Reading Time: 3 minutes The Problem: According to the commandments of the major religions, God expects humans to have only a single lifelong romantic partner and to remain sexually faithful to them: “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). Yet, as any given week of tabloid headlines will tell you, humans aren’t naturally wired for monogamy. Even after we’re […]
thought experiments
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Reengineering Human Nature
Reading Time: 4 minutes “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” —Galatians 5:17 “In order to cure most of the ills of human life, I require not that man should have the wings of […]
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Designing the Afterlife
Reading Time: 5 minutes In his book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis puts a challenge to those who condemn the doctrine of Hell as immoral: “What are you asking God to do?” The apparent reasoning behind this question is that even those who think the idea of Hell is monstrous would be unable to come up with a […]
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How Big is the Library of Babel?
Reading Time: 5 minutes One of my favorite short-story authors is the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Many of his stories deal with mind-expanding themes, including “Blue Tigers”, about a handful of stones that do not obey the rules of mathematics, “The Book of Sand”, about a book with an infinite number of pages, and “The Aleph”, a point […]