Archive for the ‘Skepticism’ Category

I often feel that the modern world has gone mad, but I must admit that I was caught off guard when I discovered in the eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796) an epistemological source of our condition.  The madness of the modern world is its solipsistic undercurrents, which leave us feeling painfully alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Great movies, like great books, are worth returning to time and again because they deal with transcendent themes.  Last night I watched the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke.  When I saw it as a teenager, I loved it.  I could quote my favorite lines.  My friends and I talked about our favorite scenes.  It was cool.  Yes, the ending was not happy (Do I need to warn about spoiler alerts for such an old movie?), but Paul Newman, who played Luke superbly, and the movie were cool.  Fifty years later, I’m not so sure. Read the rest of this entry »

A common misconception of the modern world is that one can separate technical training or the mastery of skills from moral formation.[1]  In this essay I will argue that good reading is not just a skill but is a moral or ethical act.  Why that is so will lead us into issues concerning the nature of truth and the existence of God.  Read the rest of this entry »

I am glad that in an age like ours full of inconsistent and halfway atheists who unwittingly or dishonestly extol the virtues of morality and the truths of science our students at Cair Paravel www.cpls.org have the opportunity to read atheists who willingly face the consequences of their belief or lack thereof.  Read the rest of this entry »

While mostly everyone will agree that there exist some things that can be described as true or good or at least as false or evil, very few will argue in support of objective beauty.  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is perhaps one of the few absolutes adhered to in our very relativistic age.

According to this popular aphorism, when we state that something or someone is beautiful, it is just an opinion or a way of describing a pleasurable reaction to a person or an object.  Others might disagree, but there are no criteria for judging whether an object itself is beautiful. It is just a matter of taste and thus really doesn’t matter.

In this post I want to demonstrate that it does matter whether beauty is objective. We need to realize the results of contending that beauty is merely a subjective opinion. Here are four negative consequences to denying objective beauty. Read the rest of this entry »