The meaning of 'bara'

I've come across this interesting paper on the meaning of the Hebrew word 'bara', which is often translated as 'created' in the Genesis 1 creation account.

The word is used selectively:

v1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

v21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.

v27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Its interesting to ponder on why these aspects were selected for bara creation. Traditional lexical entries for the word have defined it as meaning 'to create or form' but this paper suggests that it is better rendered as 'to separate'. Van Wolde describes it as being:

... a temporal process in which God moves the objects along a path, at the beginning of which they are not distin- guished and proximate, and at the end of which they are spatially distant and kept separate

This difference is a significant one. I don't think it would be in keeping with the context of this chapter to force the meaning of the words to fit the physical creation processes (this approach nearly always ends up going wrong somewhere along the line), but rather to think about what spiritual messages this is giving us....

P.S A number of scholars and commentators disagree with this thesis. See here, for example.

Bad Religion

Last week there were a number of reports in the press of a debate between Tony Blair and Chris Hitchins on whether religion is a force for good in the world or not. Most accounts agree that Hitchins won the debate, indeed he has previously written at great length on the evils of religion (e.g. 'God is not good').

For those of us with a positive experience of religion it is not hard to see how distorted Hitchens' views are. He is more one sided than the Second Test in Adelaide, rarely giving any acknowledgement to the other side of the story (though ironically his younger brother, Peter, is a convert to christianity from atheism).

But, with a tip of the hat and a nod of the head to Heaven in ordinarie, I saw this quote from Charles Dickens' character 'the Ghost of Christmas Present'. It neatly describes the difference between good and bad religion, a difference which often parallels that between good and bad science.

‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’

Life out of death

Perhaps Agatha Christie would have been intrigued by this piece of new research.

The chemistry of life revolves around six key chemicals. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur make up the major ingredients of many of our body's building materials.

However, from the bottom of a lake in California comes a bacteria that uses arsenic as a substitute for phosphorus. Arsenic has a similar size and charge to phosphorus which makes the switch possible and this in turn presents interesting discussion points. If phosphorus can be substituted then what else? Could there be an entirely different system of life out there based on different elements?

Whilst this is a genuinely novel discovery it is unlikely that it can be extended so far. For a start even this finding has its limits:

It is thought that downstream metabolic processes are generally not compatible with As-incorporating molecules because of differences in the reactivities of P- and As-compounds. These downstream biochemical pathways may require the more chemically stable P-based metabolites

This microbe probably represents the outer fringes of what makes up the biosphere, rather than the doorway into another world of possibilities.

Planet earth from above

NASA has published some breathtaking images taken by satellites orbiting the planet. The example above is of the Norwegian coast.

Take a look here.

The Design Argument

If the argument for design be thus demonstrated, do not the details urgently raise the question of whether the designer was all good? The ruthless setting of one species against another, armed with ingenious and seemingly cruel weapons of war; the disregard of one except as prey for the other; the offensive traits developed in the world of competitive life, would seem to implicate God in the cruel world of Nature, without showing any way out of the dilemma.

The phrase 'The Finger of God' as used by Jesus was with reference to the casting out of demons and would suggest that some forces in nature are not of God, however powerful and ingenious; and are indeed the subject of God's action against them. It has to be remembered that the ingeniousness of the resistance of the blood stream is matched by that of the invading bacteria.

Ron Storer

BioLogos

For those who want to look into the area of Faith and Science through the eyes of professionals (and not amateurs like myself!) then this site has some fascinating material.

On squeaky voices...

The fact that the early universe gives rise to an 'interesting' abundance of Helium-4, that is, neither zero nor 100%, is a consequence of a delicate coincidence between the gravitational and weak interactions.

There was a tiny window of opportunity for the formation of the light elements at the beginning of the Big Bang. In the first 0.04 seconds it was far too hot for little nuclei not to disintegrate. On the other hand after around 8 minutes the temperature was too low to force the wee nucleons to come in range of the strong nuclear force. So in 14 billion years of history there was only one period of time, just long enough to boil a pan of pasta, during which Hydrogen and Helium could have been formed.

The proportion of neutrons and protons that combined to form either hydrogen or helium is dictated by the various actions of different forces (as alluded to in the quote from Barrow and Tipler above). The maths works out at about 1 He for every 10 H nuclei.

Were the forces not so delicately balanced then we would have 100% Helium or 100% Hydrogen. In the former case life wouldn't be possible (no water, stars that burnt up faster). In the later life would probably have been possible.

