Category Archives: Science

Nobel Prize time

Posted on 08/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

Well-earned prizes have just been awarded for milestone research on DNA Repair. To quote from the Independent as usual (only because it’s cheap) the contributions of the three winners was as follows:

Posted in Creation, Science | 11 Comments

I’ve just been re-reading Tom Wright’s excellent book on eschatology, Surprised by Hope, for the first time since 2009, a couple of years before I began to think more intensely about the doctrine of creation in relation to science and all things modern, culminating in this blog. I’d quite forgotten how much the book focuses on the goodness of the current creation, and the stress of the gospel on ushering in a whole new creation, which burst into the world for the first time at the Resurrection and begins to transform it, in preparation for the parousia, by the Spirit’s work through the Church.

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Redundancy and teleology

Posted on 02/10/2015 by Jon Garvey

The Independent reports some research from the “1000 Genome Project”, under the headline “Human genome study reveals certain genes are less essential than previously thought”. The gist is that in 2,500 individual genomes studied (a supererogatory number in terms of the project’s name): “…we were surprised to see over 200 genes that are missing entirely in some people,” said Jan Korbel of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, who led one of the genome project’s studies.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 7 Comments

The role of eclipses in the culture wars

Posted on 28/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

Last night we had a total eclipse of the moon across Europe, which since it coincided with the recently popular category of a “supermoon” event got lots of press coverage.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

The Copernican Principle revisited

Posted on 22/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

I’m far from the first person to point out that when Copernicus turned the Universe inside out it wasn’t in order to knock the earth off its perch of geocentric pre-eminence in human thought (as the modern so-called “Copernican Principle” implies), but if anything to make it, for the first time, one of the heavenly bodies.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 7 Comments

Science and divine judgement

Posted on 11/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

There was a bit of a discussion on BioLogos not long ago about the possibility of miracles in relation to scientific laws. Interesting enough, but the subject has been treated quite frequently, in point of fact, from C S Lewis through to Alvin Plantinga. And it’s not really that controversial amongst contemporary Evangelicals, the target audience. As I pointed out there there’s been an intriguing change in general attitude to miracles within my lifetime, from something no modern man could countenance to something only old-fashioned atheists reject out of hand. But there’s a related field of divine action that’s both more ubiquitous and more controversial than that of occasional miracles.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 12 Comments

Gregor Mendel: My Part in his Downfall

Posted on 08/09/2015 by Jon Garvey

The title, for Uninitiated Foreigners, alludes to this celebrated autobiography by this mad genius, lest you think I really wish to denigrate the great monk. Below the fold is a link to a British documentary about epigenetics. It’s primarily about the discovery of epigenetics in the transmission of disease down generations, but we need always to remember that the medical aspects are just a window on a process that must, by its nature, be primarily physiological and adaptive, and is turning out to be ubiquitous:

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Psychological studies past and present

Posted on 28/08/2015 by Jon Garvey

An interesting news item in what is becoming an increasingly common genre of news: scientific non-reproducibility.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Pentadactyly Live

Posted on 27/08/2015 by Jon Garvey

News being slow at the moment, I thought that for light relief I’d link to a video someone’s posted on YouTube of part of the set I did at Lyme Regis Folk Festival last weekend. After all, the song Pentadactyly arose from discussions about the pentadactyl limb both here and on BioLogos.

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Creation and Election

Posted on 19/08/2015 by Jon Garvey

The BioLogos thread on the historicity of Adam turns out to be another important one, though the most interesting bit has got hived off to a sub-thread involving the Usual Suspects here, one Ex-Suspect and Christy (who so far is not suspected of anything, though she’d be most welcome on The Hump). I venture to suggest that amongst these there is broad agreement (though they may not fully realise it) that classical Christianity requires that Adam and Eve are not optional, and that attempts to make them so at least amount to new doctrine (so Eddie) and more strongly that such attempts amount to heterodoxy. That a significant strand in … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology | 21 Comments