Is natural selection science (or philosophy)?

Posted on 05/10/2016 by Jon Garvey

I intervened on one of the many current threads against about Intelligent Design at BioLogos yesterday in response to the oft-repeated claim that evolution is not random because natural selection is not random. I suggested that, as per my last post, part of the rational limitation of science ought to be the recognition that it can only construct theories about repeatable regularities, whereas it can merely observe and list the contingent – and natural selection is firmly in the latter category.

I concluded my comment thus:

If science is the study of the repeatable, what makes natural selection any more a scientific process, than is contingent history – which is as much as to say a product of providence?

That it drew considered responses from Merv Bitkofer, Sy Garte and GD (all Hump persons, of course) did not surprise me – but it also more interestingly received a “like” from Joshua Swamidass. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 10 Comments

Wittgenstein on science as one tool in the box

Posted on 02/10/2016 by Jon Garvey

Jay Johnson, over at BioLogos (though he posts here too) pointed me to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to science and its limits, a subject opened up by Joshua Swamidass’s airing of the issue over the last month or two. I’ve not read Wittgenstein, except in quotations regarding his dense analytical work on language, and suspect I would mostly find myself out of my analytic depth if I did.

But his thinking on scientism, apparently a core concern of his, fits into a stream of ideas I’ve followed over the last couple of years via the work of Arthur Eddington, Michael Polanyi and others. Jay points to a summary article here, which I commend. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 4 Comments

Neuhaus’s Law

Posted on 28/09/2016 by Jon Garvey

A few events coinciding set ones mind on interesting tracks. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

More on pseudoscience

Posted on 25/09/2016 by Jon Garvey

Bible scholar Michael Heiser specialises in slightly more esoteric aspects of the Bible, such as what is taught about supernatural beings in it (often passed over in a mixture of monotheistic embarrassment and academic naturalism). He is also interested in astronomical questions, and is a champion of Ernest L. Martin’s detailed theorising about what the Magi saw that took them in search of the child Jesus, and when it occurred. Continue reading →

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When I was a child…

Posted on 21/09/2016 by Jon Garvey

It doesn’t show much now, but when I was a kid I was quite a science fiction buff. I was eleven when Doctor Who first screened in 1963, and I remember sharing knowledgeably with my friends about what good sci-fi it was compared to most of what had been on TV.

That was certainly true: it took a stroke of genius to portray the TARDIS as having a broken camouflage circuit so it turned up incongrously as a London police telephone box amongst Daleks or Mongolian hordes. And likewise it was genius that it did not roar like a rocket, nor whirr like your average flying saucer or time machine, but instead groaned like a woman in labour as it strove to enter space-time, and sang like a whale when it had done so. The spacecraft was a living thing.

Continue reading →

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The non-problem of cosmic fine tuning

Posted on 17/09/2016 by Jon Garvey

There’s a very nice podcast here by Australian cosmologist Luke Barnes answering the common objections to Cosmic Fine Tuning. And very amusingly, too.

His blog is good value as well. It majors on CFT too, and is notable in critiquing even-handedly (if not without scorn when deserved!) arguments not only from physicists, but from atheist apologists like Richard Carrier and Christian apologists like philosopher William Lane Craig and OEC astrophysicist Hugh Ross. I should add that it comes across clearly, but not crudely, that Barnes himself is a Christian theist. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 3 Comments

Information, language, code

Posted on 12/09/2016 by Jon Garvey

Joshua Swamidass, in dispute with staunch ID apologist “Deliberateresult” (Joe Palcsak) over at BioLogos, denies (like a surprising number of TEs) that DNA is anything more than “analogically” a code, or a language, in the wider context of his being uncomfortable with considering people as biological machines:

Honestly it sounds like you are seeing people as machines, even in this quote. Of course we make analogies between living systems and machines, language, technology, etc. That is how humans work. We reason about often this way. You, however, seem to think the there is not analogy, that this is actually describing the reality.

You say, DNA is actually a language, no metaphor, right? The only differences between humans and machines are because we are much more brilliantly engineered. Right?

I’m fine with using the metaphors, but you seem to be taking them very literally. I am not comfortable with that. It leads to very poor thinking, and in the case of calling humans and example of technology, it makes me ethically and theologically squeemish [sic].

Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 30 Comments

How regular is normal?

Posted on 09/09/2016 by Jon Garvey

Tom Gilson runs the excellent Thinking Christian blog, but has also made a useful contribution to the recent debate over methodological naturalism. In 2011 he did a multi-part series here on why science neither needs, nor benefits from, MN, and came to the positive point with his alternative here. In the main, he favours a change of nomenclature rather than of practice, because of the ease with which MN, originally coined by a Christian (and not many decades ago, at that) to distinguish it from metaphysical naturalism, has actually become a potent means of endorsing the mythical link between science and atheism. Continue reading →

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How pseudoscience helped build the modern world

Posted on 06/09/2016 by Jon Garvey

Spending a sweltering summer bank-holiday Monday on an overcrowded Lyme Regis beach with my grand-daughter and her mother last week was a duty rather than a joy. The book on Lyme I’d brought along to read between building sandcastles and queuing for fish and chips told me that the town’s resident population of 3,000 expands to 15,000 on a hot summer’s day, and I could well believe it as they had all apparently encamped on the same small area of sand as us. Continue reading →

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

The foresight saga

Posted on 02/09/2016 by Jon Garvey

According to Open Theist Thomas Jay Oord in a BioLogos comment to our Eddie Robinson, Calvinists and Thomists are much less easy to persuade to change their views on the fundamental nature of God “from reason, Scripture and experience” than Arminians, Pentecostals, Anabaptists and others. Maybe that explains why I’m fated not to be impressed, though it does raise provocative questions about the reasons this might be so. Continue reading →

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