Category Archives: Science

Temporarily over on BioLogos

Posted on 10/06/2011 by Jon Garvey

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…

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

The Demise of the Random?

Posted on 21/03/2011 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just come across this overview paper by James Shapiro. If the evidence he gives is as presented, it really does seem to me to present a potentially fruitful 21st century view of evolution. The weak point of Neodarwinism has always been its reliance on random mutation as the ultimate source of variation. Indeed, for many decades after it was first suggested, mutation was downplayed as a better mechanism was sought for – that’s because all the experiments with mutation showed a zero rate of positive return (here is an amusing illustration of those results). Mutation really won the Neodarwinian day, it seems, mainly by default – and maybe by … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science | 3 Comments

Will you, won’t you?

Posted on 10/03/2011 by Jon Garvey

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 →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

Did the Puritans Start the Seti Project?

Posted on 02/03/2011 by Jon Garvey

This quote about life on other planets was sent to me by my friend Penman, a regular poster on the Biologos site. It is by Richard Baxter, one of the greatest of the 17th century Puritan writers and preachers:  I know it is a thing uncertain and unrevealed to us, whether all these globes be inhabited or not. But he that considereth, that there is scarce any uninhabitable place on earth, or in the water, or air; but men, or beasts, or birds, or fishes, or flies, or worms, and moles, do take up almost all; will think it a probability so near a certainty as not to be much … Continue reading →

Posted in Science, Theology | 5 Comments

Science and Conformity

Posted on 28/02/2011 by Jon Garvey

This article gave me that “I told you so” feeling. Before I retired in 2008 I railed against younger doctors for advising parents to use alternate ibuprofen and paracetamol to bring their kids’ fevers down. My grounds were that fever is physiological and useful, not pathological (surprising how many docs haven’t clocked this), that drugs (especially NSAIDs) have side effects, and that no evidence existed that using two antipyretics does more than one. Indeed, at the time there was no actual research to show that using even one to reduce temperature reduced the only significant complication of fever, convulsion, though it’s highly probable they would.

Posted in Medicine, Science | 1 Comment

Catching up

Posted on 27/02/2011 by Jon Garvey

Over the last few months the BioLogos blog has helped me think through an approach to creation that does injustice neither to science or the Bible, taken as the directly inspired word of God. In particular John H Walton’s book on Genesis 1 is a must-read to discover how a functionally conceived view of creation is the literal meaning, removing at a stroke many apparent contradictions with science. During my postings on that blog I have put my thoughts in a number of essays, to which I would have linked individually here if the blog had existed at the time. Instead, here are the links all together, in no logical order. … Continue reading →

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