What I find truly remarkable is the degree of support one finds for thinking AI/robots can think and exhibit agency … but not simple life forms. Wendel Berry from his essay Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Counterpoint, 2000)**
“The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines—that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.”
I really like the idea that the answers in the two realms need to be congruent even though they aren’t answering the same questions. That’s a good term for how they get along, or at least should.
I also really like the idea that the two have gifts for each other. That’s something that goes right past a lot of Christians as though it’s a concept that can’t get its foot in the door of their minds.
Awesome quote:
No doubt God could have snapped the divine fingers and brought into being a ready-made world. But Darwin has shown us that God had done something cleverer than that – God had brought into being a creation so endowed with a potentiality the creatures could be allowed to explore and bring that potentiality to birth, creatures could be allowed to make themselves.
– Charles Kingsley, Darwin’s friend
Great question: Why is science possible at all? Our ability to apply scientific reasoning to the world around us goes far, far beyond what’s necessary for our survival in this world – and that’s highly suspect if evolution is all there is. Indeed it comes down to mathematics and its ability to describe pretty much whatever subject we choose for inquiry, and it consistently has equations that are elegant, beautiful, and often astoundingly simple/brief.
His section about how carbon is made and how fine the tuning must be for carbon to exist at all is worth a repeat listen.
Superb closing, about seeing more by using both science and religion to see the universe.
When the LEGO sets themselves were for pirates and dinosaurs.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
I recall in botany class looking at a genome where a section of DNA looked like it had been copied, flipped, and then reinserted back right next to the original. Of course my lab-mate asked the obvious question, “What does the backwards sequence do?”
Dr. Chambers responded that she had seen no papers on that yet – and maybe the student would like to do some research and write one?
Check this one out from Noble’s book Dance to the Tune of Life
We find it difficult to live without answers. That is what drives our metaphysical instincts, which in turn create our systems of religious and scientific thought. They are not so far apart as many might think. The quest for meaning can be seen as the religious instinct. The quest for explanation in terms of cause can be seen as the scientific instinct. But the two connect through the fact that we cannot even begin to develop an explanation without making some meaningful assumptions about the framework within which we can interpret what we see, feel and hear. We need a metaphysics within which we can develop our physics. That is as true today as it was in the earliest scientific discoveries, as we will see as the story in this book develops. Science also contributes to understanding meaning through identifying what we call function. It is too simplistic to say that science deals only with ‘how?’, while religion deals only with ‘why?’. The two questions intertwine.
I haven’t gotten to the article yet but I am even more intrigued now. What you say about the usefulness of hearing information from an unexpected angle is that it disarms our presumption that we already know where it must be going. In other words it creates a space where something new can appear to us.
Noble’s critics worry that entertaining religion-adjacent views subverts established science and the entire scientific project. But Noble’s research doesn’t challenge the scientific method. It challenges a scientific epoch marked by a purely mechanistic view of nature that coincided with the Industrial Revolution and age of mechanization. Noble appreciates concerns raised by skeptics, yet refuses to exclude natural phenomena from scientific inquiry.
just came down to watching the video of Paul Nurse about what is life. Did life emerge or was it created? Do you believe in a God that was not alive thus created life? How could a dead object create anything, and what does eternal life mean?
Nurse is so close an yet so wrong.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, the word or logos or coherent utterance or thought or a will of a mind can control a process.
As such, the biblical explanation that God spoke things into existence is a beautiful description of reality.
Where he misses it is when he declares evolution to be a process that creates biodiversity without the need of a designer, as he misses the point that the process is beautifully designed for the purpose of propagating life with a feedback loop that enhances complexity.
At around 7 minutes he boldly states that “And that means that a living thing can acquire purpose” Makes him sound like his life started without purpose and he acquired it at Tesco
I love it when at 7:12 you see the screws that hold it all together what is made to look so all natural - without the need of designer
