They say rapid advances made in biological research in recent decades are raising questions about what they mean for our wider understanding of life itself and how to define the debate as it evolves.

Whether "new biology" - which stems from developing technologies such as genetic engineering and human enhancement - is leading the life sciences away from a strict Darwinian approach towards a holistic view more compatible with Christian thinking remained open at the end of the conference.

Organisers say the conference goal was not to reach an agreement but for participants to air their diverse views.

Nonetheless, participants did agree on one thing: the growing understanding of genetics — including how genes are turned on or off and how the now mapped genome can be edited to produce desired results — has meant important strides forward in the way science views how genes influence development.

"We realise how much we were missing in the original image without even realising we were missing it," said Donovan Schaefer, an Oxford lecturer in science and religion and co-organiser of the conference.

This naturally has an effect, he said, on "the grander questions about biology, religion, the humanities and evolutionary theory generally".

Source

• RNS
• The Tablet
• Crux
• Image: Religion News Service

Its current form as a constituent college of the University of London will end in 2018.

But a statement following a governors' meeting noted that the Jesuit-run institution's "mission and work will not [end]".

Heythrop, which specialises in theology and philosophy, has been struggling with a budget shortfall following the rise in student fees and increasing administration costs.

Merger talks with St Mary's University in Twickenham did not reach a formal negotiating stage.

The college has about 650 students and employs 91 people, including 45 academic staff.

Continue reading

If you had been an MP 10 years ago, would you have milked your expenses for what they were worth?

And if you and your family faced a threat, would you protect them or save yourself?

We all like to think that in such situations our basic decency would shine through, but we can never know.

This is the central theme of Force Majeure, in which an avalanche suddenly threatens to engulf a Swedish family enjoying lunch on the terrace of a plush ski resort.

The husband and father, Tomas, flunks his test. Instead of trying to shield his wife and children he runs away, not forgetting his precious smartphone.

In the aftermath, several characters try to excuse him.

"In situations like these you're not always aware of what you do," says one. "You try to survive."

Aristotle would not have been satisfied by this or the other excuses offered in Tomas's defence. He would have insisted that in those few seconds, Tomas revealed his character.

Aristotle's insight was that we rarely have the time or opportunity to sit down and think about what the best thing to do is before acting. Indeed, a good person does not have to do this.

To become good you have to practise being good by cultivating the habits of goodness. Only then will you find yourself doing the right thing almost automatically.

If you practise thinking about what you want to be and doing what is necessary to become that person, when you are tested you will be able to do the right thing without thinking. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: Sharmill Films

Although it may seem strange to many in the West, contemporary Chinese scholars find Thomas's thought not simply fascinating, but of enduring relevance.

I have just spent one month at four Chinese universities, speaking of the ways in which Thomas's understanding of the relationship among philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences can be used to disentangle contemporary confusion about the philosophical and theological implications of evolutionary biology and cosmology.

In Shanghai, Beijing, and Wuhan, I found receptive, enthusiastic audiences.

Most Chinese graduate students who study Western philosophy specialize in either German philosophy, with an emphasis on Kant or Hegel, or in some form of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, especially the philosophy of mind.

Still, I encountered those who were learning Greek and Latin in order to read Aristotle and Aquinas in their original languages.

One evening in Beijing, I discussed passages in Aristotle's Physics with students who were taking a graduate seminar on Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on Aristotle's ‘On the Soul.'

One student from Fudan University in Shanghai wants to compare the ways in which certain Chinese thinkers search for metaphysical foundations of ethics with the way in which Thomas Aquinas does; another in Wuhan is examining the different senses of "science" in Thomas's works.

The number of those studying Thomas may be small, but, as Aristotle observed, a beginning is more than half.

Wuhan's Thomas Study Center

At the University of Wuhan, I spoke at a three-day conference dedicated to Thomas Aquinas and medieval philosophy.

The conference was jointly sponsored by the Thomas Study Center in the Department of Religious Science in the School of Philosophy of the University of Wuhan, Fu Jen Catholic University of Taiwan, and the Li Madou Center in Italy.

That there is a Thomas Study Center at a major Chinese university, and that it has been in existence for nearly two decades, may itself be surprising to many. Continue reading

Sources

• The Witherspoon Institute
• Image: St Dominic's Priory, Macau

In part, this is a result of a misunderstanding.

We often think that the primary reason to ban incest is to prevent genetic abnormalities or other harm to children who might be conceived.

When there are so many options available by which to prevent such harm, this reasoning seems less and less intelligible.

Incestuous couples could simply refrain from having children, for example, or use assisted reproduction technology to conceive healthy ones.

The lack of intelligibility does not mean that there is a wave of defenders of incest attempting to break the taboo, although there are some.

But it does offer an opportunity to reconsider why incest is a bad thing for a society to tolerate.

And in doing so we might recognize that the problem to which incest gives rise has infiltrated our society by other means, posing a major threat to the health and stability of our families.

The Philosophical Case Against Incest

In the Supplement to his Summa, Thomas Aquinas discusses questions of consanguinity.

After asking whether consanguinity is an impediment to marriage by virtue of the natural law, he gives three reasons that it is.

Interestingly, none of these reasons makes reference to difficulties with offspring.

Rather, Aquinas holds that incest is contrary, first, to the order of relations that should exist between parents and their children.

A daughter cannot relate in the appropriate ways to her father both as father and as spouse, for example.

Aquinas's third reason is that incest is contrary to an "accidental" end of marriage: the binding together of humankind and the extending of friendship. Continue reading

Sources

• Public Discourse
• Image: Fair Observer

The "science puts God out of a job" trope has been championed by a number of scientists in recent times. "We have discovered," says Lawrence Krauss, "that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing. In this sense ... science makes it possible not to believe in God."

