Richard Dawkins’ new children’s book, The Magic of Reductionism Reality has a really useful chapter on miracles. Dawkins bases much of his position on Hume’s argument against miracles: Continue reading
I remember a cartoon in Punch many years ago (sadly all the cartoons in Punch were many years ago now), in which a sudden new display of stars in the night sky spelled out, in evenly spaced Roman capitals, “GOD IS DEAD”. The caption underneath read, “Official Humanist Miracle Declared.”
Why do many atheists get so angry against both creation and religion? If it were the evidence alone, you’d expect a purely academic disagreement. It’s often stated in terms of the tyrannical history of religion, and yet that is characteristically either exaggerated or actually flies in the face of fact. Yet people like Coyne et al seem to hate God himself, even though they deny his existence.
Here’s a quote from David Berlinski’s obituary on Christopher Hitchens:
Christopher Hitchens found objectionable the very idea of a source of authority, and so of power, greater than his own.
Is “autonomous naturalism” a recognised term?
Challenges to ones worldview assumptions usually come from exposure to a different culture. My assumptions about the place of talking about ones faith in medical practice received a jolt in the early nineties when I first read Richard Baxter’s 1650 spiritual classic The Saints’ Everlasting Rest.
However much Christians may agree or disagree with the writings of the late Francis Schaeffer, he had one thing absolutely right. And that is that we are called, as Christians, to submit every area of of lives to Christ, to further the end that all creation will eventually acknowledge his rule. Together with the more immediate end of being salt and light in the world. I picked up that revolutionary idea as a student, as a result of which I tried from the start to do my chosen career of medicine “Christianly”. That did not mean “fanatically”, but it meant taking the trouble to question how much of what I was taught was consistent with living as a disciple, and how much needed to be re-examined. I’m surprised, looking back, how much of a rebel against the system it made me right up until my retirement.
Over on BioLogos I’ve been involved (possibly too much) in a couple of quite fruitful exchanges based on blog series appearing there about the sociology and philosophy of science. If I’d been aware of this two part essay by Alvin Plantinga I’d probably just have given the link and bowed out, since he makes virtually the same arguments as I did, only better. I’d like to say it’s a case of great minds thinking alike, but more likely I’ve just picked up the ideas through the filter of people who have read him more than I have.
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Actually, if I hadn’t liked the alliteration, I wouldn’t have used “falsifying” in the title. What I really want to assert is that none of the key ideas in Neodarwinian theory (taken as the heart of evolution) are either verified or logically capable of being demonstrated empirically, let alone falsified. This has been said before, but it’s worth reiterating, because we’re still being told it’s as factual as gravity…
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I’ve stumbled across this astonishing series of articles by Stephen L Talbott at the Nature Institute. Astonishing because it’s an overview of some of the new (and astonishing!) processes being discovered within the cell, including some very good stuff on epigenetics, yet put in the context of a whole scientific and philosophical critique of not only Neodarwinism, but of the whole reductionist approach to biology and of ateleological science overall. An ambitious set of targets indeed!
There’s a lot of it, and some is somewhat technical, but don’t let that put you off wading through the lot. It’s some of the most conceptually fruitful stuff I’ve read in a long while.
An interesting article on Evolution News & Views by Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a German molecular plant geneticist. Basically he claims precedence in publishing the process recently re-discovered by Austin L Hughes and published in Heredity. Apparently the idea (called plasticity-relaxation-mutation) has been around in the literature for 25 years, but not in English journals.
Its importance is that it provides an evolutionary adaptive mechanism completely different to (and conceivably a complete replacement for) adaptive natural selection.
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A refutation of William Paley’s design argument
(Garvey, J.C. Kipling, J.R. et al 2011)
William Paley, the 19th century Intelligent Design Creationist, tried to put the scientific clock back 500 years to the time when Francis Bacon was burned at the stake for denying that the world was flat, by using the example of a self-replicating watch found during a walk on the heath.
His “argument” (which was never peer-reviewed in the proper way) has been rightly dismissed many times on the basis that a watch is quite different from the biological systems known to have evolved by random mutation and natural selection. But in these days when Fundamentalist attempts to impose the God of the Bible under the guise of science are threatening to undermine the fabric of the Universe, and have already produced global warming, there is now a clear need to refute his sophistry from a purely scientific and evolutionary viewpoint.
