Category Archives: Science

Of New Atheists and Brownshirts

Posted on 20/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

This Evolution News and Views piece on Christopher Hitchens suggests that the penchant of New Atheists like Dennett to use invective where discussion might do was learned directly from the recently deceased Hitchens. If this is so, the appellation “brown shirts”, otherwise so apt, ought to be reviewed.

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Reality really is magic!

Posted on 19/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

Richard Dawkins’ new children’s book, The Magic of Reductionism Reality has a really useful chapter on miracles. Dawkins bases much of his position on Hume’s argument against miracles:

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Contingency and the detectability of creation

Posted on 19/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

I remember a cartoon in Punch many years ago (sadly all the cartoons in Punch were many years ago now), in which a sudden new display of stars in the night sky spelled out, in evenly spaced Roman capitals, “GOD IS DEAD”. The caption underneath read, “Official Humanist Miracle Declared.”

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The root of the debate?

Posted on 17/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

Why do many atheists get so angry against both creation and religion? If it were the evidence alone, you’d expect a purely academic disagreement. It’s often stated in terms of the tyrannical history of religion, and yet that is characteristically either exaggerated or actually flies in the face of fact. Yet people like Coyne et al seem to hate God himself, even though they deny his existence. Here’s a quote from David Berlinski’s obituary on Christopher Hitchens: Christopher Hitchens found objectionable the very idea of a source of authority, and so of power, greater than his own. Is “autonomous naturalism” a recognised term?

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Threatened worldviews and their effects

Posted on 17/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

Challenges to ones worldview assumptions usually come from exposure to a different culture. My assumptions about the place of talking about ones faith in medical practice received a jolt in the early nineties when I first read Richard Baxter’s 1650 spiritual classic The Saints’ Everlasting Rest.

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Christians and methodological naturalism (2)

Posted on 16/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

However much Christians may agree or disagree with the writings of the late Francis Schaeffer, he had one thing absolutely right. And that is that we are called, as Christians, to submit every area of of lives to Christ, to further the end that all creation will eventually acknowledge his rule. Together with the more immediate end of being salt and light in the world. I picked up that revolutionary idea as a student, as a result of which I tried from the start to do my chosen career of medicine “Christianly”. That did not mean “fanatically”, but it meant taking the trouble to question how much of what I … Continue reading →

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Christians and methodological naturalism (1)

Posted on 16/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

Over on BioLogos I’ve been involved (possibly too much) in a couple of quite fruitful exchanges based on blog series appearing there about the sociology and philosophy of science. If I’d been aware of this two part essay by Alvin Plantinga I’d probably just have given the link and bowed out, since he makes virtually the same arguments as I did, only better. I’d like to say it’s a case of great minds thinking alike, but more likely I’ve just picked up the ideas through the filter of people who have read him more than I have.

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Falsifying the fundamentals

Posted on 11/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

Actually, if I hadn’t liked the alliteration, I wouldn’t have used “falsifying” in the title. What I really want to assert is that none of the key ideas in Neodarwinian theory (taken as the heart of evolution) are either verified or logically capable of being demonstrated empirically, let alone falsified. This has been said before, but it’s worth reiterating, because we’re still being told it’s as factual as gravity…

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Stephen Talbott and a science of qualities

Posted on 10/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

I’ve stumbled across this astonishing series of articles by Stephen L Talbott at the Nature Institute. Astonishing because it’s an overview of some of the new (and astonishing!) processes being discovered within the cell, including some very good stuff on epigenetics, yet put in the context of a whole scientific and philosophical critique of not only Neodarwinism, but of the whole reductionist approach to biology and of ateleological science overall. An ambitious set of targets indeed! There’s a lot of it, and some is somewhat technical, but don’t let that put you off wading through the lot. It’s some of the most conceptually fruitful stuff I’ve read in a long … Continue reading →

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Is PRM the new NS?

Posted on 08/12/2011 by Jon Garvey

An interesting article  on Evolution News & Views by Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a German molecular plant geneticist. Basically he claims precedence in publishing the process recently re-discovered by Austin L Hughes and published in Heredity. Apparently the idea (called plasticity-relaxation-mutation) has been around in the literature for 25 years, but not in English journals. Its importance is that it provides an evolutionary adaptive mechanism completely different to (and conceivably a complete replacement for) adaptive natural selection.

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