Category Archives: Science

Is Genesis real impossibility?

Posted on 12/04/2018 by Jon Garvey

Joshua Swamidass has become involved in what appears, at first sight, a minor disagreement on a BioLogos thread puffing a new essay by several authors entitled Is Genesis Real History? His objection was especially to one sentence (bearing the marks of John Walton’s hand, I suspect), which reads: Or consider Genesis 2:7, when God forms Adam from dust and breathes into his nostrils. This could not have happened exactly as described, because we know from other passages in the Bible that God is Spirit with neither hands nor lungs.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology | 7 Comments

Natural selection is a choice – 3

Posted on 09/04/2018 by Jon Garvey

As I’ve described in the previous two posts, natural selection is, despite its reputation as the biggest discovery ever, the central tenet of (only) some of the theories of evolution that have held centre stage since Darwin and Wallace popularised it. One of the negative reasons for its being recurrently in doubt is the ongoing difficulty of deciding what natural selection actually is.

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Natural selection is a choice – 2

Posted on 06/04/2018 by Jon Garvey

I left off last time  by mentioning that the “time honoured status of natural selection,” which habitually appears as the basis of evolution’s incontrovertibility in discussions, is in fact a historical myth. It’s an easily documented one, too. My source in this piece is principally the Wikipedia entry on “The eclipse of Darwinism,”  which nicely summarizes the authoritative history by Peter Bowler.

Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology, Science | 8 Comments

Natural selection is a choice – 1

Posted on 04/04/2018 by Jon Garvey

Despite the frequency with which the variable definitions of “evolution” are pointed out (eg Joshua Swamidass’s firm insistance that the correct scientific definition is only “change over time”) yet in common discourse about origins the mental concept nearly always reverts to “evolution by random variation and natural selection, as has stood the test of time for 160 years since Darwin.”

Posted in Creation, Science | 33 Comments

Doing the shuffle

Posted on 02/04/2018 by Jon Garvey

Back in 2015 I did a post on my own personal twin study, describing the interesting phenomenon of how one of my identical twin daughters, who learned to walk via the minority (5%) technique of bottom-shuffling, rather than the usual (95%) crawling, gave birth to a baby daughter who did the same thing. I wondered then about what would happen to the newborn daughter of the other twin, who crawled in the usual way, and what would be the genetic, or epigenetic, explanation of whatever resulted. I may even have updated the story since, but if so I can’t find it.

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The creation of Israel

Posted on 29/03/2018 by Jon Garvey

Contrary to what many believe, the Bible does not teach that God stopped creating (Heb. bara) after the sixth day, though clearly the seventh day, God’s sabbath, draws a line under that special week of work. There are nevertheless a good number of references to God’s ongoing secifically creative acts scattered throughout the Old Testament. Some of those uses of the word relate to the creation of Israel as a nation, in Isaiah ch. 43.

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Balancing the books

Posted on 26/03/2018 by Jon Garvey

I was reading a Young Earth Creationist’s critique of Theistic Evolution last week. He made the (usual) case that because of accepting as authoritative the human findings of science over the word of God in the Bible, mainstream TEs have denied virtually every major doctrine of orthodox Christianity.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 27 Comments

More on that methodological thing

Posted on 23/03/2018 by Jon Garvey

In the light of my previous post on methodological naturalism, Ian Thompson kindly made me aware of a book on the Victorian debate between the majority of theistic scientists, such as James Clerk Maxwell, and the naturalists such as Thomas Huxley and the X Club, who eventually triumphed in establishing their programme. It’s an enlightening read.

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Do not touch my anointed

Posted on 21/03/2018 by Jon Garvey

Once more I’ve posted a few comments on BioLogos and got into trouble. Well, that’s been the pattern since 2011, so it’s no surprise. The thread was the old and currently 827-comment-long Buggs/Venema/Swamidass conversation on the population genetics of human origins, a lull in which made me think it was timely to add the kind of cautionary note on the validation of models I’ve sounded here and here.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science | 22 Comments

Genealogical Adam – isolated tribes

Posted on 19/03/2018 by Jon Garvey

One of the objections to the Genealogical Adam hypothesis is the case of isolated tribes who, perhaps, have never interbred with descendants of Adam in any plausible historical time-frame.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science | 8 Comments