Questions from the Unsettled Mind

Something extremely advanced has been entering our skies, and that much is well documented. The open question is what, and the serious candidates are stranger and more various than the usual alien story.

In this episode:

• Leslie Kean's UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, and why the phenomena themselves are not in dispute

• The alien hypothesis, and the assumption buried inside it that a visitor would be interested in us at all

• Why a cover-up might be motivated by impotence or by instruction rather than by conspiracy, and how populations adapt - occupied France, Viking-raided England

• France publicly acknowledging and studying the problem while the United States does not

• Earth-based alternatives: a hidden advanced race, another dimension, time travellers, or a Captain Nemo with a Nautilus

• The demonic possibility: telepathy in close-encounter reports, and the curious absence of any alien interest in Judaism or Christianity

• C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, and why the Incarnation might mean rational material agency is now permanently housed in human nature

Mentioned: Leslie Kean · C. S. Lewis, the Space Trilogy · Jules Verne's Nautilus

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels. The famous nine-rung ladder comes from one early writer, and it does not survive contact with St Michael.

In this episode:

• Why there are no angelic species: two angels differ more than a squirrel differs from a caterpillar

• No equality among angels, only a metaphysical hierarchy of power - more an army than a family

• Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite's parallelism: nine titles matched to nine ranks, in triads facing God, man, and the space between

• The first crack: the assumption that each angel is given exactly one job

• The St Michael problem - an Archangel by title, yet fighting Satan before humanity existed, and called a Prince in Daniel

• The alien who learns nine human occupations and concludes he now understands the species

• What can safely be inferred instead: arche means command, and Thrones, Dominions and Principalities are names of authority

Mentioned: Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite · St Michael · Daniel · 1 Corinthians 11:10

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Psychiatry accounts for much of what used to be called possession, Hollywood has made the rest ridiculous, and nobody enjoys the thought that we are not at the top of the food chain. None of that is an argument.

In this episode:

• Why the popular case against demons assumes its conclusion instead of arguing for it

• Clearing away the winged toddlers: angels as incorporeal substances, older than the universe, and not essentially physical at all

• Why "god" in the ancient sense meant a disembodied being, and why Lucifer is still an angel by nature even as a demon

• The gap in creation: God filled every other category, so an empty one for finite living incorporeal minds would be strange

• What evidence is actually available - Roman and Persian art, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and present-day paranormal reports

• Jesus as an unimpeachable witness, including the legions of angels he told Pilate he could call, and why he does not bluff

• The angelic choice made all at once, Lucifer's rebellion, and why a third of them answer to a different name now

Mentioned: Lucifer and St Michael · the Annunciation · Pontius Pilate

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

At Pentecost the Apostles spoke real, identifiable human languages, and pilgrims from across the world heard their own. What happens in modern tongues-speaking is not that, and the usual defence appeals to the language of angels.

In this episode:

• Pentecost itself: the rushing noise, the divided tongues of fire, and Galileans heard in every native tongue

• Why the gift functioned as a sign, falling first on Jews, then half-Jews, then Gentiles, ratifying the Church's universality

• St Paul's correction at Corinth: vanity, speakers talking over one another, and five intelligible words preferred to ten thousand foreign ones

• Joel's prophecy, and why the entire age of the Church counts as the "last days"

• St Augustine reporting that the gift had already ceased, and the blind man healed at Milan as the kind of thing that still happens

• The re-emergence among obscure sects, then the Mormons, then Pentecostalism, and the fact that the speech mimics the speaker's own native cadence

• Why there are no angelic languages at all: angels are pure minds, their tongue is telepathy, and 1 Corinthians 13 cannot bear the weight put on it

Mentioned: Acts 2 · the prophet Joel · 1 Corinthians 13 and 14 · St Augustine · the Annunciation

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Genesis says God made man in his image, and nearly everyone assumes that means our rationality. But the angels are rational too, so that cannot be what sets us apart.

