“University of Hawaii researcher Lou Herman ‘has proved that dolphins are capable of complex problem solving, demonstrating prodigious feats of learning, memory and creativity,’ reports Reader’s Digest. ‘One well-known anecdote involves a clever aquarium dolphin who was rewarded by his trainers for retrieving one piece of garbage after another. It turns out that, in order to maximize his fishy rewards, the dolphin had stashed an entire newspaper at the bottom of the tank and was tearing off one small piece at a time.’”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 12, 2012

“If chemicals had power of choice, it would be impossible to be certain that a chemical experiment would come off. If an acid ever prayed not to be led into temptation, chemistry would not be an exact science.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 19, 1913 quoted in Gilbert Magazine 9-10/08

“It is a pressing problem for a credible theology, second only to the problem of suffering, to give some satisfactory account of why the diversity of religious affirmations should not lead us to the conclusion that they are merely the expression of culturally determined opinions. Kenneth Cragg reminds us that even in the seventeenth century John Bunyan felt the difficulty. In Grace Abounding he wrote, ‘Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors and Pagans: and how if our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too?’ Of course, there is unquestionably a degree of cultural determination in our actual religious beliefs. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, rather than in England, it would be foolish to deny that the chances are I would be a Muslim. But the chances are also that I would not have spent most of my life as a theoretical physicist, but that does not mean that science is simply a cultural artefact. We must not commit the genetic fallacy of supposing that origin explains away the content of belief.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist

In my latest National Post column I ask whether Canadians will yet again excuse a pathetic performance by an elite institution because we are snobs.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say our political classes are reacting to inflation like a bird to a snake, paralyzed by approaching danger.

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