Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) deeply influenced the Vienna Circle, initially provided a philosophical foundation for their logical positivism. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and other logical positivists eagerly latched onto his assertion that language functions by picturing facts about the world, leading them to declare that any
Is the Word of Wisdom Growing Less Relevant? The Word of Wisdom is viewed by some as a cultural relic of a Church that once fretted over trivial issues like what kind of beverages were sinful. Too many have trivialized its message and purpose, seeing only the debate over a
talThe following first appeared in Public Square Magazine. To My Young Colleagues in Science, For much of the last several centuries, science and religion have been in apparent conflict. It was not always so. In the earliest days of modern history, scientific knowledge in the Western world often emanated from
With the seemingly never-ending sequence of misfortunes and disasters that fill the news, it takes only a cursory glance at the news headlines to evoke one’s interest in a book which promises a “science of the cross.”[1] What could such a science be, and might it offer some hope for
The Catholic tradition has much to say about the relation of science to the faith. In what follows I will discuss the development of that tradition, starting with its roots in Sacred Scripture and ending with some of the writings of St. John Paul II. A good place to start
In 2014 a group of biologists ran a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) DNA amplification on several biological samples to compare their genetic material to known control samples. There was nothing unusual about the procedure itself; it is used every day in laboratories throughout the world and is a staple of
Would religious thinkers in times before the Scientific Revolution ever have considered accepting the word of scientists over a plain reading of the Bible? Yes, they would have. And, in fact, they did. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin all took the words of astronomers over a plain