The consequences of 'a beginning'

Quote taken from a New Scientist article

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

Read it all here

Non identical twins

There have been a few recent items in the news concerning 'twin' planets for our very own earth. They centre discoveries in other solar systems of planets of similar size and composition to the earth together with speculation that perhaps we could live there one day, or perhaps they contain life too.

Actually what they highlight is how special the earth is. For example these two recent discoveries are 'hot as hell'.

By faith

By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

Hebrews 11 v 3

Early days

It is truly amazing that we know so much now about our early days. For example, Africans do not have DNA which is specifically derived from Neanderthals, whereas people in the rest of the world do carry a small amount. This confirms the picture of human history derived from studying fossils. Neanderthal bones have not been found in Africa, so it isn’t surprising that their DNA is not there either. The fact that non-Africans have some of the DNA found in Neanderthal bones confirms that which geneticists knew from other studies: we have two distinct groups of human ancestors—those who left Africa in ancient times and those who stayed.

Quoted from an essay on Biologos

Twist on life

This TED talk describes an interesting twist on studies into the origin of life.

Cronin and his team are looking at inorganic matter (i.e. chemicals that don't contain carbon) for answers. There are, of course, huge quantities of speculation involved, and Cronin's willingness to carelessly indulge should make us wary.

This is unlikely to go anywhere. It is widely acknowledged that it is the unique properties of carbon that make complex life possible. The only other possible contender is Silicon but it is nowhere near as flexible. Organic (carbon based) chemistry has an unparalleled diversity in the compounds it can generate and it has the critical ability to be to form polymers. As an added bonus it is the fourth most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen, helium and oxygen.

The only life we have evidence for is intrinsically tied to the unique nature of Carbon.

Evolution of birds

The development of birds from theropod dinosaurs is one that captures the imagination. It has also been captured in the fossil record with a 'warehouse full' of specimens available for consideration

A new find from Canada has uncovered a range of different feather configurations trapped inside amber. The beauty of fossils found in amber is that in comparison to their compressed counterparts in rock they are voluminous and three dimensional. They even preserve the colours.

Book Review: Reasons

Reasons edited by Thomas Gaston

This is a book that needed to be written.

It is, in overview, a panoramic look at some of the key intellectual reasons for believing in God, Jesus and the Bible, stringing them together in a compact and readable volume. And what a timely work it is. In the developed world faith is popularly regarded as nothing but superstition - something for the ignorant and uneducated. The evidence of this book illustrates that this is far from the truth.

Yet it doesn't ignore criticism and is even honest enough to draw the readers attention to possible objections to its arguments. But the overwhelming message is that Biblical faith in the 21st Century is robust and, contrary to popular belief, reachable by reason.

There are two halves to the book. Initially it looks at reasons for seeking. Why in this world of ever increasing secularism should we be interested in a God? The book begins with the wide angle lens examining the general philosophical reasons for asking the question, before moving to the scientific grounds of the finely tuned universe and the origin of life on earth. In terms of biology's witness of God this is where the book stops. In some ways this is a little disappointing, but it is equally important to recognise what the authors haven't put in. More on this later.

The next chapter looks at Consciousness and explains how consideration of this subject should lead us away from mere materialism. It speculates that quantum theory could provide an insight in to how consciousness works (although having suggested this it could do with more explanation of what quantum theory is and how it might relate to the problem of mind). The chapter is an important one but it in my opinion it also needs to be clearer that it is not advocating a kind of floaty soul that is separate from the body.

The next reason to seek comes from examining the evidence of human morality, before the first section concludes with what is the weakest chapter of the book, on The Problem of Evil.

In some ways this chapter is a little out of place here. Suffering is more likely to be seen as a reason not to seek God. But having included it in the book I didn't find the conclusions satisfying. The tone was at times condescending and a lot of space is used arguing over how much pain is required for there to be a problem, which all felt a little irrelevant. Then, when considering natural disasters such as the 2004 Tsunami we are told that this is not a theological event. I don't find this satisfactory, neither do I think that it is useful to explain the existence of pain as because it is only 'temporary'. Unfortunately the chapter only begins to address the key issues at the end when it says 'Suffering is mandatory for spiritual development'. This is the area that needs to be explored in far more depth.

But the next section gets us back on track with Reasons for Believing. It is crammed full of useful information from the textual reliability and historical accuracy of the Biblical texts to the evidence of prophecy, the nation of Israel, and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. There are many juicy morsels of information in these chapters that can't be conveyed properly in this short review, but certainly the gentle persuasion of the 'Resurrection' chapter is a particular triumph.

And here, after a short Epilogue, the book ends. But as alluded to above it is interesting to recognise what isn't included. There are no Intelligent Design type of arguments (that is if we don't include the very valuable chapter on abiogeneis). This is a great relief as they could have undermined the whole package. Though it does feel like there should be something more to say about life on earth. As yet this is still being worked through by Christian thinkers and a range of views exist. For example, there are Simon Conway Morris' ideas about convergent evolution making human beings an inevitability of the process of evolution, through to others who feel that the emergence of human beings required much more guidance. Either way it feels that the teleology of the earth's natural history should be an important topic.

The reader will leave this book amazed that such an enormous scope of argument has been covered in a little over 200 pages. This is the great value of the work. Such a wide range of issues surround belief in God, Jesus and the Bible, and in this one place a good number of them are dealt with expertly, each one building on the last.

The few criticisms discussed above certainly don't get in the way of me offering a hearty recommendation.