Signature in the BioLogos

Posted on 28/06/2011 by Jon Garvey

I’ve finally got round to reading Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. This is the second ID text I have read, having tackled Darwin’s Black Box  in 1998. In the view of some people on the BioLogos forum, that makes me an addict of “mendacious intellectual pornography.” Indeed, it was BioLogos that persuaded me to read Meyer. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 3 Comments

14th Century Marmoset

Posted on 15/06/2011 by Jon Garvey

This is just to produce a link to my new instrumental album, which you can hear and download here.

Posted in Music | 1 Comment

The image of God – being spokesperson for a worshipping cosmos

Posted on 15/06/2011 by Jon Garvey

I want to pick up on one throwaway idea on my previous blog. That is the thought that one aim of gaining knowledge, apart from the good of mankind, is to praise God for it. I was prompted in this by a video of Tom Wright, which I won’t link to as he was reflecting someone else’s thought – though no doubt, being Wright, some additional insight drifted in.

Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Theology | 1 Comment

Sciences and their theories of evolution

Posted on 13/06/2011 by Jon Garvey

As I rather feared when I was asked to write it, the comment on my post on BioLogos has degenerated into people from, or interested in, one discipline accusing those from others (and me in particular) of ignorance, usually with an implication of moral culpability. This is ironic, given that my article was written to encourage more helpful communication in interdisciplinary discussions.

After all, why do we seek knowledge at all? Continue reading →

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Temporarily over on BioLogos

Posted on 10/06/2011 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been a bit remiss in updating this blog. But in the meantime I’ve a new essay on the BioLogos website. It would have been here but they asked first…

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

The Demise of the Random?

Posted on 21/03/2011 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just come across this overview paper by James Shapiro. If the evidence he gives is as presented, it really does seem to me to present a potentially fruitful 21st century view of evolution.

The weak point of Neodarwinism has always been its reliance on random mutation as the ultimate source of variation. Indeed, for many decades after it was first suggested, mutation was downplayed as a better mechanism was sought for – that’s because all the experiments with mutation showed a zero rate of positive return (here is an amusing illustration of those results). Mutation really won the Neodarwinian day, it seems, mainly by default – and maybe by the big popular push it later got from “The Selfish Gene”. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science | 3 Comments

Will you, won’t you?

Posted on 10/03/2011 by Jon Garvey

Britain must be one of the only places in the world where you can hear a radio programme in which 3 philosophy professors discuss free will with an informed chairman. Free will poses a difficulty for naturalism because although we consciously make decisions – especially moral ones – every day, it is difficult to account for them.

The determinism of natural law would suggest free choice, and so moral accountability, to be impossible. Yet introducing the only other naturalistic mechanism, randomness (by invoking quantum physics for example) would, even if plausible, still exclude moral responsibility because ones will would be the “victim” of external random forces. So there seems no natural mechanism for the alternative to determinism, libertarianism. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

Did the Puritans Start the Seti Project?

Posted on 02/03/2011 by Jon Garvey

This quote about life on other planets was sent to me by my friend Penman, a regular poster on the Biologos site. It is by Richard Baxter, one of the greatest of the 17th century Puritan writers and preachers: 

I know it is a thing uncertain and unrevealed to us, whether all these globes be inhabited or not. But he that considereth, that there is scarce any uninhabitable place on earth, or in the water, or air; but men, or beasts, or birds, or fishes, or flies, or worms, and moles, do take up almost all; will think it a probability so near a certainty as not to be much doubted of, that the vaster and more glorious parts of the creation are not uninhabited; but that they have inhabitants answerable to their magnitude and glory.

Richard Baxter
quoted in “Gathered Gold”

Amazing to think that so soon after Galileo Evangelicals were not only considering, but welcoming, this issue.

The only problems I have in considering extraterrestrial life are (a) are there intelligent aliens in the image of God and (b) what happens if some of them sin – the Lord Jesus can’t, surely, die again?

Posted in Science, Theology | 5 Comments

Romans 5 and Pre-Adamic Man

Posted on 02/03/2011 by Jon Garvey

One of the passages that causes some difficulties for “old Earth” views of mankind, and especially of the origin and nature of sin, is Romans 5. But not only can these difficulties, I believe, be overcome, but the passage can cast considerable light on how spirituality and sin might come into a world in which the human race is acknowledged to have existed for many millennia. My essay on the subject here

Posted in Adam, Creation, Theology | 1 Comment

Diversity Rules, OK?

Posted on 02/03/2011 by Jon Garvey

Online comments on the recent case in which a Pentecostal couple were rejected as foster-parents tend to degenerate into the usual slanging matches over homophobia. But what the judges’ ruling seems to concern is not homosexual orientation as such, but equality and diversity legislation. They cite regulations to ensure that children “are provided with foster care services which value diversity and promote equality”. This is considerably more open-ended than the question of harming sexually confused children.

Mr and Mrs Johns themselves insisted that they would love any child unconditionally, but would not consent to endorse the homosexual lifestyle. They also pointed at that the issue was scarcely likely to arise in the children of 5-8 whom they were applying to foster. Social Services countered that such a child might have a homosexual brother. So we can already see that the question has broadened out from “abuse of a gay child” to “the possibility of a child’s being induced to abuse other children by not positively promoting their lifestyle.” Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology | 1 Comment