"Admit the existence of a God, of a personal God, and the possibility of miracles follows at once." G. G. Stokes
At any given stage of scientific explanation, one cannot rule out all alternative assumptions by scientific theory alone.
Even self-evident principles are known only by abstracting from the sensible.
Translation inevitably diversifies interpretations, involving as it does interpretive choices.
We use qualities to determine quantities.
Understanding is an imitation of heaven.
The Church is the extension of Christ as both historical and heavenly.
"...the use of paradox is to awaken the mind." Chesterton
As it is easier to be an official than a scientist, official scientists slide toward being more officious and less scientific.
It is science as hard, tedious work that makes discoveries, but science as flashy rhetoric that collects the grants.
the romance of conscience
"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head." Chesterton
"Marriage is the institution which most requires a sense of reality.
Jeremiah 4:29 & Job 30:6 use 'keph' rather than the usual 'sur' for rocks; note that in both cases the context is about last-resort shelter.
there is one thing that you must know,
though you know it as you cry:
for the things that make life good to live
sometimes good men must die
gird up your loins, inflame your heart,
exhort your weary feet;
sometimes an evil worse than death
is the evil of defeat
"A sentence is too long either when length makes it obscure or unpronounceable, or else when the matter is too little to fill it." C. S. Lewis
The problem with Lyotard's account of the postmodern is that postmodernism is responsible for an explosion of metanarratives, metanarratives everywhere and multiplying like rabbits.
Jaki's argument for the universe (from Limits)
"...any totality, as a form of perfection, is really and consistently understood only insofar as it is set aganist a larger, more inclusive totality. But this again is subject to the same restriction.... As a result one may conclude that the sensory understanding or grasp of any totality depends ultimately on the reality of its supreme kind, which is the universe. Only this way can regress to infinity be avoided."
"Even as there is no branch of knowledge from which exact science is wholly excluded, so it would seem there is no branch which exact science wholly covers." Eddington
The brain has different functions depending on the system within which one considers it.
The scientific outlook is (deliberately) a never-ending tangle of riddles.
To say that Christ is King is to say that He is font of law, font of justice, font of mercy, font of honors.
"Great subjects do not make great poems; usually, indeed, the reverse." C. S. Lewis
While Bunyan gives us strict allegory, Spenser gives us loose allegory, something often ambiguous between allegory and allusion. Bunyan is describing an experience in personated terms; Spenser is narrating representative characters with a thematic meaning.
The difference between classical and neoclassical is the difference between genius and method.
passion, mood, season, climate
Sometimes a hug is next door to a prayer.
"The world-edifice puts one into quiet astonishment by its immeasurable greatness and by the infinite manifoldness and beauty which shine forth from it on all sides. If now...the presentation of all this perfection excites the imagination, on the other side another kind of enthralment seizes the understanding when it considers how so much splendor, so much greatness flows from a single universal rule with an eternal and right order." Immanuel Kant
"In the universal quiet of nature and in the tranquillity of mind there speaks the hidden capacity for knowledge of the immortal soul in unspecifiable language and offers undeveloped concepts that can be grasped but not described."
As the son of a Jewish woman, circumcised and presented in the Temple, Jesus is by blood, by nationality, by covenant, and by sacred sign a Jew.
Demythologizers are almost always transmythologizers; they strip away one to replace it with another.
States tend to fiscalize due services over time, converting service obligations to the state into sources of revenue.
"Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science." Einstein
"All philosophies survive by the metaphysical truth which they contain." Gilson
Places and times are only equivalent as the possible means of measuring them allow them to be.
Experimentation is socially structured by rituals that facilitate communication and cooperation.
Scientific inquiry is limited by the bounds of integrity of the inquirer.
transcendental arguments as arguments from final causes
authorial persona -> narrative voice -> lectoral impression
In the long run, activism can only bargain with either noncooperation or violence.
People treat their invention of new sins as proof of their moral progress.
"Assent is the acceptance of truth and truth is the proper object of the intellect." Newman
"Personality is always transcendent in relation to process." William Temple
Which social facts are relevant to laws depends on laws and other obligations.
Because we wonder, God exists.
"History is philosophy drawn from examples." Dionysius of Halicarnassus (De arte rhetorica 11.2)
