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Author Archives: Jon Garvey
The environment – random with respect to teleology
Here’s me with one of my main guitars. Even most non-guitarists will recognise it as a Fender Stratocaster (though mine is a Tokai copy), the most successful model of electric guitar ever made. It was released in 1954, and remains the worldwide market leader, pretty much in its original form. Even Fender’s “improvements” have proved unable to compete with the original post-war technology. To what can one attribute its 60 year dominance of a crowded market?
Posted in Creation, Science
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Keeping science and religion separate (not)
My attention was drawn to an article by philosopher of science Stephen Dilley, in which he examines just what a surprisingly prominent place is given to theological arguments in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. I must acknowledge upfront that I found the downloadable version of the article on Hump subscriber Ian Thompson’s Theism website, so he’s covered this issue already. But it does no harm to spread the information wider, I guess.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
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Creation and Evil
One of the baseline positions of The Hump of the Camel is the essential goodness of creation both before and after the fall of mankind into sin. I’ve probably written on it too many times to do useful links (try the search box), but I’ve argued for it from the Bible, extensively from church history and in other ways too. Carnivores, parasites – all come within the wisdom of God’s good creation. At the same time, I’ve never wished to deny that, in numerous ways, sin has corrupted creation in God’s eyes, and damaged it both directly and indirectly. Whether by God’s judgement or man’s corruption there are aspects of creation that … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology, Theology
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The Nature of the Physical World
One of the great mysteries of modern life is why materialism as a philosophy refuses to lie down and die. Ted Davis on BioLogos pointed out recently that the modernist Samuel Schmucker believed in 1920 that Victorian science had discredited materialism. I’ve just completed a series of reviews in which mathematician and philosopher William Dembski argues that present knowledge of the nature of information has done the same. Today I want to address the book by astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British “father” and expositor of both relativity and quantum theory, from the 1927 Gifford lectures.
Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology
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Premonitions and materialism
Last Friday night I had a rather vivid dream in which half my back tooth fell out, which was annoying. I should have woken up then, because the dream went on to include the front of my head falling off too – or rather, the painless falling-off of some extraneous bony extensions to my skull, which looked very interesting on the dream X-rays. It’s astonishing how dreams can ignore even the most basic aspects of reality. It was a surprise to look in a mirror and see some stranger’s face staring back at me – you’d have thought that was a fairly core aspect of identity. But that’s dreams for … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science
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Conservation of information, evolution, etc
Since William Dembski’s Being as Communion is released in the USA today, I’ll make this post the last in the series. To be honest, I’m a bit hesitant to comment on the culmination of the book, since it deals with his Law of Conservation of Information, on which he has published stuff before and received the usual criticism (that is, usually, ideologically-motivated dismissal).
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Dembski on chance and necessity
William Demski’s two chapters on Determinism (short) and Contingency and Chance (longer) are useful in delineating ideas often used loosely, and the latter in particular presents some very helpful ideas.
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Dembski on getting information into the Universe
I shall pass over the chapter in Being as Communion in which Dembski applies his informational metaphysics to “energy”, except to say that it attempts to consider information as a dynamic, relational thing rather than as something static. In chapter 14 he demonstrates how the universe is not a system closed to information, even if it is insisted that conservation of energy be maintained. And this applies whether the physical nature of the universe is seen as indeterminate or deterministic.
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Information as the foundation of metaphysics – and science
The next three chapters of Being as Communion are really the centre of the book as far as arguing for its subtitle – “A Metaphysics of Information” – is concerned. So what’s wrong with matter as the foundation for understanding the physical world? Briefly, matter cannot give a complete account of information, and matter itself can only be inferred from the informational “signatures” of the particular forms it takes. Information explains matter, but not vice versa. Ergo information is prior.
Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology
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Dembski on natural teleological laws
The 9th chapter of Being as Communion is important (in my view) because it brings his ideas into conjunction with two apparently disparate thinkers: the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel and the Christian palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris, neither of whom are of course associated with IDM.
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