Category Archives: Science

Rules are there to break us

We had an excellent pub lunch on our daughter’s birthday yesterday. A lovely warm and cosy thatched village hostelry, with a log fire. It was obviously very popular because every table was full. We spent a couple of hours there over an excellent meal and their home-brewed bitter. And the only masks in sight were on a few of the newcomers sporting their cosmetically-compliant face-rags as they came through the deserted lobby to the sparsely-occupied bar, before being ushered to their convivially-packed tables and removing the masks.

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The evolution of British primary health care

Back in the days of Richard Baxter, George Herbert or John Wesley, medical care was part of the remit of the church minister. Whilst physicians balanced the humours of the rich in cities, out in the sticks the poor could seldom afford their fees, and the pastor, as the most educated member of the community, made it his business to know some herbal cures and folk remedies. How effective they were – other than by demonstrating compassion, not to be denigrated in these days when the suffering are left to die alone – is hard to say, but then the same is true of the professional bleeders and purgers of … Continue reading

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Old views on biology tested empirically

With biology nowadays so focused on evolutionary theory (“nothing makes sense” etc – Dobzhansky) it’s easy to forget that the predictions of older theories about the living world can still be tested against the wealth of modern data. Sometimes, they do surprisingly well: sometimes they don’t.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature | 1 Comment

Pseudoscience and a challenge from history

Phillip Johnson gives an intriguing quote from Karl Popper on pseudoscience. He points out that Popper was raised in Vienna, a centre both for Marxism and Freudian theory, both of which claimed to be scientific and, for many decades, were accepted as such. Belief in either had

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Revisiting evolution (on the same old season ticket)

I’ve been re-reading Phillip E Johnnson’s Darwin on Trial, partly for nostalgia’s sake, since I met the guy once, and partly to re-examine some of the arguments, having been largely detached from the evolution discussion for a year or so in favour of examining dubious hegemonic scientific consensuses in other fields.

Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 1 Comment

A passage to India

A friend of mine is wrestling, candidly and productively in my view, with the hype of climate change. On the one hand he sees that there is so much in the mainstream account that is just nonsense, both regarding climate change itself, and the proposed solutions such as those fudged at COP26. On the other (if I don’t misrepresent him) he finds it hard to believe that a whole scientific community is complicit in deception, and also feels that the existence of harmful warming is undeniable, affecting the poor most of all. One example he cites is his own experience of extreme temperatures when visiting Delhi a few years ago.

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The Bat that Roared

Maybe you remember a cold-war era humorous novel by Leonard Wibberley, entitled The Mouse that Roared? It was subsequently made into a film starring Peter Sellers.

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Repenting for civilisation?

I believe in original sin. But that means not that everything humans do is evil, but that everything we do is tainted by evil. My book God’s Good Earth argues that original sin has not corrupted the natural creation, which remains firmly under God’s good government. And likewise, mankind cannot corrupt that creation, which in part at least was made for humanity, by living in it and using it. I think that may have been forgotten.

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Science goes Stalinist

A Prestigious cardiologist (Dr Peter McCullough) : a prestigious journal (Elsevier’s Current Problems in Cardiology): a worrying paper on rates of post-vaccination myocarditis. Peer review: check. Published online: check… then taken down “temporarily” and, a week later, “unpublished,” the only explanation to the lead author being that the publisher has the right to do so in the publishing contract. Full discussion here.

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I’m pro-vaccination, but…

Another day, and another excellent article points to the signs of developing problems with the COVID vaccination programme. At the same time, statistician John Dee provides an alarming presentation of ONS data showing how (factoring in obvious things like the number of tests) the positivity rate of PCR tests has escalated since mass vaccination was rolled out, even as you’d expect it to wane:

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