Category Archives: Science

Spot the difference

Posted on 14/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been interested to see discussions from time to time about what it is that causes the Intelligent Design pioneer Michael Behe to be excluded from the “broad church” of theistic evolution by those within the “Guild”. It’s not just that he happens to be in a different denomination, but that he attracts regular opprobium, even scorn, for his ideas, and particularly for irreducible complexity.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

In What Sense Does Evolution Require a Creator to “Establish” It?

Posted on 11/02/2017 by Edward Robinson

Over at BioLogos, a vigorous discussion is going on under the column entitled “Signal and Noise”. Cornelius Hunter has returned to debate the soundness of evolutionary theory, and, predictably, he is being ganged up on by all the usual suspects.

Posted in Creation, Edward Robinson, Science, Theology | 9 Comments

C S Lewis on current theistic evolution controversies

Posted on 10/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

The excellent Preston Garrison, apart from alerting me to the review of a new book on Babylonian science that led me to a whole series of posts on the ANE and Hebrew pictures of the world, recommended an old and little-read book by C S Lewis. Studies in Words, published in 1960 just three years before his death, is a philology text for students, so not the most obviously relevant book for thinking about either “biblical science” or modern science. But it actually has some useful light to cast on both.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 9 Comments

Saltational behavioural evolution

Posted on 05/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

2016 was a good year for British archaeology, as it became clear that a Neolithic settlement at Ness of Brodgar on the far-flung Orkney Islands (dating to c.3500BC) had been a major “capital” and, in all likelihood, the fountainhead of the “stone circle ” culture that spread south through Britain over a thousand years and culminated in the mighty monuments at Stonehenge, Avebury and elsewhere.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment

The proteus of evolutionary consensus

Posted on 01/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

Larry Moran is a prolific blogger on evolution, and is respected enough to have big scientific names commenting in his threads. He’s also militantly anti-creationist and anti-ID, though he’s gained some respect from the latter group for being willing to engage in discussion with them, despite persisting in contemptuously labelling them “ID-creationists”.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

Conceiving creatio continua via Genesis 1

Posted on 29/01/2017 by Jon Garvey

Herbert McCabe, and other philosophers for whom I have a lot of respect overall, suggest from time to time that according to classical theology à la Thomas Aquinas we shouldn’t expect to see any signs of God’s handiwork in creation, even though it is all utterly dependent on him ontologically. This is because he creates secondary causes to be sufficient explanations in themselves – there are no gaps for God to fill. This argument is used by them and, derivatively, by Evolutionary Creationists to dismiss not only ID but all natural theology (and, strictly speaking, an active theology of nature too) on principle.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

Through the looking-glass

Posted on 12/01/2017 by Jon Garvey

Having had my mind drawn back to “Genesis cosmology” in the last post (which showed that cosmology is actually culturally impossible in Genesis!) I might spend a few posts boring you all with some further observations seeking to undermine the detail of what, as far as I can see, is an entirely spurious idea of “ancient science”, which I call the “goldfish bowl cosmos”.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

The world before the world

Posted on 09/01/2017 by Jon Garvey

Preston Garrison recently sent me (courtesy of Ted Davis) an interesting review (limited access – sorry) for a forthcoming academic tome on Babylonian science, knowing I’d be interested both because of my musings on what science is, and what it isn’t, and also because it has implications for interpreting the early chapters of Genesis. I’m tempted to buy it when it comes out, despite the price and having to learn cuneiform(!), but meanwhile some thoughts.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 11 Comments

I fought the law – and the jury’s still out

Posted on 02/01/2017 by Jon Garvey

In the last post I showed how “probablistic chance” fares no better than “Epicurean chance” as a true cause of physical events. Half of Monod’s materialistic “chance and necessity” explanation for evolution thereby falls to the ground. What is left is what appears to be the safer concept of nature obeying the “laws of nature” (ie the natural truths behind the formulations scientists make). This necessity, we assume, is a commonplace foundation of science which fits well into the theistic framework: God writes the laws of nature, and so achieves his purposes in the world.

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Debunking a soft view of chance

Posted on 30/12/2016 by Jon Garvey

In the batch of articles I’ve done on “chance” over the last month or so, my main target has been the only kind of “chance” that makes much sense in an atheistic framework, and that is what I have called “Epicurean chance”. The basic concept of this is that totally undirected events can lead to order that, otherwise, would demand the designing intention of a purposeful being. Epicureanism has been a philosophically dubious claim ever since Democritus suggested it four centuries before Christ.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 2 Comments