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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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): Continue reading →

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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 the creation of man in chapter 1 refers to the creation of Adam in ch2. There are other explanations apart from the material-literal for the 7-day creation, too, some of which predate the whole modern scientific issue. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, History, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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Thinking through theistic evolution

Posted on 03/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

I only recently encountered a large-scale 2009 survey of UK views on evolution and creation, called Rescuing Darwin (a strangely unconfident title for his Bicentennial Year). I won’t review it fully because the detailed analysis produces a confusing and not particularly clear picture, like the US survey recently discussed by Debbie Haarsma on BioLogos. For those interested, I will just quote the headline figures, as they are rather surprising for what is a far more deeply secularised society than the US. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Theology | 4 Comments

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. Continue reading →

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

Complex systems and top-down causation

Posted on 30/07/2014 by Jon Garvey

Lest you think that my last post  was merely whimsical (which seems a popular word here recently) have a look at the following YouTube talk by George F Ellis (quoted in that post), whose speciality as a physicist is complex systems. Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Science, Theology | 24 Comments

Form, health and optimization

Posted on 29/07/2014 by Jon Garvey

One of the things that used to intigue me when I was in medicine (in those occasional philosophical moments) was the fact that, though I spent my life combating disease, it was rather hard to pin down what health actually is. The 1946 WHO definition of health is very worthy, but totally impractical:

“A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Whilst I had a pretty holistic approach, I wasn’t going to sort out people’s social lives, and for some reason it was officially frowned upon to improve their mental well-being by sharing the gospel with them. But I knew reliably, if not infallibly, how to recognise “health”. In fact a couple of hundred thousand consultations gives one a Polanyi-type “personal knowledge” of what’s OK. Continue reading →

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