Quote Unquote

As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it seems almost as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.

F Dyson

Cosmic coincidences part 2

Four and a half billion years ago, when the earth was just a wee bairn, it was struck by an object the size of Mars. From what physicists can make out collisions of this magnitude are extremely rare in the universe. When the dust of that collision had settled there were two key outcomes. Firstly the earth had grown a bit bigger, and secondly the debris that was kicked into space coagulated to form the unusually large moon.

Typically moons are very small compared to the planet they orbit, but for earth's satellite body things are very different. This is crucial to maintaining our climate. The size of the moon means that it acts as a gravitational steadying force, stabilising the earth's tilt, and in doing so preventing wild fluctuations in the heat coming from the sun.

Conditions might be bad for complex land-based life if there were no moon and obliquity varied significantly.

Cosmic coincidences part 1

New Scientist magazine this week has an article that discusses some of the unlikely happenings that occurred in the universe en route to the arrival of us.

In the first moments of the Big Bang matter and antimatter were present in equal amounts. The thing is that when these two come into contact with one another they wipe each other out in a spray of photons, so in theory that's all that should be left of the universe.

However the reality is another matter, so to speak. Matter won the day over antimatter and in doing so creating a universe that really does matter.

Something tipped the balance in favour of matter and in doing so allowed a universe to develop in which life could exist.

Something seems to have favoured the creation of matter at a crucial moment within the first instants after the big bang.

My causes

I just watched an interesting programme in which Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs decided to put his faith to the test and invite four leading atheists to challenge him.

One of the four was a scientist who felt that because science could explain, or has the potential to explain, everything that he is, then there is no room and no need for God. The way he framed his position brought home to me some key issues in sharp clarity:

- The atheist has to have faith that God cannot be one of those causal forces and...
- The atheist has to believe that God cannot work through the medium of any of the other causal forces... to get to the point where they don't believe that there is a God
- Many believers fail to grasp the reality of some of the myriad causal forces that contribute to the making of each one of us

These forces are indeed wide ranging. They involve nature and nurture, culture and genetics, history and biology - a spicy cocktail if ever there was one, but included in that list, and indeed running through it, I include God.

Another gap closed?

I just bought a copy of The Times for the first time in months - so it worked!

The current commotion is all about pre-release comments from Prof Stephen Hawking, author of an upcoming book The Grand Design. What has he said?

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

We'll have to wait until the book is published to find out the full story, but essentially we're talking about origins, origins of the universe and the Big Bang. The religious problem exists for people whose belief in God is fuelled by things that science can't explain - the gaps. However, before the atheists get too excited, for many believers this just isn't the way they understand God.

God is not squeezed inbetween like intellectual Polyfiller, rather he is the potter who shapes the Universe he created. In a way that means that there shouldn't be any gaps. As Dr David Wilkinson, astrophysicist and theologian, said today

The God Christians believe in is a God who is intimately involved with every moment of the universe's history, not just its beginnings

Hawking concluded his previous book by saying that if we could unify the physics of the Big Bang we should 'know the mind of God', and perhaps this next work will be his answer, but one thing is for sure: God's mind is not deciphered entirely by equations. However revealing they may be, there is a limit to the efficacy of science in this domain. Dr Lee Rayfield, Bishop of Swindon, put it like this

His conclusion does not change the remarkable coherence between the nature of our universe and the understanding Christians have about the nature and character of God.

Still, the storm in a teacup will continue for at least as long as The Times' serialisation goes on. Dawkins will continue to buzz like a high energy particle at straw men and soft targets, but the real loser will be truth. Some people will be turned off science by the comments, others religion. What a shame. As theoretical physicist Prof Chris Isham lamented...

I groaned when I read this. Stephen's always saying this sort of thing - he loves the publicity.

And I'll be buying the book on the back of it. Sucked in!

Ancient Near East beliefs

It seems clear that the creation accounts of early Genesis were designed to undermine the prevalent myths of the time. The following example comes from Egypt, dating to around 2000 years ago. The full text can be found here.

Serve God, that he may do the like for you, with offerings for replenishing the altars and with carving; it is that which will show forth your name, and God is aware of whoever serves Him. Provide for men, the cattle of God, for He made heaven and earth at their desire. He suppressed the greed of the waters, He gave the breath of life to their noses, for they are likenesses of Him which issued from His flesh. He shines in the sky for the benefit of their hearts; He has made herbs, cattle, and fish to nourish them. He has killed His enemies and destroyed His own children, because they had planned to make rebellion; He makes daylight for the benefit of their hearts, and he sails around in order to see them

The Instruction of Merikare

Asa Gray...

