In Knowing the Unknowable God, David Burrell traces the intellectual intermingling of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions that made possible the medieval synthesis that served as the basis for Western theology. He shows how Aquinas's study of the Muslim philosopher Ibn-Sina and the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides affected the disciplined use of language when speaking of divinity and influenced his doctrine of God.
Albert Einstein once remarked that behind all observable things lay something quite unknowable. This book explores that special territory perceived by Einstein: where the unknown takes over from everything that is understandable, familiar, explicable
How can I know God if he is incomprehensible? Is it possible to know God in a way that takes seriously the fact that he is beyond knowledge? Steven Boyer and Christopher Hall argue that the "mystery of God" has a rightful place in theological discourse. They contend that considering divine incomprehensibility invites reverence and humility in our thinking and living as Christians and clarifies a variety of theological topics. The authors begin by investigating the biblical, historical, and practical foundations for understanding the mystery of God. They then spell out its implications for theological issues and practices such as the incarnation, salvation, and prayer, rooting knowledge of God in a concrete life of faith. Evangelical yet ecumenical, this book will appeal to theology students, pastors, church leaders, and all who want intellectual and practical guidance for knowing the unknowable God.
This essential companion to Chaitins highly successful The Limits of Mathematics, gives a brilliant historical survey of important work on the foundations of mathematics. The Unknowable is a very readable introduction to Chaitins ideas, and includes software (on the authors website) that will enable users to interact with the authors proofs. "Chaitins new book, The Unknowable, is a welcome addition to his oeuvre. In it he manages to bring his amazingly seminal insights to the attention of a much larger audience His work has deserved such treatment for a long time." JOHN ALLEN PAULOS, AUTHOR OF ONCE UPON A NUMBER
“A razor-smart sci-fi corporate noir nightmare. Dare to Know is what happens when Willy Loman sees through the Matrix. A heartbreaking, time-bending, galactic mindbender delivered in the mordantly funny clip of a doomed antihero.”—Daniel Kraus, co-author of The Shape of Water Now in paperback, this mind-bending and emotional speculative thriller is set in a world where the exact moment of your death can be predicted—for a price, featuring an excerpt from the upcoming Bride of the Tornado. Our narrator is the most talented salesperson at Dare to Know, an enigmatic company that has developed the technology to predict anyone’s death down to the second. Divorced, estranged from his sons, and broke, he's driven to violate the cardinal rule of the business by forecasting his own death day. The problem: his prediction says he died twenty-three minutes ago. The only person who can confirm its accuracy is Julia, the woman he loved and lost during his rise up the ranks of Dare to Know. As he travels across the country to see her, he’s forced to confront his past, the choices he's made, and the terrifying truth about the company he works for. Wildly ambitious and highly immersive, this thought-provoking thriller explores the destructive power of knowledge and collapses the boundaries between reality, myth, and conspiracy as it races toward its shocking conclusion.
It's What You Don't Know That Counts Discover the important roles chance and uncertainty play insuccessful strategic planning. In this ingenious work, author RalphD. Stacey shows managers how their companies can benefit from theunexpected developments that impact their business and how they canprepare to creatively leverage the opportunities such developmentspresent. He explains how an appreciation of conflict and teamdialogue can help managers discover and build on the innate energyof their organizations. And he illustrates his theories withreal-world examples from Sony, Kodak, Federal Express and othernoted market innovators.
While fulfilling his dead father's dream of creating a prosperous farm in California, Joseph Wayne comes to believe that a magnificent tree on the farm embodies his father's spirit. His brothers and their families share in Joseph's prosperity andthe farm flourishes - until one brother, scared by Joseph's pagan belief, kills the tree and brings disease and famine on the farm. Set in familiar Steinbeck country, TO A GOD UNKOWN is a mystical tale, exploring one man's attempt to control theforces of nature and to understand the ways of God.
A distillation of over seventy years as a monastic and more than three decades of writing on centering prayer, Reflections on the Unknowable is Fr. Thomas Keating’s latest volume on how we might develop our intimacy with God and our experience of the Christian contemplative tradition. The first part of the book consists of a long interview with Fr. Thomas, in which he examines concepts of the divine‐including the astonishments, playfulness, and transformation available to the individual willing to open the door to God. The second section consists of thirty-one brief homilies, which range over topics as diverse as the Trinity and the message of Epiphany, spiritual evolution and cultivating interior silence, and the treasure of spiritual poverty and the beauty of chaos.
Contemporary Jews often find meaning in Judaism's family and communal orientation, its beautiful rituals, its enriching culture, its sense of ethnic rootedness, and its moral values. For the classical Jewish tradition, however, all of these features of Judaism depend on a belief in God. Since many modern Jews do not know what to make of that belief, it is often ignored. They may be inspired by Judaism's high regard for education and its passion for justice, but their belief in God rests on childhood images of the Almighty. They are often embarrassed and uneasy, for they sense that their attachment to Judaism may be based upon intellectual quicksand. Motivated by just such feelings, Rabbi Elliot Dorff probes what we as adults can know about God through human reason, human and Divine words, and human and Divine action. Without assuming a background in philosophy, he skillfully takes us through some of the major philosophical options and conundrums in using each of these sources of knowledge about God and the images of God that result. With remarkable clarity and inspiring honesty, Rabbi Dorff's exploration results in a vibrant Jewish faith, one that takes due regard for both the emotional and intellectual sides of our being. Dorff's own personal quest, artfully woven throughout this spiritually uplifting volume, aids the reader to make his or her own Judaism emotionally satisfying and intellectually sound. The result is a Judaism that can be for the modern reader what it is for the author: the product of a love of God "with all one's heart, with all one's soul, and with all one's might."
Britain's most famous mathematician takes us to the edge of knowledge to show us what we cannot know. Is the universe infinite? Do we know what happened before the Big Bang? Where is human consciousness located in the brain? And are there more undiscovered particles out there, beyond the Higgs boson? In the modern world, science is king: weekly headlines proclaim the latest scientific breakthroughs and numerous mathematical problems, once indecipherable, have now been solved. But are there limits to what we can discover about our physical universe? In this very personal journey to the edges of knowledge, Marcus du Sautoy investigates how leading experts in fields from quantum physics and cosmology, to sensory perception and neuroscience, have articulated the current lie of the land. In doing so, he travels to the very boundaries of understanding, questioning contradictory stories and consulting cutting edge data. Is it possible that we will one day know everything? Or are there fields of research that will always lie beyond the bounds of human comprehension? And if so, how do we cope with living in a universe where there are things that will forever transcend our understanding? In What We Cannot Know, Marcus du Sautoy leads us on a thought-provoking expedition to the furthest reaches of modern science. Prepare to be taken to the edge of knowledge to find out if there's anything we truly cannot know.
