Category Archives: Science

Colour me red

Posted on 25/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

An unexpected, but very welcome, contributor to my recent post on spectral colour was David Briggs, whose excellent website on colour theory, primarily intended for artists, is an invaluable educational tool for us all (or me, at least). I particularly liked his section on colour vision, which shows just what an incredibly sophisticated visual system we enjoy, as well as how disappointingly little of its workings get into the educational curriculum of either arts or sciences. Check out, for example, the set of “illusions” David uses to show how much neurological processing is involved in maintaining our sense of the constancy of colours under different lighting conditions. 

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 28 Comments

The price of dualism

Posted on 23/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

I’ll leave pngarrison to comment on the interesting paper to which he linked on the last post. Good stuff again – thanks. I’ll just kick off this line of thought with the final sentence of that paper: We are thus left with a fascinating puzzle as to how an 8-mo-old prelinguistic human not only seems to think of animals as a coherent category but then makes inferences that they alone must have filled insides. The paper is written from the mindset that this infant concept is somehow the origin of the “folk biology” that animals are integrated wholes, but I would suggest that perhaps the real “folk biology” is more … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 22 Comments

More faces in clouds

Posted on 19/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

In our recent discussion on cryptic images and randomness, it was pngarrison who raised the issue of pareidolia – the human tendency to see images, especially of faces, in what are clearly (apart from God’s sense of humour) random patterns.

Posted in Philosophy, Science | 7 Comments

The organic and the atomistic

Posted on 18/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

One of the accusations that modern Aristotelians (like Ed Feser) throw at Intelligent Design is that it has an engineering view of biology, and an engineering Deity, the issue being that organisms are actually whole entities that cannot be divided, like human artifacts, into disconnected parts assembled for a function. Interestingly, a good number of Evolutionary Creation voices at BioLogos have echoed that critique (to the point of getting Ed Feser to write some columns).

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More on seeing what you believe

Posted on 16/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

One of the astonishing examples of theory driving observation in the history of science is how Aristotle’s theory of trajectory was believed by over 2 millennia’s worth of observers – careful philosophers, archers, gunners and small boys playing catch included – until Galileo showed they were all parabolae. How could people be so blind to what every day phenomena were telling them?

Posted in History, Philosophy, Science | 14 Comments

The thick plottens

Posted on 13/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

Pngarrison helpfully pointed us a day or two ago to a recent article in the context of the randomness of variation. It does raise some interesting issues from The Hump’s perspective. So I’ll very briefly summarise it in the knowledge that it’s open-access, and those with a better background can bypass my meanderings.

Posted in Creation, Science | 4 Comments

More on mind and randomness

Posted on 10/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

Just as Dennis Venema failed to reply to my serious questions about randomness on his BioLogos post in October, so also Darrel Falk abandoned any reply to my questions on his concept of randomness on his. Ones respect is bound to flag in the face of such determined non-interaction. Both propose a vaguely fuzzy idea that God can achieve his purposes through randomness, without saying anything specific either about what that randomness might be, or about the nature of God’s purposes. I conclude it’s yet another theistic evolution idea that depends on rhetoric rather than intellectual rigour, which is disappointing.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 28 Comments

Unswung heroes

Posted on 07/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

I am gratified that what might have been seen as quite an opaque post  regarding the serious business of epistemology, and possibly a bit obscure regarding even its main subject music, should have hit the right buttons with some readers regarding humanness, holism and the limitations of analytic thinking. I’m especially gratified because, as usual with me, it takes the form of an analytic examination. To shake the foundations I should really have told you to listen to some piece of arcane jazz repeatedly until enlightenment came… something like the sound of one hand clapping in triple time, maybe. This post is more of the same. No new insights, except … Continue reading →

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It don’t mean a thing…

Posted on 06/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

…if it ain’t got that swing One of the recurrent themes on The Hump, which I’m trying to address from different directions, is the priority of mind within our reality, and hence the myth of objectivity apart from human ideas. That ranges from the mind-based metaphysics of Eddington or Dembski (coming from quantum and information science directions respectively), to the “personal knowledge” of Polanyi’s philosophy of science or the Goethian approach to knowledge. I’ve included the thought that contemporary science has an inevitable tendency to abstract reality into symbolic representations, most marked in the eliminative materialism that ends up rendering everything – even matter and the minds that conceive it – as … Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Philosophy, Science | 14 Comments

Chance, providence and apostleship

Posted on 05/11/2014 by Jon Garvey

I have a couple of posts in reply to Darrel Falk’s review of Alister McGrath’s book over at BioLogos. My entrée was to critique McGrath’s cavalier use of some of the writers I have dealt with here at length (though I should mention that the book has been on our own recommended list for a year or more). But underlying that I’m still rather mystified about what overall case is being argued, whether by McGrath of Falk. I may be obtuse, but it looks as though the New Revelation is that God’s planning and purpose might possibly work through the mechanisms of mutation and selection through the wonder of providence. If … Continue reading →

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