Author Archives: Jon Garvey

The conversation on the BioLogos thread I mentioned previously has continued, with Catholic Thomist biologist Mary B Moritz taking the part of Neil Ormerod, the original author. From her writing she takes a line that seems to be the commonest amongst Thomists interested in evolution (such as Ed Feser), pointing specifically to the allegedly simplistic shortcomings of Intelligent Design, but having no problems to speak of with the Neodarwinian scientific model. I’m commenting here, rather than on BioLogos, which would be appropriate, simply because of space.

There’s an article on BioLogos,  about divine contingency, by Neil Ormerod, based on Thomas Aquinas’ teaching. I’ve commented there, partly supportively but also with some criticisms, particularly on the article’s targeting Intelligent Design (largely inappropriately) and glossing over what would be far more approppriate criticisms of modern theistic evolution. First remove the beam from your own eye… To be honest, compared to the relative straightforwordness of Aquinas’ own writing, I found it a little hard to comprehend what picture of the world the article was painting, and in particular what idea of chance itself, which in the article was most often referred to as “genuine contingency.” So I’ll look at … Continue reading →

A piece by Michael Egnor in Evolution News and Views reviews a paper by Benjamin Libet about his work on the neurophysiology of intentional action. Libet’s is the famous work that showed, in an experimental setting, that an unconscious “readiness potential” precedes the conscious act of willing by some 350-400ms, and that in turn precedes action potentials in motor nerves by 200ms.

My brother likes to be useful to the world by participating in BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) projects, in which the computing power of the broad masses is used for processor-heavy tasks like screening data from the SETI program (a hiding to nothing) or testing climate change models (potentially immensely valuable). When I was visiting him recently, I displaced the BOINC screen-saver in order to check the news, and found an item purporting to have mathematical evidence that the universe is a hologram. The idea of the cosmos as an illusion (of what, for whom?) is a common conceit, usually in the form of its being a computer … Continue reading →

In a previous article I briefly reviewed Loren and Deborah Haarsma’s book on theistic evolution. The version of theistic evolution presented as their own preference, allowing for several other models, seems basically to endorse Jacques Monod’s dipole of chance and necessity, but viewed as a theistic mode of design. The initial “deposit” of the creation could be sufficient, the book suggests, to have produced the whole natural world, without the need for further divine activity, though their theology happily grants the possibility of the latter. But the position is that the fine tuning of the original laws and conditions makes known evolutionary mechanisms sufficient to guarantee the sort of bisophere … Continue reading →