Divine image or pareidolia?

Posted on 11/04/2015 by Jon Garvey

BioLogos is currently doing a series with the strapline: “A continued examination of the genetic evidence that God designed humans by way of common descent.” This is actually more an attempt by Dennis Venema to demonstrate the truth of a Neodarwinian account of human origins than simply an appeal to common descent (still less to divine design), but in fairness it would seem that the description is the result of sub-editing as it does not occur in the articles themselves. Continue reading →

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Do the Brontosaurus

Posted on 09/04/2015 by Jon Garvey

It’s nice to see that the genus Brontosaurus is being rehabilitated after over a century of being rudely lumped together with Apatosaurus. For many of us amateurs, of course, it never needed rehabilitation, having been far more iconic than its alter-ego throughout the last century. Continue reading →

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God, unbelief and universal morality

Posted on 07/04/2015 by Jon Garvey

A recent thread on disputes about the nature of information quickly degenerated into the kind of denegration of religious faith usually (though just as unproductively) seen on apologetics sites, which was why I asked for it to stop. Debating such matters is really outside The Hump’s remit – we are here to discuss the implications of holding Christian faith for science; other sites exist to argue about the validity of Christianity itself with anti-theists. I’m not sure why anyone would prefer to debate with apologetics amateurs rather than with the full-timers, other than lack of confidence in ones arguments. But that said, since Christians see morality as a fundamental part of God’s creation, it has an obvious place in any discussion about the alternative view that there is no creation, and hence this post. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology | 33 Comments

Truth from afar

Posted on 04/04/2015 by Jon Garvey

Rounding off my meanderings in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions I just want to pick up on a point I mentioned near the close of the last post.

Kuhn says that, in his view, it is a mistake to see science, in its various paradigmatic guises, as converging on the Final Truth of reality, preferring to see it as extending from where it is now. In other words he is committed to the value of science, and its progress, but more in terms of its utility in solving problems than in the grand ambition of reaching ultimate truth. In this, actually, he seems to echo part of the mediaeval concept of science, in which nobody seriously thought one could understand the world fully as it is, but at best find ways that were descriptively or predictively useful – hence “saving the appearances”. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 4 Comments

A few more Kuhnian implications

Posted on 02/04/2015 by Jon Garvey

Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, addressed in a recent post, condenses many ideas that have already found their way into columns here in the last year or two, so I like him a lot.

One such idea is the way in which perception itself, as opposed to merely the interpretation of perception, is theory-led (or paradigm-led, in his terms). He gives a number of examples in science in which it was simply impossible to see something under one paradigm that became impossible to miss under the new. For example, Aristotelian science saw swinging stones as a question about interrupted falling. Galileo, however, influenced by a century of the new ideas that had replaced the Aristotelian framework, saw them as pendulums, a matter of perpetual oscillation. The different way of seeing led to different questions, different experiments, and the deduction of different principles. Some of the old was lost as the new was gained. Continue reading →

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Against method

Posted on 01/04/2015 by Jon Garvey

A nice story in The Independent: A new (old) cure for MRSA? Revolting recipe from the Dark Ages may be key to defeat infection.

The story, as I hope you’ll read, speaks of a “stomach-churning potion…”, a mediaeval eye-salve which nevertheless has been found to treat MRSA. The journalistic aim of the piece is to amaze one that the Neanderthal ignorance of the Dark Ages could accidentally produce something which, though inevitably Dark and Horrible, pluckily rivals the infallible results of Science™. Continue reading →

Posted in History, Medicine, Science | 11 Comments

Kuhn’s predictions make prediction harder

Posted on 30/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Several decades ago I had a patient with complex needs that boiled down to what’s called “personality disorder”, combined with a low IQ. The problems presented as a great dependency on a weekly fix of doctor, on whom she could offload her many nebulous problems and vaguely uncomfortable feelings. She actually managed reasonably well on that. Continue reading →

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

RIP John Renbourn

Posted on 28/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Thursday saw the passing of one of the great acoustic guitarists of the world – and one of the formative influences on my more limited technique. Continue reading →

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Magic in an age of incredulity

Posted on 27/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Have you ever noticed how many serious academic bloggers are addicted to science fiction? Hardnosed researchers of evolutionary biology, or analytic philosophy or even critical theology will throw in regular posts about the latest Dr Who or Star Wars story. That got me wondering why magic remains so popular in fiction, in an age when nobody believes in magic.

For science fiction, after all, is only really the supernatural set within pseudo-science rather than demonology (if you don’t count Phillip Pulman or Terry Pratchett, where it is set in demonology). As the introduction to one of the sci-fi anthologies on my shelf says, a story beginning “The last man in the world was sitting reading, when there was a knock at the door” would have been a ghost-story in the nineteenth century, but is science fiction now. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 5 Comments

Blues is truth, and so is Science

Posted on 25/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

There are probably not many readers here who would fully endorse Brownie McGhee’s dictum that “Blues is Truth”. Whilst you might well agree with me that the blues is a music very expressive of the human condition, you’d probably consider that its truth lies in a fairly restricted sphere. You might even wonder if its practitioners always bare their souls honestly, rather than playing what they know their audiences will pay for. Then again, though Leadbelly said “There never was a white man had the blues” it owes its continued popularity, and even existence, to the efforts of a generation of white, British Grammar School kids like Eric Clapton and Brian Jones, who never knew what a mojo is, quite apart from how to get theirs working. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments