Bruce Charlton's Notions

When I recently wrote a post musing on the possibility of quitting blogging, I received an extremely encouraging response from readers - som...

I have substantially revised, re-shaped and expanded my paper on the metaphysics of biology - and it is nearly ready for archiving on The Wi...

When it is complained that Christians don't really change for the better, or that Christianity is only for Sundays - what is perhaps bei...

God created the universe, we are God's children, and he loves us completely. God's greatest wish is that we should eventually grow...

Professor Richard Dawkins, and ex-chief-Orthodox Rabbi Jonathan Sacks are of similar age, social background, class and education: but the fi...

Swing is a particular rhythm which is very simple - yet not really. The rhythm is this: The Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris - Sweet...

When I went to medical school, my main interest in classical music was studying the piano literature. This was somewhat later for me than fo...

I came across Colin Wilson's The Outsider (first published 1956) at the age of nineteen, and was astonished and delighted to find for t...

Most people who advocate 'meditation' have in mind something which is undirected, often deliberately anti-purposive, often passive a...

Despair is usually denied as shameful and a refutation of one's life choices - but if the defiantly gay words are ignored and the behavi...

Two bits of evidence came to mind while thinking about Richard Adams's great fantasy novel Watership Down (1972) - the one about rabbit...

I regard theocracy as the only truly coherent (and best) form of government - by which I mean that all the various officially-approved aspec...

We can 'know about' something in a detached and observational way; but full knowledge of a thing entails experience of that thing, a...

Teleology (purpose) in biology is based on, requires, that reality be coherent, cooperative and complementary. This, in turn, requires that ...

Because they are not real scientists - or, at best, no longer real scientists - but merely successful bureaucrats of research. No real sci...

In a teleological (purposive) model of evolution I have inferred that there must be governing entities that shape evolution in order to over...

On reflection, I think that teleology must be of the nature of following a blueprint plus instructions - in other words, teleology entails a...

So... we approach the centenary of probably the worst year in the history of the Christian world. In the scale of its unleashed and still-...

Readers may have gathered that I am troubled by frequent, sustained migraines - these are always on the Left side; and indeed one-sided, sev...

First, read this article from 2001 - when I was essentially an adherent of New Age spirituality - it was published in Abraxas - a Colin Wil...

Thanks to everybody who commented yesterday - this generous response certainly inclines me to keep going a while longer with this blog: know...