In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there’s a stark divide in Canada and throughout the West, vividly on display over the truckers’ convoy, between those who favour plain reasoning and those who like their logic ornate, dazzling and convoluted.
“We cannot begin by forming independently a theory of how God is knowable and then seek to test it out or indeed to actualize it and fill it with material content. How God can be known must be determined from first to last by the way in which He actually is known.”
Thomas Torrance in 1969, quoted approvingly in John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room…. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.”
C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask whether the shock of Russia invading Ukraine, and the mostly commendable Western response, will make Canadians and their governments more serious about defence spending and therefore about budgeting generally.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the real danger facing Canada isn’t tyranny but anarchy, with governments full of meddlesome ambition so lost in make-believe they freeze facing real-world problems.
“We cannot begin by forming independently a theory of how God is knowable and then seek to test it out or indeed to actualize it and fill it with material content. How God can be known must be determined from first to last by the way in which He actually is known.”
Thomas Torrance, quoted in John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
In my latest National Post column I ask how I, of all people, could be a lonely voice of balanced reason on the truckers’ protests.
“You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity be… a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over again. But if Christianity should happen to be true – that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe – then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News December 12, 1903 , quoted in Dale Ahlquist and Peter Floriani Chesterton University Student Handbook