I was discussing the basis of religion with a friend at a party. He is a serious theologian and a born again Christian. When the subject of existence of God came up, my friend said that the best argument was made by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his “The Five Ways”. I decided that it is best to go to the source and evaluate it.

St. Thomas was a pretty good logician, but the unscientific and erroneous beliefs held in his time makes many of his conclusions irrelevant now that we know the universe better. St. Thomas used the knowledge of the ancients, mainly that of of Aristotle to form his worldview. He did not have the benefit of modern science. The discoveries of DesCartes, Bacon, Newton, Einstein and other modern thinkers and experimenters had not been made.

One of St. Thomas’ most important theses in Summa Theologica is The Five Ways – considered by some as a conclusive proof of the existence of God. (more…)

The mind is often thought of as a continuously operating “machine” handling all the inputs and giving all the outputs that are part of our daily experience. I have come to the conclusion that our minds are more like the SETI@home project than a Cray Supercomputer. Each of the things that must be processed, whether it is your homework, lunch, breathing, interpersonal relationships, driving a car, Mozart, walking or philosophy are processed by a part of your nervious system working in teams or semi-independently on the particular task at hand.

These different processes are coupled more or less closely by the neurological connections formed by habit. It is likely that you will solve similar problems in ways that are similar those that were sucessful before. The brain’s “wiring” is connected by experience. There is obviously a lot of “wiring” that comes from instinct, and probably from “race memory” where your ancestor’s successes in solving certain problems effected the morphology and ease of developing the same “circuits” as your grandparents’.

(more…)