The topic of marriage has been on my mind quite a bit as of late. My fiancée and I are in the midst of our wedding (and marriage) planning. We just sent out the cards announcing date and time (so save the date!), and I've been discussing suits with my groomsmen. She's changed her bridesmaids' outfits a couple of times (making picking the aforementioned suits a bit more difficult), and has been meeting with her tailor to make the wedding gown. Today my fiancée and I begin our marriage preparation classes, and last night was the first of three NFP classes. We've even found a little time to read up on some materials and go to a few extra talks to prepare us for marriage: Fulton Sheen, John Paul the Great, Christopher West, and even a few discussions with the local priest.

All of this has caused me to think a bit about the theology which underlies marriage, especially in light of the high divorce rates. There are many people who believe that marriage ought not to be necessarily permanent, and others who want theirs to be permanent, but excuse failed marriages by saying "Too bad, so sad," but then turn around and complain about the Church's teaching against "remarriage" after a divorce.

Chesterton once remarked that a heretic is unable to truly have an original thought. His point was that the heretic was too busy tearing down to ever really build up, and it's certainly a good point to consider. In my own experience, however, the heretic's problem is not that he never has an original thought, but rather that once he has that singular thought he can think of nothing else.

How much do we take "on faith" in our everyday lives? This question arose in my mind yesterday as I sat through a colleague's talk in my research group's meeting. He was talking about a phenomenon which has been named "optical bullets," and I began to wonder why these are scientifically interesting. The talk in question is to be delivered at the upcoming meeting for the American Physics Society's Division of Plasma Physics. Though I wondered about the importance of optical bullets, I next came to realize that they must be interesting if for no other reason than that Professor Downer was interested in them. In other words, I can place trust in their importance, because a prominent member of the scientific community is also interested in them.

Last night I walked in to a conversation between two of my office mates. I usually pay loose attention to what they talk about and sometimes even join the conversations, especially if it gives me an excuse to take a break from working on physics homework (or simulations, or theory work, or any kind of tedious calculation). In any case, one of the post-docs remarked to on of the graduate students that it's amazing how much we think we can know about history from the barest of samples. We see a court document or an official state (or Church) summons, or the surviving remnant of a letter between friends, and then try to convince ourselves that we know what life was like during that era.

“When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

So wrote the ever-witty writer G.K. Chesterton, the apostle of common-sense and prophet of the century to come. As men turn increasingly away from belief in a supernatural God, they are increasingly places their trust in the natural sciences, and particularly in physics. Physics is, after all, the basis for most of the other natural sciences, for it is the laws of physics which govern the motions and even formations of the stars in the cosmos and the rate of reaction amongst molecules; and in turn these may govern biology and geology, and the atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Indeed, physics is the most exact of the sciences, perhaps because it is the most exactly mathematical; as such, it has no limits amongst the things with material, quantifiable properties.

The late scientist-philosopher Stanley L Jaki once remarked that philosophically speaking, the second most difficult word to grasp is nothing. Every living person has some concept of nothing, though those concepts may vary a little. The idea is certainly a vague one, not easily pinned down; it is certainly difficult to describe in terms of materialism and the rigid formalism of mathematics.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object? Or more properly phrased, what happens when an unstoppable object collides with an unmovable object? This question seems like a bit of a logical stumper, until one realizes that it is sheer nonsense. An unmovable object and an unstoppable force cannot simultaneously exist. Within in the bounds of the laws of physics and of mathematics, neither object can exist, for an unmovable object would necessitate an infinite amount of inertia, and thus infinite mass; and an unstoppable object must have an infinite amount of momentum, which is possible only if the object has infinite mass or is traveling with a speed of c, that is, at the same speed as light traveling in a vacuum.

Growing up on a farm, I learned from an early age to avoid the dark and cool places under our barn and house: here there be dragons, or at least killer spiders. My parents both took great care in telling all three of us to avoid these places, and to avoid especially the spider webs woven there--for here there lived the infamous black widows, black as witches' hats and marked with the devil's own timepiece. We avoided these dark places as if our lives depended upon it--for these spiders are quite poisonous, especially to children.

When St Thomas Aquinas addressed the question of God's existence he could think of only two arguments against his position. On of those arguments was more against the ability of humans to know for certain that God exists, and thee other was the problem of evil (or suffering). Fast forward through the centuries to today, and modern atheists have added little to the problem of evil; at times, they have split suffering and evil into two categories, though generally suffering is classified as a form of evil; and occasionally attempts have been made to refute this or that argument for the existence of God (though a great many of these have been circular at best). Even the "scientific atheists," from Darwin to Russell to Weinberg, Dawkins, and the other "New Atheists" have based their atheism not on science but on the problem of evil.