Can the Brain Explain Art?
What is happening in our brains when we perceive and appreciate the arts? What are the neural substrates of artistic sensations, feelings and emotions? How do diverse arts affect the brain?
What are Breakthroughs in Physics?
Season 20
Art Seeking Understanding: Art delights us, but how and why? Explore art and cognitive science, philosophy, history, theology, and more.
Salvation – A Philosophical Inquiry
It’s intended as ultimate purpose: salvation means eternal life with God. For believers, what actually happens, what kind of life? For non-believers, what can we learn about how religion works?
Atonement – A Philosophical Inquiry
Can atonement absolve sin? For believers, how could The Atonement work? What’s the process? For non-believers, what does The Atonement say about the kind of God that supposedly designed it?
The Incarnation – A Philosophical Inquiry
It’s a staggering idea: God became flesh. Why would the Creator become human? For believers, how could Divine and Human natures interact? For non-believers, how do beliefs reflect the psyche?
The Trinity – A Philosophical Inquiry
It seems the ultimate riddle: How could One God be Three Persons? How could One be Three? Or Three be One? And why three? Non-believers and believers can both enjoy the logic and linguistics.
Jesus as God – A Philosophical Inquiry
Why the astonishing claim that Jesus is God? Not like God. Not representing God. But literally God? One need not be a Christian, or even a theist, to appreciate the arguments.
Epistemology: How Can We Know God?
Can humans have knowledge of God? Between humans and God, between finite and infinite, there seems an unbridgeable gap. So what can it mean to “know God”? There are multiple meanings.
Why Anything at All II?
It’s the ultimate puzzle. It’s the haunting question. Why is there “something” rather than “nothing”? It seems impenetrable, uncrackable, unfathomable. But are there ways?
What Exists II?
What’s the ultimate stuff of reality? What’s absolutely fundamental and non-reducible — the fewest number of categories within which every specific thing, of every general kind, can be classified?
What’s Strong Emergence?
Here’s the claim: each level of the scientific hierarchy — physics, chemistry, biology, psychology — has its own special laws that can never be explained by deeper laws (physics). How can this be?