The Hump of the Camel

Another set of artistically-minded visitors this weekend, and another trip to our nearest Jurassic coast village and its small art galleries. For my wife and I another look at nice stuff we can’t afford, and probably wouldn’t if we could because we’d only come back next time and want something else. There aren’t enough walls in the house.

It never ceases to amaze me how much variety and ingenuity is on display in such places. There are dozens of different visions even of the local landscape, but beyond that a plethora of approaches to interpreting reality, to representing the human form or to abstract expression. Photographic realism, hazy impressionism, bold colour, subtle taste, quirkiness, humour, brooding solemnity… somebody’s putting all these and more into their art somewhere, and moreover producing a thrill of empathy when someone like me or you sees it.

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My last-but-one post reminded me of Eugene Koonin’s invocation of the multiverse to explain unlikely events such as the development of DNA replication. In my first post on this I hinted at some absurdities inherent in this idea, in that one ought to expect far more instances of unlikely events than we see if all things are possible in an infinite many-worlds multiverse. Blow the irreducibly complex biology – where are the unicorns and spontaneous transmutation of lead to gold?

Nevertheless, one might conclude that a more mainstream view of the multiverse (if “mainstream” has any meaning in gauging pure speculation) could still help explain highly contingent events. After all, if the weak anthropic principle can be invoked to explain fine tuning, why not the low probabilities emerging as problems in evolutionary events?

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There’s a chapter in the Gordon/Dembski magnum opus by Howard J Van Till, called Cosmic Evolution, Naturalism, and Divine Creativity. Of Van Till, the book says: “His books in the 1980s… played a powerful role in moving evangelical higher education to accept theistic evolution over against creationism.” So it’s clear that he is the source to which we need look for much of the theology of the BioLogos school of thought.

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I’ve been wading through the recent tome edited by Bruce Gordon and Bill Dembski, The Nature of Nature. It’s a tour de force indeed, though every reader is bound to find whole areas of discussion where their eyes glaze over from incomprehension. That’s no bad thing if it reminds us how little we know even when we think we’re well educated.

So far, the piece that’s intrigued me most is Fazale Rana’s essay on molecular convergence, simply because I was unaware of the extent of this (and, of course, because I actually understood it, which helps). What most unsettled me was his drawing our attention to the confusing origins of DNA replication. Continue reading →