Indederminacy and the Sublime in Nature — Smart people head for the basement when the tornado warning comes — whenever the threat is imminent. That’s what my mother always did, ushering my siblings and me down there to crouch against the wall and listen to the radio until the all-clear report came. I lingered upstairs once, hoping…

Yes indeed, we live in a mysterious universe. And while science informs our worldviews, expanding our knowledge of What-Is, that's not all there is to what any of us believes. Thanks for this thoughtful look into the matter.

Are we the architects of our own demise? — There is much talk these days about the balance of nature. Most conservationists and ecologists embrace the notion, believing that disruptions to the global ecosystem — the biosphere — is due largely to human interference. To remedy that, we should mend our ways. …

An excursion into the wildness within — I stepped off the logging road, pushing through a tangle of young spruce blocking the way, and felt my nerves loosen for the first time in months. Springtime verdure was abundant in the lowlands, but in the mountains the leaf buds of the trees were just opening. The chill of…

Where Camus got it wrong — I had everything figured out when I was 18 years old, or at least thought I did. Then I went off to college to study philosophy with a heavy emphasis on Existentialism. Several years later, I walked away with a degree in Nothingness. …

A Failed Yet Glorious Species — Sing praise for Homo sapiens, those magnificent, brainy primates! We bury the last of them today. May God rest their souls in peace. They were the last of a long line of hominins, outcompeting the rest. There has never been more powerful creatures on Earth. …

What is all this living and dying for, and how did it come about? — People I love are dying. That we are mortal creatures isn’t news to anyone, but it’s different somehow when death hits close to home. In recent years I’ve lost my parents, two boyhood friends, and other friends I’ve known for decades. There seems to be a flurry of death going…

Acknowledging the meta-physical world that we inhabit — Pantheists say that God and the universe are one and the same. No deity transcends the universe, they tell us but exists immanently within it. This makes sense from a naturalistic point of view. Nature is everywhere. Nature is the universe, and nothing exists beyond it. As a natural philosopher…

Contemplating the secrets of the deep — This is not what I had expected. When the last hint of the Maine coast fades into the mist, it seems like we have entered another dimension. The 65-foot boat that my wife and I boarded in Portland looked formidable back there. …