Category Archives: Science

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

The presentation of self in everyday ecology

Posted on 21/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Apologies to sociologist of my youth Erving Goffmann for the title. Our friend Hanan, as always perceptive, e-mailed me with some quotes from a blog, or perhaps a conversation, on ecology: Ecosystems adapt not because they’re in harmony, but because they’re in tension. Sometimes that tension yanks everything in a new direction when things are changed, and sometimes everything falls apart… “Harmony” suggests that everything is working together. What’s really happening in an ecosystem is that everything is working on its own, and on its own, for its own reasons (so to speak), reacting to everything around it. Even symbiosis, like between bees and flowers, isn’t the bees and flowers … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

Unexpected stasis in evolutionism

Posted on 19/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Evolution was first presented as a theory of biology, but soon become the definitive way of thinking about every conceivable process involving time. In a real sense, it’s our culture’s “theory (or metatheory) of everything”, so that it’s not unfair to label the predominant worldview of the West, and not just of some atheist subset of positivists, as “Evolutionism”. Let me demonstrate this from both academic and popular sources, mixed indiscriminately.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 10 Comments

Nothing in life makes sense except in the light of genealogy?

Posted on 17/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Last Thursday my wife and I took a drive out, initially to Maiden Castle, Britain’s largest iron-age hill-fort (a new-build from 600BC, if you don’t count the Neolithic causewayed camp it replaced), but then to Radpole Lake, one of the largest reedbed habitats in the country.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 12 Comments

More on the sociology of science

Posted on 16/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Last week I wrote about a recent sociology paper that has revealed a significant social grouping in the US, which they call “Post-secularists”. I suggested that the most interesting thing is not so much the nature of the new demographic as the fact that it was only after someone changed the kind of questions being asked that the phenomenon become visible to science. Here’s another instance of how science cannot be separated from sociology.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 8 Comments

Democracies burn books

Posted on 14/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Just a quick one today. I notice this story in the Independent today. Old books (non-fiction, note) pulped in Manchester reference library update. Some of the comments say it’s a storm in a teacup because, as the council spokeswoman said, “The only books which were withdrawn as part of this vital housekeeping exercise were those which were duplicated, outdated or otherwise obsolete.”

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Another “Third Way” to cut the cake

Posted on 13/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

I was interested to see this piece of sociological research last week, which is well worth downloading and studying in detail. As you’ll see, the study uncovers a hitherto apparently invisible group, comprising 21% of the US population, which they call “post-secularists”. I don’t want to waste space doing a full summary, as the one in the Huffington Post seems to cover the bases laid down in the paper succinctly and pretty fairly.

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Ritual purity and ideological pollution

Posted on 11/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

I went to check for any new stuff on the Third Way website of alternatives to Neodarwinism over the weekend, and noticed a further addition to the “Ts and C’s”. It seems they now consider themselves in danger of becoming ritually unclean:

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

More on stochastics

Posted on 09/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

In two recent posts here and here I tried to show, via the route of Thomas Aquinas’s Fifth Way, that “randomness” as it is actually found in the world is a sign of order, not disorder, and therefore points to God no less than does final causation in nature.

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