Evolution Speciation – A brief history: The late eighteenth century 5 Apr 20146 Apr 2014 After Linnaeus had settled on the older mechanism of hybridisation of genera with other genera or with varieties formed by geographical conditions as the cause of new species, the topic began to pick up speed. Hybridisation remained the usual method as late as the 1830s (e.g., in Lindley) but two… Continue Reading
Accommodationism Accommodating science: Faith and reason 5 Mar 2014 [This is the penultimate chapter. I can’t be bothered trying to get the references or footnotes included in the posts, so you’ll have to wait for the book. Some of this has appeared on the blog before in less well written form, so don’t worry about the deja vu] All… Continue Reading
Accommodationism Accommodating science: Evolution and change 2 Mar 20146 May 2014 Robert J. Berry is a geneticist at University College London. He is also an evangelical Christian and has written a number of works on the compatibility of religion (his kind, anyway) and evolution (Berry 1975). He was moved to write to the science journal Nature, in which he took to… Continue Reading
Accommodationism Accommodating science: Geology and Time 27 Feb 20142 Mar 2014 Some religions have no real view of history, while others hold to some kind of eternal cycle, but the western religions have a narrative with a beginning middle and end. And in the best known version of this – Christianity, what else? – history is given as a very short… Continue Reading
Accommodationism Accommodating science: Astronomy 27 Feb 201427 Feb 2014 If science and religion do conflict, what are the points of conflict that have occurred? These tend to have arisen in historical contexts as the science evolved. I shall consider five sciences and how religion has responded to them: astronomy, or cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology and biology in general, medicine,… Continue Reading
Accommodationism Undefining religion 15 Feb 201429 Jun 2024 [This will be a series of posts based on a book I am writing – see last post] When anthropologists began to study religions in cultures other than the European context, which itself was based upon Roman jurisprudence, they encountered a difficulty. Until this time, in the mid-nineteenth century, “religion”… Continue Reading
Biology Natural classification 23 Jan 201423 Jan 2014 It occurs to me that I haven’t plugged my own book here. What a failure on my part! It was published in December, so it is really time I did so. In this book, Malte Ebach and I discuss a topic not often discussed in the philosophy of science: the… Continue Reading
Biology Does life exist? 11 Jan 2014 Life, I believe, is what physics does on one particular planet on a Wednesday. More exactly, it is a series of chemical and physical dynamics that occurs between 3.85 billion years ago and now on this planet. Ferris Jabr, an editor at the Scientific American site, has a piece entitled “Why… Continue Reading
Evolution What is “nature”? 2 Jan 20142 Jan 2014 Many critics of science, including Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig,attack something they call “naturalism”, the view that the natural world is all there is. As Papineau notes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, the term has no very precise meaning in philosophy, or in science…. Continue Reading
Evolution The Day of the Doctor of Evolution: CoE #66 1 Dec 20133 Dec 2013 I was eight years old in late November 1963. I didn’t pay much attention to the TV news – some guy had been shot or something, and I wasn’t to know that C. S. Lewis had died until much later – but I was instantly taken by the eerie sound… Continue Reading