Category Archives: Politics and sociology

By chance I discovered recently that my old Grammar School zoology teacher, Tony, is living not too far from me. Though he used to be called “Sir”. I’m tossing around whether to contact him after 43 years, remembering those old bumper stickers, “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” I have reason to be very thankful to him and his colleague Des (also called “Sir”), who were responsible for getting me to Cambridge and enabling my career in medicine. And additionally, to any understanding I may have of the biological issues raised by evolution. How coincidental, then, that at the same time various British luminaries should be petitioning the … Continue reading →

Less edifying, in my humble opinion, is this piece in Monday’s Guardian by Karl Giberson, a key contributor to, and former Team Member of, BioLogos. His experience, of course, is his and not mine – I grew up in Britain, it would seem some years earlier than he did in North America. But I don’t recognise his view of Evangelical Christianity as an abusive environment for young people, nor his portrait of Francis Schaeffer, whose writings influenced me to think seriously and Christianly in every area of life, including my profession of medicine and my interest in science. And in everything else I encountered, come to that.

I’ve been a bit remiss in updating this blog. But in the meantime I’ve a new essay on the BioLogos website. It would have been here but they asked first…

Britain must be one of the only places in the world where you can hear a radio programme in which 3 philosophy professors discuss free will with an informed chairman. Free will poses a difficulty for naturalism because although we consciously make decisions – especially moral ones – every day, it is difficult to account for them. The determinism of natural law would suggest free choice, and so moral accountability, to be impossible. Yet introducing the only other naturalistic mechanism, randomness (by invoking quantum physics for example) would, even if plausible, still exclude moral responsibility because ones will would be the “victim” of external random forces. So there seems no … Continue reading →