Religion, Science and God

Father Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016) was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1954, and served as an Exorcist of the Diocese of Rome from June 1986, at first under the supervision of  Candido Amantini , and subsequently as Chief Exorcist of the Diocese (the 'Pope's Exorcist'). He has been portrayed by the actor Russell Crowe in the film, The Pope's Exorcist  (2023). Amorth, with five other Catholic priests, co-founded the  Associazione internazionale degli esorcisti , the  International Association of Exorcists, in 1990, and it was formally recognised by the Roman Catholic Church in 2014. Besides claiming, inter alia , that yoga and the Harry Potter books are the work of the Devil, and that participating in the former and reading the latter will result in eternal damnation for those doing so, the late Father Amorth claimed to have performed no fewer than 160,000 exorcisms during the course of his career. This claim was made in May 2013, according to the Huffington Post (

It was the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Protagoras ( c. 490- c. 420 BCE), numbered among the 'Sophists' by Plato, who coined the phrase 'Man is the measure of all things', taken up enthusiastically by the Renaissance humanists. Plato believed him to be denying the existence of objective truth, and this is borne out when one examines the Protagoras quotation in full: 'Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.' The Greek version of this reads: ' pant ōn chr ēmat ōn metron estin anthrōpos, tōn men ontōn hōs estin, tōn de ouk ontōn hōs ouk estin. '   A rather less sexist English translation would read: 'Humans are the measure of all things: of the things that exist, and of the things that don't.' This is the idea that reality is purely subjective, and that whatever appears to be the case for any given individual is true for that person. So, if the weather is cold fo

I only mentioned this fact in passing in my last blog post, about Satan (the Adversary, in Hebrew), aka Lucifer in Latin, or Phōsphoros in Greek, both names meaning 'Light-Bringer', also being Venus, or Aphroditē, the Roman and Greek goddesses of love, and Astartē, their Phoenician equivalent, which I didn't mention. Lucifer, the Morning Star, as male, is the brother of Vesper, the Evening Star, and the son of Aurora, the Dawn, and Cephalus, meaning 'Head'. That's the Roman version of the story. The Greek version is that E ōsphoros, the 'Dawn-Bringer', Ph ōsphoros' other name, is the son of  Ē ōs, 'Dawn', and Kephalos, 'Head', an Aeolian prince she had kidnapped because she'd taken a fancy to him, forcing him to be her lover. Hesperos (Latinised as Hesperus), the Evening Star, is his brother. Astronomically, of course, the Morning and Evening Stars are identical, and neither of them are 'stars' at all, but the planet Venus

In the Christian mythology, Satan (Hebrew, 'Adversary') is an Archangel, originally Lucifer (Latin), Phōsphoros (Greek), Helēl (Hebrew), meaning 'Light-bringer'. Because of his pride - his hubris - he and his followers, a third of all the angels in Heaven, fell, and are now condemned to suffer the torments of Hell forever. He, and they, are determined to ensure that as many humans as possible share their miserable fate, in order to spite their Creator. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, or Jewish Bible (the Tanakh ), the Septuagint (LXX), renders part of Isaiah 14:12 referring to Satan as ' ho he ōsphoros ho pr ōi ', the Morning Star, also identified with the Evening Star and the planet Venus, which to the Romans was, of course, a goddess, that of love, equated with Greek Aphrodit ē. Let us now unpack this: we are to suppose that an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator God, endowed with absolutely infallible foreknowledge, created Satan an

I'm currently writing a paper on what's called the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. This was first proposed, as the name implies, by an Islamic theologian and philosopher,  Abû Hâmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazâlî (1055/6-1111), see: Frank Giffel (2020) . rather more recently, the argument has been defended by (among others, but most prominently) W.L. Craig and Andrew Loke . The argument may be expressed as a syllogism, thus: (1) The Universe had a beginning; (2) Everything that has a beginning has a cause; (3) Therefore, the Universe had a cause. My own version of the argument is a bit different: (1) The Universe exists; (2) The Universe had a beginning, and will have an end. (3) Everything that exists, and has a beginning and an end has a cause; (4) Therefore, the Universe has a cause. I argue that infinite temporal and causal regresses and progresses are both impossible, and that physical infinities (as opposed to conceptual or mathematical ones) are

Paul R Ehrlich wrote his paper, 'Has the Biological Species Concept Outlived Its Usefulness' in December 1961, publishing it in the pages of Systematic Zoology , 10(4):167-176 (DOI: 10.2307/241164). The concept was supposedly decisively refuted by Sokal and Crovello in 1970 (Sokal, R.R. & Crovello, T.J., 'The Biological Species Concept: A Critical Evaluation,' The American Naturalist , 104(936):127-153 , March-April 1970). The biological species concept (hereinafter BSC) was developed by the Russo-American geneticist, Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky (1900-75) in 1935 ('A Critique of the Species Concept in Biology,' Philosophy of Science , 2(3):344-355 , DOI: 10.1086/286379) and developed by the German biologist Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) in (e.g.) his Systematics and Origin of Species , New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1942, and defended in Chapter 2, ' The biological species concept ', of Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate ,