"The Acts of the Apostles provides evidence that Christian proclamation was engaged from the very first with the philosophical currents of the time. In Athens, we read, Saint Paul entered into discussion with 'certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers' (17:18); and exegetical analysis of his speech at the Areopagus has revealed frequent allusions to popular beliefs deriving for the most part from Stoicism. This is by no means accidental. If pagans were to understand them, the first Christians could not refer only to 'Moses and the prophets' when they spoke. They had to point as well to natural knowledge of God and to the voice of conscience in every human being (cf. Rom 1:19-21; 2:14-15; Acts 14:16-17). Since in pagan religion this natural knowledge had lapsed into idolatry (cf. Rom 1:21-32), the Apostle judged it wiser in his speech to make the link with the thinking of the philosophers, who had always set in opposition to the myths and mystery cults notions more respectful of divine transcendence." -- Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Master's Thesis


For anyone who might be interested, my master's thesis has now been published and is accessible HERE.

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Sunday, January 7, 2024

Biblical Cryptography: The Atbash Cipher

Cryptography is the art and science of secure and private communications. Very simply put, the main idea is for a sender (call her Alice) to take a message, turn it into nonsense, and send it to a receiver (call him Bob). Upon receiving the nonsense message from Alice, Bob turns it back into the original message so that he can read it. An eavesdropper (call her Eve) who might intercept the nonsense message should be unable to turn it back into the original message. The process of turning a message into nonsense is called encryption, and the process of turning nonsense back into a message is called decryption. Thus, Alice encrypts a message and sends it to Bob, and Bob decrypts the message and reads it. Eve is (ideally) unable to decrypt the message even if she intercepts it.

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Infallible Epistemic Agents

In some of my (somewhat experimental) posts (such as HERE , HERE , and HERE ), I play rather fast and loose with the concept of 'infalli...