Saints and Science

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

What is not surrounded by uncertainty, cannot be the truth.

----Richard P. Feynman

We are always ready to watch a theory fall under the imapct of new data, but we do not expect a great and influential theory to collapse from logical error in its formulation. Virtually every empirical scientist has a touch of the Philistine. Scientists tend to ignore academic philosophy as an empty pursuit.

Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin p. 40

All who leave the earth go to the moon,” declared an Upanishad, an ancient Hindu text, “which is swollen by their breath during the first half of the month.” The Manichaean followers of the Persian sage Manes (A.D. 216?-276?) gave the moon a brilliant role in their mystic doctrines, and so compounded the doctrines of Zoroastrianism and Christianity into an appealing new sect that tempted many early Christians, including Saint Augustine. The moon takes a crescent shape, they explained, when it is being swelled by the luminous souls that it has drawn up from the earth. The moon wanes when it has transferred these souls to the sun. Every month the boat of the moon that sails across the skies takes on a new load of souls, which it regularly passes on to the larger vessel of the sun. The crescent moon, symbol of immortality, adorned funeral monuments of the ancient Babylonians and in Celtic countries, and across Africa. In republican Rome, the shoes of the senators were decorated with ivory crescents, taken as a symbol of their pure spirits, since noble souls after death were transported to the heavens, where they walk on the moon.

------ Daniel J. Boorstin
The Discoverers, “Charting Heaven & Hell”

Saints and Science

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Saint Gabriel: Annunciation to a Leaf Insect

On Mutation:

mouth slightly open

Saint Gabriel: Annunciation to a Leaf Insect