In this episode:

• Aristotle's rationality - acting from inner reasons rather than outer causes - and why it separates us from animals but not from angels

• Discursive intellect against angelic intellect: why we draw conclusions across time and they do not

• Flipping the question: what we share with animals and not with angels, namely that we beget

• Divine begetting within the Trinity, and how human begetting uniquely merges spirit and matter

• Why human nature was prepared as God's image all along, making redemption restoration rather than re-creation

• Theosis: St Athanasius coined it, what it means for the species and for the individual, and why making a saint does not unmake the man

• "Male and female made he them" - why marriage, not the solitary individual, images a God who is many persons in one substance

Mentioned: Genesis 1 · Aristotle · St Athanasius and theosis · St Peter on partakers of the divine nature · the Church as the Bride of Christ

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

If God already knew yesterday what you will do tomorrow, it can seem settled before you arrive. That is the fatalist's argument, and the whole of it rests on one unexamined assumption about where God is.

In this episode:

• The argument from foreknowledge set out plainly, and why theologians following Calvin find it useful

• The hidden move: inserting God into the timeline as though he were one more creature inside it

• Why God has to exist logically prior to space and time, since both begin together

• Boethius on picturing time as a spiral with God at the core, seeing every point at once

• God's "now" is always - at the burning bush, at the furnace with Daniel's three friends, at the cross, and twenty years from now

• Why seeing an act does not cause it, and why we could as accurately say God "pastknows"

• Reading Romans 8 through Romans 1, and why predestination is commitment to a choice God sees rather than one he compels

Mentioned: John Calvin · Boethius · Romans 1 and Romans 8 · the cosmological argument

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

A child asks whether she will ever see Fido again, and some parents answer no and call it facing reality. The three reasons usually given for that answer are all bad ones, and the third is the worst.

In this episode:

• The "animals have no souls" argument, and why the conclusion simply does not follow from the premises

• The doubt hiding underneath it: whether God is actually able to recreate a thing exactly as it was

• Why heaven is not a bodiless realm of consciousness - rooms and mansions, Enoch, Elijah and Mary, a seated Christ, and a city descending to a new Earth

• The "it isn't in the Bible" objection, and why not everything that is true had to be put there

• The parent who tells a child to grow up and detach, and why that is Stoicism rather than Christianity

• Morel mushrooms, coffee and the aesthetics of the whole planet, and what the resurrection of the body implies about them

• The answer, which is short: yes, if you love them

Mentioned: Enoch, Elijah and Mary · St Peter on the new heavens and new earth · the new Jerusalem in Revelation · Stoicism

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Jim Jones, Applewhite, David Koresh. Charlatans always talk about faith, and they always want yours. The earliest Christian writers insisted that we test such claims. This episode is about how.

In this episode:

• Hebrews 11: faith as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen, and why that makes faith rational

• The crucial distinction between judging a message you cannot verify and judging the messenger who brings it

• Gideon's test in Judges 6, and why asking God for evidence was not a failure of faith

• Jesus and the paralytic: a healing offered precisely as proof of authority to forgive

• Moses before Israel and before Egypt, and why God supplied signs at all

• The miracle cluster: why God authenticates his messengers heavily, publicly, and more than once

• What cult leaders demand instead, and why faith in the messenger is the beginning of tyranny

Mentioned: Hebrews 11 · Gideon in Judges 6 · Matthew 9 · Exodus and the ten plagues · Jim Jones and David Koresh

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Many people take it for granted that science and religion are incompatible. Is that a finding of science, or an assumption brought to it?

In this episode:

• Physicalism as an assumption smuggled in, and why no empirical science actually requires it

• What religion studies: human nature, the soul, God, angels, sin, redemption, hope and justice

• The classical definition of a science, and why religion and ethics both qualify

• Aristotle's distinction between sciences and arts, and why each discipline contains some of both

• Whether the natural sciences disprove religious claims, or merely make them unnecessary

• Weeping statues, near-death experience, and what ought to count as evidence

• The rational arguments for God's existence that most people never actually meet

Mentioned: physicalism · Aristotle on science and art · near-death experiences

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Aristotle said truth is saying of what is, that it is. Today people speak instead of "my truth". Both cannot be right, and the difference matters more than it sounds.

In this episode:

• The correspondence account of truth, and what "true to me" actually adds to "I believe"

• Pilate's sneer, and why Jesus did not bother answering it

• Why nobody speaks of subjective truth in physics, chemistry, engineering or medicine

• Moral and religious claims as assertions about the real world, whether or not we like where they lead

• Speaking things into existence, and who alone is able to do it

• The man standing on the railway track, and why his convictions do not alter the steel

• Why a properly ordered mind wants true beliefs rather than comfortable ones

Mentioned: Aristotle · Pontius Pilate

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.