Sheldrake and divine action – a thought experiment

Posted on 23/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

I’ve mentioned Rupert Sheldrake in a few posts, and his name has come up in comments, usually with the slant, “He’s probably nuts, but there are more things in heaven and earth…” In retrospect I have underestimated the extent to which we nowadays live in intellectually muddied waters (even here one has had to learn that “scientifically discredited” may mean no more than “Jerry Coyne’s trolls scoff at it”). There’s a long and interesting interview with Sheldrake on Best Schools, which shows that he’s read and studied a lot more than many of his detractors. That doesn’t make him right in his theorising, but it does make him more worth reading than many (as is, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, coming from a completely different position). His great strength is in investigating carefully what others dismiss out of hand. Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology | 6 Comments

The eclipse of the camel

Posted on 21/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Well, a near total eclipse of the sun occurred here in Britain yesterday, and I was in a position actually to take some photographs. To be precise I was pulling up brambles behind our garden fence, so in a perfect south-facing position. Here’s what I got: Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science | 10 Comments

Knowing and creating

Posted on 20/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

An interesting interview with one of those proposing non-Darwinian models of evolution, Luis P Villarreal, on Huffington Post. His virus-centred approach is just another one of many recent advances, but it highlights an aspect that in his estimation has been woefully sidelined in evolutionary studies. Continue reading →

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Heaven is up there… sort of

Posted on 18/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

J Richard Middleton has a piece on his publisher’s blog expanding an idea that was implicit, though not stressed, in his book A New Heaven and a New Earth, which I briefly reviewed here. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Theology | 4 Comments

Reasons beyond reason

Posted on 16/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

There’s a thought-provoking podcast on Randal Rauser’s blog, featuring philosopher Michael Rea on naturalism. He starts by carefully defining “naturalism” in accordance with those who most espouse it in the academic literature (because it’s one of those words that has ended up meaning almost anything and everything). His main conclusion is hardly new – that naturalism, understood as the decision to accept as authoritative only scientific epistemology, cannot be justified by naturalism. Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology | 22 Comments

Eager beavers and missing lynx

Posted on 14/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

Exciting times ecologically close to home. Just a dozen miles from here, the first wild beavers to be seen in Britain since they were hunted to extinction in the eighteenth century have been granted UK citizenship. Presumably introduced deliberately (as none have been known to escape from captivity) the fate of the half-dozen or so living on the River Otter has been in the balance, as the risk of their carrying infection was discussed. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science | 3 Comments

Dark arts

Posted on 13/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

For some reason, far too late last night I found myself following a contentious thread on a site I don’t normally visit, because (as in this instance) it tends to be a slanging match between Creationists and Atheists. I was just curious, honest. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 37 Comments

Marking the occasion

Posted on 12/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

A year ago I did a piece on the three philosphical models of divine action. This was mainly to show the inadequacy of the “mere conservation” model that seemed to dominate the BioLogos mindset regarding the natural creation, leaving only the category of “miracle” to account for God’s action in the life of the believer, history and (in extremis) nature. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 16 Comments

If Adam wasn’t alone, then what?

Posted on 10/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

A. Leo Oppenheim, writing in the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography on Man and Nature in Mesopotamian Civilization, makes an interesting (and usually unnoticed) distinction between the two “creation stories” of Genesis.

The relationship between man and nature in the ancient Near East is nowhere as pointedly formulated as in Genesis 1:26, where it is said that God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The parallel version of the Creation story (Genesis 2:19) formulates the same relationship differently, and in a way that is more relevant to the characteristic attitude of those civilizations that relied on writing for the preservation of their intellectual traditions. It says, “God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” While it was thus man’s privilege as the lord of creation to give names to the animals, the knowledge of all their names and their individual features and behavior was considered the privilege of the sage. This is illustrated by the passage (I Kings 4:33) that extols the wisdom of Solomon: “And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology | 5 Comments

Essences, fuzzy or firm

Posted on 08/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

In this post, on the possibility of “adamic man” living with some other kind of “humanity”, I dropped in a passing comment on the difficulty for Darwinian gradualistic evolution of being able to come to grips the meaning of a word like “human” at all.

Merv picked this up (remembering at least one exchange on universals we’ve had in the past):

Does the fact that we can’t look at our continuous visible spectrum and point precisely to where it stops being red and starts being orange (other than by arbitrary selection of a cutoff frequency) mean that there can be no sustainable category of “red” colors?

It just doesn’t seem to follow that an inability to define precise boundaries negates entire (and nevertheless important!) categories.

Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 25 Comments