Into The Abyss

Todd and Tyler talk about the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The Hellenistic character of Diaspora Judaism and early Christianity. The importance of the Septuagint to our understanding of the development of the Hebrew Bible texts. The ways that the Septuagint was used by New Testament authors. And ways that Septuagint translators sometimes shifted the meaning of cert...

Todd and Tyler talk about Bible translations. Translation approaches ranging from word-for-word to thought-for-thought. How different translations handle idioms. The vast number of Bible translations. And the different preferences that people and groups have.

Todd and Tyler talk about Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. Among other things. "Is Christ divided?" Diversity of spiritual gifts. Ecumenism. Modern equivalents to eating meat sacrificed to idols. Heretical lawlessness (antinomianism) that presumes to transcend morality. The nature of resurrected bodies.

On arguments for the existence of God from the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason is the principle that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground. This principle has been applied to argue for the existence of God as the ultimate reason behind all things.

The recent developments in AI are quite impressive. If someone had told me a couple years ago about the capabilities of something like ChatGPT I wouldn't have believed them. AI certainly has enormous practical benefit. But since artificial neural networks were inspired by biological neural networks they can also be useful models for them. In this episode I share some recent studies investigating t...

Jared, Mike, and Todd talk about ChatGPT and the AI revolution, particularly the remarkable developments of the last year and 6 months (2022-2023). We talk briefly about how neural networks and large language models work. Then we get into the possible social, economic, aesthetic, and even existential implications for humanity. We talk about the possibility of this being a major positive breakthrou...

There is a condition of looking for something without knowing what we are looking for, or even that we are looking for anything at all. Augustine called it restlessness. Jesus described it as a thing that we would ask for if we knew to ask for it. It is a thirst for living water that will quench all thirst. All religions give witness to this act of reaching out. Jesus taught us to reach out by cal...

A brief history of secular thought from the Enlightenment to the present, looking at how it has been shaped by culture and events. We start in the Enlightenment with Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Thomas Paine. Moving into the nineteenth century we look at literary influences like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Carlyle, then social critics like Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx. Charles Da...

A reflection on the idea that “The world comes from reason, and this reason is a Person.” (Joseph Ratzinger). The intelligibility of the world and the personal nature of the Logos.

I think that there are certain ideas – like in mathematics and logic – that are necessarily true in a way that is separate from space, time, and material things. Such ideas must exist in a way that is very different from material things. We could suppose that these ideas are products of our minds; and there does seem to be something mental about them. But these ideas also seem to have real effects...

The statutes and judgments given to Israel were a mark of their special wisdom and understanding: “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” (Deuteronomy 4:6) Such wisdom and understanding are valuable to us not only for understanding the way things are but also for knowing how to live. The laws and statutes given by God are worth continual study and bring great reward: “O how...

The doctrine of the Trinity is very important in Christianity. But people who are not Trinitarians, even non-Trinitarians who believe in the Bible and in Jesus, might wonder, what’s the reason for believing in the Trinity? Is the idea of the Trinity motivated from Biblical texts or was it something that came out of Greek philosophy or Greek culture in early Christianity? How did Christians come to...

Entropy is an important property in science but it can be somewhat challenging. It is commonly understood as "disorder", which is fine as an analogy but there are better ways to think about it. As with many concepts, especially complex ones, better understanding comes with repeated use and application. Here we look at how to use and quantify entropy in applications with steam and chemical reaction...

Could anything truly exist in such a fashion that it could never be either perceived or thought of, even if only in principle? How would such a reality be distinct from absolute nothingness? A look into the philosophical issues of being and knowing with John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Joseph Ratzinger, and David Bentley Hart.

A brief introduction to classical theism. Classical theism is a systematic understanding of God shared among many Christian, Jewish, Pagan, Muslim, and Hindu thinkers throughout history. It is primarily philosophical rather than scriptural in origin, but it also opens up an intellectual space for understanding theism as a plausible and reasonable way to see reality. And so it makes for a useful po...

Rick and Todd discuss the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Rapture" in which Captain Sisko, Emissary to the Bajoran Prophets, receives a series of dramatic visions. We discuss the interpretive frameworks of spiritual and secular worldviews, the high costs of prophecy, the reliability or trustworthiness of powerful entities, the interaction of spiritual experiences and the brain, and the importa...

Evolutionary biology benefits from a non-reductionist focus on real biological systems at the macroscopic level of their natural and historical contexts. This high-level approach makes sense since selection pressures operate at the level of phenotypes, the observed physical traits of organisms. Still, it is understood that these traits are inherited in the form of molecular gene sequences, the pur...

When Jesus taught that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood many of his disciples walked with him no more. Many of his teachings and actions were strange and unsettling. In a word, uncanny. Rudolf Otto similarly described the Holy as a numinous mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Something radically other. Flannery O'Connor evoked dramatic responses to the uncanny in her fiction through narrati...

Jared and Todd talk about ontological pluralism: What exists? How do we categorize what exists? Are those categories intrinsic or man-made? A related idea is perspectival realism. We discuss the ideas of William Wimsatt and Scott Page, among others. Is reality monistic, dualist, pluralistic? Is the question even meaningful? And what (if any) practical implications would there be?

I love the Apostles’ Creed. If you ask me for a one-paragraph statement of what I believe, most fundamentally, this is it. Not just what I believe about religion, but what I believe most fundamentally about everything; about life, existence, and all of reality.

Rick and Todd discuss first contacts in Star Trek. The first contact of Vulcans coming to Earth and first contacts of Federation humans with other species in the galaxy. We discuss the Prime Directive and other Federation policies. We discuss contacts with the Malcorians, the Prophets of the Wormhole, and Species 10-C. What different reactions do species have at contact? What kinds of challenges m...

Noether's theorem is an important theorem that relates invariance of space-time transformations to the laws of conservation: space-translation invariance to the conservation of linear momentum, space-rotation invariance to the conservation of angular momentum, and time-translation invariance to the conservation of energy. The models of physics are point-of-view invariant: physical models cannot de...

Christianity has many unknowns, which makes possible many differing beliefs. This can be discouraging. There are limits in the extent of our reasoning, something Immanuel Kant explored in his theory of antinomies. And there are limits in the answers resolvable in scripture, in response to which Pseudo-Dionysius admonished that theology must remain within the bounds of revelation. But the unknowns...

"There went out a sower to sow." In his parable of the sower Jesus gives various active and passive roles: sower, seed, good soil, soil among thorns, stony ground, and waysides. This meditation on Mark 4 considers the seed as the word and the Word Christ, our receptivity to Christ, how he can enter, germinate, grow, and transform us into new creatures.

Rick and Todd talk about the series Star Trek: Picard. The continuing story of the Picard character and the introduction of new crew members Raffi, Rios, Agnes, Elnor, and Soji.