Category Archives: Science

Cosmology through the ages #3 – Mediaeval

Posted on 18/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

Enter, stage left, the Great Chain of Being… This, an idea common to much ancient Greek philosophy, held that all that exists is linked in a continuous chain, or hierarchy, from top to bottom. As we saw in the last post such ideas had little impact on early Christian thought, which though interacting with philosophy was fundamentally biblical, and concerned with religious truth, leaving science to the scientists. Exceptions were writers like the mainly Platonist Origen (whose views were considered flaky as a result) and, notably, the heretical Gnostics.

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Cosmology through the ages #2 – Patristic

Posted on 16/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

The three Patristic writers most associated with cosmological considerations are Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria (c200-264), Basil of Caesarea, one of the Cappadocian Fathers (c329-379) and Maximus of Constantinople (c580-662). I shall concentrate most on Basil for my purposes here.

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Cosmology through the ages #1 – Biblical

Posted on 14/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

In June I did a post  to show that ancient cosmologies, including that of Genesis, were not so much old-science, or even pre-science, as altogether indifferent to the physical and therefore a-scientific. It occurs to me it would be interesting to go on to show how cosmologies have changed over the millennia, and where we end up today. This has already helped me clarify issues in the science-faith discussion, so maybe it’ll give you some points to ponder as well.

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The Third Way and God

Posted on 12/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

I’ve not yet commented on the new project called The Third Way, but my recent mini-series of posts on natural selection seems a good reason to do so. It was launched this May by James Shapiro, Denis Noble and Raju Pookottil, and has already attracted some notable names from various fields, some of whose work I have read, including Eva Jablonka, Gerd Müller, Eugene Koonin, Stuart Newman and Robert Austin – 29 names in all at the time of writing.

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 4 Comments

Evolutionary algorithms and the Lovelace Test

Posted on 11/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

This article is interesting. It seems AI computer boffs needed a better test than the Turing Test for Hard Artificial Intelligence, should it ever arrive, given the subjective and easily manipulable results of the Turing Test recently. The original publication is here. As you’ll see, the test involves demonstrating a computer outputting something that was not designed into it in the original program – and should that ever happen, the computer will be shown to be truly intelligent, according to those best qualified to say.

Posted in Science | 14 Comments

Levels of certainty

Posted on 10/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

The 2009 Rescuing Darwin survey, to which I referred in a previous post,  was linked to a long essay by Nick Spencer and Denis Alexander, both theistic evolutionists by persuasion. Their own spin on the survey results is evident from early on in their essay (and perhaps even in the project’s title):

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Deep time – what’s the story?

Posted on 08/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

When one draws back from the “evolution is a proven fact” polemic, and aims to pin things down more rigorously, the least-contestable parts of the received scientific wisdom, vague as that is overall in the public arena, are the great age of the earth, and the succession of species (as opposed to common descent, which has some strong evidence but of a more inferential kind). Deep time’s strongest theological suit, in my book, is that a careful reading of the Bible makes no statement about the time of the creation – the chronological evidence of histories and genealogies actually takes one back to Adam, and it is an inference that … Continue reading →

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Law and nature

Posted on 07/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

GD mentions in a recent comment how the Aristotelian concept of nature’s predictability is fundamentally different from that of modern science. To previous generations of natural philosophers, habitual actions were the result of the forms applied to matter by God. They were the intrinsic tendencies of substantial forms, and so part of their essential natures.

Posted in Science, Theology | 4 Comments

More on selection, optimization and doubt

Posted on 05/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

I want to expand a little on why I have conceptual problems with standard Neodarwinian evolution as a more-or-less complete explanation for the origin of the species, touching again on optimization, which I dealt with recently in the context of formal causation.

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Creation and Magic

Posted on 31/07/2014 by Jon Garvey

The discussion on God’s “magical” activity on a previous thread managed to jettison the theme of the thread, and the overall theme of the blog too, that is the doctrine of creation. But it’s actually worth devoting a post to the subject of magic, because in many ways it is a magical understanding of the cosmos that the biblical creation doctrine subverted.

Posted in Creation, History, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 31 Comments