Krauss is in Sydney to debate the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" - the traditional starting point for an ancient argument for the existence of God. Kraus, of course, is a cosmologist, known in the field for his work on the cosmological constant and dark matter, and to the wider public for books such as The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. Krauss's opponent is the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. He has built a career around the philosophical defence of theism, and is best known outside academia for his many public debates with atheists.

I am, like Krauss, a professional cosmologist and astrophysicist. I've also interacted with a philosopher or two, and I've read a lot of Craig's work. So I thought it might be opportune to offer a guide to the uninitiated.

Science versus God

There is a temptation among the opponents of God to defend the following argument: "Science, science, science, science, science, science. Therefore the universe is all there is." The assumption is that science will automatically push God out of reality.

What is science? Here's what I try to do in my day job. Physics uses a rather peculiar approach to studying the universe. We can translate physical (measured) facts about the universe into mathematical facts about a "model" of the universe. Mountains of data are neatly summarised in a few equations. Having made the leap into mathematical space, we look for mathematical facts corresponding to measurements we haven't made yet - in other words, predictions. We can then, for example, build a 27 km long, multi-billion dollar machine under France to smash protons together at ludicrous speeds to see if we were right about a type of particle predicted on paper in 1964. This actually works. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: Wallpaper Search Engine

At times like these, philosophers are of limited use because when they have talked about dying they have tended to focus on what it means for the one who dies. Plato, for instance, called philosophy a preparation for death, while Epicurus told us we had nothing to fear from dying. But such thoughts are not much use to those who die suddenly. My father had seemed fit as a fiddle, but he was struck by a heart attack and died on the spot. The same happened to his brother and his brother-in-law, while his own father was killed instantly by a stroke. It is as though the Grim Reaper enjoys playing a cruel joke on those who look intently ahead. Those who prepare to meet him face-to-face are just as likely to find he sneaks up behind them and takes them unawares.

A much more useful philosophy would help us to prepare for the deaths of others. I have never been sure that philosophy does a good job of that. But perhaps a philosophical outlook can help us make sense of death when it comes close to us. Continue reading

Sources

• Julian Baggini in Aeon
• Image: U S Institute of Peace

Julian Baggini is a writer and founding editor of The Philosophers' Magazine.

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

Most of us will, no doubt, remember writing a similar extended address as children, following through the logic of this series of ever-larger locations. The last two entries in Dedalus's list are, obviously, redundant in any real address. Only an alien sending a postcard home from another universe would think to add them. We are all, in some loose sense, ‘citizens of the world', or at least its inhabitants.

And yet, as adults, we don't usually think about much outside our immediate surroundings. Typically, it is our nation that defines us geographically, and it is our family, friends, and acquaintances who dominate our social thinking. If we think about the universe, it is from an astronomical or from a religious perspective. We are locally focused, evolved from social apes who went about in small bands. The further away or less visible other people are, the harder it is to worry about them. Even when the television brings news of thousands starving in sub-Saharan Africa, what affects me deeply is the item about a single act of violence in a street nearby.

Life is bearable in part because we can so easily resist imagining the extent of suffering across the globe. And if we do think about it, for most of us that thinking is dispassionate and removed. That is how we as a species live. Perhaps it's why the collective noun for a group of apes is a ‘shrewdness'. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: Globalization and Autonomy

Few can deny that the movement is on the march. At the time of the election four states moved in favour of same-sex marriage and other states are quickly gathering momentum on the issue. Disturbingly, the thought embedded in Signorile's spiel is that even polite disagreement and opposition to the claims of same-sex marriage advocates amounts to wholesale bigotry and intolerance. Heterosexual marriage supporters vehemently deny this, but many people now think that principled opposition to same-sex marriage is a delusion.

One reason why supporters of traditional marriage are losing elections is that they are losing the war for intellectual credibility. They are too often mired in facile arguments about "tradition", Bible passages, and bleeding heart litanies about children. Supporters of gay marriage have succeeded in ridiculing these fumbling attempts at a rationale as ignorant and homophobic.

So a robust intellectual defence of the traditional view of marriage by a group of authors which includes Princeton law professor Robert P George is a welcome addition to the debate. Labelled by the New York Times as "America's most influential conservative Christian thinker", George, a convert from the ranks of the Democrats, is responsible for the interdenominational manifesto The Manhattan Declaration signed by a number of Christian leaders in support of traditional marriage, sanctity of life and religious liberty. Sherif Girgis is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Princeton and a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. Ryan T. Anderson, who is William E. Simon Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and editor of the Witherspoon Institute's journal Public Discourse, is a Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a Ph.D. candidate in political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Altogether a formidable team. Continue reading

Sources

• Shawn Murphy in MercatorNet
• Image: Dave & Charlotte

Futa Helu, who died aged 75 in February 2010, was a Tongan philosopher.

He studied philosophy, literature and mathematics in Sydney in the 1950s. His particular inspiration was the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus.

Slowly it morphed into a high school and then a university, the only such institution in the Pacific that is aligned to neither a church nor a government.

It came to the attention of Auckland film-maker Paul Janman when he was studying social anthropology at the University of Auckland and excited his interest sufficiently for him to devote 2004 and 2005 to teaching literature there.

Gradually he gained Helu's confidence, was given access to Atenisi's archives and entrusted with telling its story. The result is a fascinating and multi-layered portrait of a man in whose aspirations are embodied many of the challenges of development in the Pacific.

Tongan Ark will also be screening at the Auckland Art Gallery and in Christchurch and Wellington. see screening times

Source

• The New Zealand Herald
• Image: ScreenShot TonganArk