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Category Archives: Science
More on “Civilisational Christianity.”
The two pieces I recently did, inspired by Bret Weinstein, were not intended to do him down, since the piece I quoted from him was essentially apologising to Christians that the New Atheism movement, by denigrating them, had sidelined important allies against the same enemies of truth and morality. My main point was that he has failed to recognise that faith in God is the foundation of that morality and truth, not an unfortunate superstitious add-on.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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More on Bret Weinstein’s evolutionary distorting mirror
Yesterday I critiqued Bret Weinstein’s proposed rapprochement of “science” with Christian morality, pointing out that he misunderstood the foundations of Christianity, and merely tried to replace them with an inferior, naturalistic evolutionary, narrative. In fact the problem is worse than that, because it’s not simply that his proposal hides the shaky metaphysical foundations of naturalism, but that even in materialist terms it is pseudoscientific. And that is because societal morals are demonstrably non-evolutionary. As I will now demonstrate.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Bret Weinstein’s evolutionary mirror
Bret Weinstein has been one of the good guys regarding not only COVID, but the woke phenomenon that targeted him and his wife when he was working in academia. But he’s also an evolutionary biologist, and likes to frame everything from the viewpoint of random change and natural selection. That’s useful when dealing with the micro-evolution of viruses, but less so when dealing with human values.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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One of my occasional posts on occasionalism
How God works in the world is often regarded (and is indeed) a deep philosophical question. But it actually matters in real life, which is why the Bible says a lot about it. Because it doesn’t do so in a systematic analytical way, but through narrative, poetry, historiography and so on, its importance is often missed by those academics who like systematics.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology
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Book review: Busting Anti-Vax Myths
I had higher than usual expectations whilst I was awaiting my free review copy of this 2022 book by Prof. Oisín MacAmadáin (Expert), not least because the author’s Dublin agent turns out to be related to me by a marriage in Queen Elizabeth I’s time. How unlikely is that? (Well, not that unlikely, since 20 generations ago both of us have 1 million ancestors, around the total population of Ireland at that time, though the fact that both ancestors were Archbishops of Armagh might change the odds a little). Still, that human connection with the author certainly warmed me to the book in advance.
Posted in Medicine, Science
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The religious apologetics of naturalistic materialism
James Tour, as many of you will know, is a noted chemist who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve, unashamedly engaging in apologetics alongside his groundbreaking research, particularly that involving nano-particles.
More on climate
I’m about three quarters of the way through a book, the reading of which was prompted by a brief exchange here, and a slightly longer one by e-mail, with GD, whose professional expertise is as a fuel chemist. The book, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPPC (Clintel Foundation, Amsterdam, 2023), is an analysis of the IPCC’s latest report, AR6, by a range of “questioning” scientists including those who have been expert reviewers and contributors to IPCC reports. Such analysis is essential because – sobering thought – almost nobody in the world has read AR6, or any of the other IPCC reports, in their entirety.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Science
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It’s always ther cloimate wot gets the blame
As I anticipated, our Harvest Festival had a significant section on failure of harvests in poor countries and how we need to help, in this case focusing on Uganda – a country where, but for providential circumstances, I might have worked. I voiced my reservations about the anthropocentrism of harvest thanksgiving nowadays in my previous blog, and I won’t labour the point. What I will mention, though, is another near-universal theme in the kind of video we were shown – that it is the poor who are already feeling the brunt of climate change, witness the increasing droughts being experienced by farmers in Uganda.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science
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Providence, raindrops and horsehoe-nails
One throw-away line in a video for the excellent Christian course Discipleship Exploredcaught my attention. The narrator, speaking of God’s care for us, said that “each drop of rain has its intended target.”
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology, Theology of nature
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More on soul as the sole reality
I eventually worked through Joshua Farris’s The Creation of Self, as mentioned recently, and have to say I felt it improved towards the end.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology
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