Category Archives: Science

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.

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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 | 2 Comments

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.

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Weeny, Weedy, Wiki

Here is an interesting discussion between journalist Glenn Greenwald and Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, on how the latter has become little more than a crude propaganda platform. Sanger has been putting this message out for several years, but like most truth now, a majority of people still have no idea that Wikipedia is anything other than an unbiased source of information. Even earlier this year, or perhaps last, responding to some such accusation of bias, the anchor of The Hill opined that whilst Facebook is unreliable, Wikipedia usually gets it right. Wrong, when the subject is controversial. Greenwald’s disillusion came firstly from seeing how his own Wikipedia entry gradually … Continue reading

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (3)

We left the last blog post with a simple “toolkit” from Genesis 1 which, whilst it may not “define” man in the way Aquinas sought to do, certainly describes him theologically in a way that enables us to interrogate the archaeological record for biblically human origins.

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (2)

Let’s start our exploration by considering the scant information Genesis contains on what it took to be a human being “in the beginning.”

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (1)

When I wrote The Generations of Heaven and Earth, whose central theme is the Genealogical Adam and Eve paradigm, I spent some pages discussing the status of those people “outside the garden,” on the assumption that an Adam and Eve around the Chalcolithic period, as suggested by the text, would have had many contemporaries. By that time, after all, and indeed very much earlier, human traces are known from all around the world.

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Unidentified Aerial Putins

When I last wrote about UFOs (now officially and paradoxically relabelled “UAPs” though, we are told, the government knows they are alien spacecraft and therefore “objects” and not merely “phenomena”), it was in the wake of the release of the “Tic-tac” episode by the Pentagon. I speculated, tongue in cheek, about the possibility that they might simply be the equivalent of interstellar dolphins rather than anything more intelligent.

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How to spot deception before researching it

Words of wisdom for the times by the excellent Nick Hudson:

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Refugee crisis hits Springwatch

I’ve remarked from time to time how the BBC series Springwatch (and its other seasonal offshoots) has learned to treat bad-anthropogenic-climate-change as the default explanation for every apparent change in Britain’s natural world, being obligatorily appended to any more scientific explanation that may be to hand. Hence the recurrent phrase, “Apart from the usual causes, like loss of habitat and climate change…”

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