What is Freedom? According to Stephen Hawking in The Grand Design…

What is Freedom? According to Stephen Hawking in The Grand Design it would need a knowledge of the initial state each of the thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body to predict human behaviour, so, for all practical purposes,...

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Every realm of nature is marvellous: and as Heraclitus…

‘Every realm of nature is marvellous: and as Heraclitus,  when the strangers  who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and hesitated to go in, is reported to have bidden them not...

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Shostakovich 5 at the Albert Hall

Shostakovich 5 at the Proms From the very first bars you knew that you were in the presence of an extraordinarily great piece of music.  When it was first performed in Leningrad at the height of the Stalinist purges of...

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The last thing any Australian would want is poms feeling sorry for them…

The last thing any Australian would want is poms feeling sorry for them.  But we should thank our lucky stars that but for the most atrocious luck imagineable they would have won the ashes.  At Trent Bridge,  but for...

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The Assumption. If not falling asleep to trumpets on a golden divan bed then what?

The Assumption. What are we to make of this feast?  There could hardly be any doctrine more likely to arouse the contemptuous mirth of atheists than the idea of Our Lady not dying but falling asleep and being transported directly...

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Catholic means universal and it is a tragedy that in a world where

Catholic means universal and it is a tragedy that in a world where the majority of climate scientists (no problem mate, the scientists are divided, I read it in the newspapers) are telling us that humanity is facing a...

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The creed by which many atheists live often goes something like…

The Atheist Myth The creed by which many atheists live often goes something like this: before science people could neither understand the mysteries of the universe nor control its hazards, so they invented gods to explain the mysteries and, by...

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Pants & socks won’t save the world but…

The theory was that oil would peak by 2014 and renewables come into their own, thus saving the world from global warming.   It was a myth.  More oil has been discovered in the US in the last two years...

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Evolution works because when the environment changes those members…

Evolution works because when the environment changes those members of a species with the genes best suited to the new conditions survive.  But often these changes are sudden and extreme.  Is it likely that, at every one of the...

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One strand in Dante’s allegory is that theology….

One strand in Dante’s allegory is that Beatrice stands for theology.  So often the great mystical writers tell us that contemplation is intensely erotic.  Theology is its love song.  But how often is it no more than the parchment...

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