a longer pre-occupation of his on distinguishing between such stochastic concepts as non-random and deterministic.