Category Archives: Science

Reasons beyond reason

Posted on 16/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

There’s a thought-provoking podcast on Randal Rauser’s blog, featuring philosopher Michael Rea on naturalism. He starts by carefully defining “naturalism” in accordance with those who most espouse it in the academic literature (because it’s one of those words that has ended up meaning almost anything and everything). His main conclusion is hardly new – that naturalism, understood as the decision to accept as authoritative only scientific epistemology, cannot be justified by naturalism.

Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology | 22 Comments

Eager beavers and missing lynx

Posted on 14/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Exciting times ecologically close to home. Just a dozen miles from here, the first wild beavers to be seen in Britain since they were hunted to extinction in the eighteenth century have been granted UK citizenship. Presumably introduced deliberately (as none have been known to escape from captivity) the fate of the half-dozen or so living on the River Otter has been in the balance, as the risk of their carrying infection was discussed.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science | 3 Comments

Dark arts

Posted on 13/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

For some reason, far too late last night I found myself following a contentious thread on a site I don’t normally visit, because (as in this instance) it tends to be a slanging match between Creationists and Atheists. I was just curious, honest.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 37 Comments

Marking the occasion

Posted on 12/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

A year ago I did a piece on the three philosphical models of divine action. This was mainly to show the inadequacy of the “mere conservation” model that seemed to dominate the BioLogos mindset regarding the natural creation, leaving only the category of “miracle” to account for God’s action in the life of the believer, history and (in extremis) nature.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 16 Comments

Essences, fuzzy or firm

Posted on 08/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

In this post, on the possibility of “adamic man” living with some other kind of “humanity”, I dropped in a passing comment on the difficulty for Darwinian gradualistic evolution of being able to come to grips the meaning of a word like “human” at all. Merv picked this up (remembering at least one exchange on universals we’ve had in the past): Does the fact that we can’t look at our continuous visible spectrum and point precisely to where it stops being red and starts being orange (other than by arbitrary selection of a cutoff frequency) mean that there can be no sustainable category of “red” colors? It just doesn’t seem … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 25 Comments

Talking with the animals

Posted on 06/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

In the rich discussion arising from this piece (thanks to Colossian Forum for the original stimulus), pngarrison comments: The possibility of Adam and Eve being one couple among a population, with only their descendants being fully human makes no sense to me. Their descendants would be confronted with how to treat the sub-humans who looked like them, made a living like them, possibly talked like them. How would they even tell for sure who was fully human and who wasn’t? If they could tell the difference, would it be o.k. to treat the sub-humans like animals? If they were in the middle East, you end up saying the people in … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

The literal literal meaning of Genesis

Posted on 05/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

This recent highly-commented post, and a local request to teach on the recent insights into the biblical creation story, have put my mind back on to Genesis. I’ve use this illustration before:

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

Primary reality

Posted on 28/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

There’s an interesting take on the historicity of Adam on the Colossian Forum, as part of a project funded by BioLogos, Beyond Galileo – to Chalcedon: Re-imagining the Intersection of Evolution and the Fall, of which at least one of our readers, J Richard Middleton, is a participant.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology | 35 Comments

How order develops spontaneously in news

Posted on 26/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

This Independent headline caught my eye: New theory could prove how life began and disprove God. As you’ll see, that’s the sub-editor’s sense of priority: the article itself just says the new theory “throws out the need for God”. The Indie’s source, with its stress on the punch-drunkness of God and the terror of Christians, is actually a piece by Paul Rosenberg at the Richard Dawkins Foundation, rather than the original review in Quanta Magazine. The latter was obviously un-newsworthy when it appeared over a year ago as it just mentioned the science, not the demise of God. Quanta was itself a secondary source for the work of physicist Jeremy … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

Why I am not a postmodernist

Posted on 23/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Well, I’ve finally struggled through Michel Foucault’s The Order of things, much in the manner of someone destroying his health trying to cross the Sahara on foot, but too stubborn to give up. The enterprise started well – his preface laid out the bones of a thesis that there have been fundamental changes in the very patterns of thought, especially scientific thought, of which he proposes three since the sixteenth century. These changes are far deeper than the changing science itself, and he describes them as being at an “archaeological” level, and the result of rather mysterious forces rather than any new discoveries or increase in rationality.

Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments