Life: Keeping you safe from a deterministic universe, Part III

By , on March 31st, 2009%

So somewhere, somehow some chemicals started replicating. It’s no shame that science hasn’t cracked this yet. There are some great hints starting to become manifest, maybe RNA started it, but how is actually irrelevant to our metaphysical quest. Somehow it got started, is a perfectly acceptable beginning to our quest at this stage of the science. But we want to be careful about just saying “God did it” because when science figures this out we don’t want to have hung our hat on this lack of explanation as a coat hook for our belief. (See my “God of the Gaps” post for more on this.) Continue reading Life: Keeping you safe from a deterministic universe, Part III

5 comments   Evolution, Faith, Philosophy of Science, Religion

It was determined at the big bang you would read this post: Part II

By , on March 29th, 2009%

I have great difficulty influencing the past. Try as I might, it seems to be a fixed place that manipulating is hard because time’s arrow, as it is called, moves in only one direction. Breathtakingly bright physicists don’t really see a reason for this, but it does seem to be an empirical observation of how the universe unfolds. It might be that the universe is deterministic and if so, time is a bit of an illusion. Continue reading It was determined at the big bang you would read this post: Part II

12 comments   Evolution, Philosophy of Science, Religion

The reason there are tumbleweeds: Part I

By , on March 25th, 2009%

As we returned from St. George yesterday on I-15 it was breath-stealing windy and tumbleweeds were occasionally blowing across the freeway. Most were about the size of basketballs. I told my teenage son that you don’t need to worry about avoiding tumbleweeds because they were dry and brittle. Continue reading The reason there are tumbleweeds: Part I

7 comments   Uncategorized

So you want to learn something about evolution

By , on March 14th, 2009%

So you’ve read Origin of Species and you want to learn something about modern evolutionary biology (or you’ve decided to save the classic for later, but you still want to get the low-down on modern evolutionary studies). There is a cornucopia of new books on evolution, so which do you choose? Which one should you start with? Now I’m going to make some daring assumptions. Continue reading So you want to learn something about evolution

13 comments   Evolution, Faith

Greetings from Dakar

By , on March 3rd, 2009%

Sorry not to have posted for a while, I’m in Dakar, Senegal working on tsetse fly problems and the prep for this trip has slowed me down a bit. But I wanted to give you a heads up that good things are on the way!

Coming up:

A short post on Continue reading Greetings from Dakar

2 comments   Uncategorized