The Hump of the Camel

Argon (an occasional poster here in the past) made an ironic, but serious, point over on the Methodological Naturalism thread at Biologos.

After talking about a result in his own protein modelling research that seems to fall midway between the predictions of “chance” and “design” (whilst favouring neither), he concludes that God has a sense of humour – or, more seriously, that deliberate ambiguity is built into the Creation:

It is highly improbable that a designer would leave ambiguous, non-objectively discernible marks on its creation. Similarly, it is improbable that a purely natural, designer-less universe would leave ambiguous marks behind. Considering the great difficulty in demonstrating the existence or non-existence of a designer throughout the ages, this leaves one to conclude: The universe was designed so as to make the certainty of a designer completely indeterminable.

Continue reading →

With a large tome in the post from Amazon, and a trip to the beach imminent, I picked the thinnest unread book on my shelves to take. This was part of a job-lot I acquired last year from a Baptist minister, and was The Clockwork Image, by Donald M Mackay: at 111 pages even shorter than my online book God’s Good Earth (plug). Sadly most of his books are out of print now, though he was one of the most important (and both theologically and scientifically competent) writers on science and faith until his relatively early death in 1987. See this obituary from the ASA. Continue reading →

Our own Sy Garte did an excellent overview of the current state of evoltionary theory at an ASA meeting recently. Here is a link to his blog, and here is the talk itself.

When I ran our church youth group, in the late 1980s, one of our young people (a gifted musician) came from a Catholic family. He rather resented being expected to play organ at his parents’ church every week, especially as he felt increasingly estranged from his religious background. One Sunday he complained to me that in the morning he’d played a hymn whose words included, “O blessed Pelican.” He had no idea what it was about, and wondered if I knew. Continue reading →

Computational biologist and theistic evolutionist Joshua Swamidass invited us at The Hump to respond to his online challenge The-100-Year-Old-Tree. My response was longer than the others he has posted, so between us we distilled it down to the form in which it appears on his website. This (following the challenge itself) is my original full version. Continue reading →

This is an expansion of a theme I brought up in a discussion on BioLogos. Ever since evolutionary theory became an intellectually preferred way to view the Universe (long before Darwin and any persuasive scientific evidence – we have to go back at least to Buffon and the Enlightenment philosophy of the eighteenth century) it has been tempting to some to recast theology in the light of evolution. This is still, sadly, routinely done in theistic evolution, as the conflicts that occasionally surface at the ASA, CiS or BioLogos show to those with eyes to see. Continue reading →