Darwinian teleology has the special advantage of accounting for the imperfections and failures as well as for the successes. It not only accounts for them, but turns them to practical account... So the most puzzling things of all to the old-school teleologists are the principles of the Darwinian,... it would appear that in Darwinian evolution we may have a theory that accords with, if it does not explain, the principal facts, and a teleology that is free from the common objection.. if {a theist} cannot recognize design in Nature because of evolution, he may be ranked with those of whom it was said 'Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe'

Darwiniana, 1876, as quoted in Barrow and Tipler

The Weak Anthropic Principle

Barrow and Tipler offer this definition:

"The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so"

Here's an example.

We observe that we exist at a point in the life of the universe where carbon is readily available (it wasn't this way earlier on).

But then this would have to be so - because if there wasn't any carbon then there wouldn't be any us.

The Anthropic Principle

In the perspective of these violences of matter and field, of these ranges of heat and pressure, of these reaches of space and time, is not man an unimportant bit of dust on an unimportant planet in an unimportant galaxy in an unimportant region somewhere in vastness of space?

No! The philosopher of old was right! Meaning is important, is even central. It is not only that man is adapted to the universe. The universe is adapted to man. Imagine a universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percent one way or the other? Man could never come into being in such a universe. That is the central point of the anthropic principle. According to this principle, a life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design the world.

John A Wheeler's Foreword to 'The anthropic cosmological principle' by John Barrow and Frank Tipler

The Neanderthals

Here is an interesting overview on what we know about the Neanderthals. Its 45 minutes long and features Simon Conway Morris as a contributor.

Genesis in photos

by Sebastiao Salgado
from this fascinating project.

The first of many

Half way down the west coast of Africa, in Gabon, the oldest examples of multicellular life has been discovered. The rocks date back 2.1 billion years. Looking at the growth patterns scientists deduced that these creatures exhibited cell-to-cell signalling and coordinated responses - a feature commonly associated with multicellular organization.

Two hundred million years earlier there had been a dramatic increase in the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere, a phenomenon that may well have contributed to this development.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7302/full/nature09166.html

The very beginning

Here's a link to a great article on the implications of the Big Bang on philosophy.

Joy, love and light

This poem moves me to tears. It speaks of the emptiness of a world without God. Of course, that has nothing to do with the actual question of whether God is true or not, but still.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night

From Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

I believe there is joy, love and light.

Playing god

Craig Venter's work has hit the headlines again. Its exciting stuff, but rather than going into the ethical issues that present from the first synthetic species created I want to pick up on what it means for the study of abiogenesis (origin of life).

A few years ago Venter's team produced the simplest form of life they could possibly manage by cutting bits out of the genome of a very simple bacteria. They kept on cutting bits out until they got to the point where if they lost any more genes then the cell just wasn't functional. The end result was a bacterium with a genome of around 500,000 base pairs. You could think of it as the lowest common denominator of life.

Now the team have stitched together a completely novel genome from scratch, but here's an interesting extract from an interview with Dr Venter:

How difficult was this?

At one time there was just one error in over a million base pairs, and we found that as a result you don't get life.

In explaining how complex a task it was Venter explains that anything worse than 99.9999% fidelity just doesn't work. That's astonishing. And when you combine it with the previous findings outlined above you realise that at root life is an exceptionally special and delicate phenomenon.

Common Descent

One of the main tenets of modern biology is the theory of universal common ancestry, or the idea that all living organisms can trace their genealogy back to mutual descendants. A recent paper has sought to further test that theory. It looked at the main domains of life (Eukarya, Bacteria and Archaea) and asked if their relationships are better defined by a unified common genetic relationship or by multiple lineages. The results were unequivocally in favour of UCA, but the introduction to the paper highlighted other, more general reasons for accepting the theory.

The evidence it listed was:
1) the agreement between phylogeny and biogeography
2) the correspondence between phylogeny and the palaeontological record
3) the existence of numerous predicted transitional fossils
4) the hierarchical classification of morphological characteristics
5) the marked similarities of biological structures with different functions
6) the congruence of morphological and molecular phylogenies
7) key commonalities at the molecular level
8) near universality of the genetic code

Marking on Eggshells

Overlooking the Verlorenvlei River in the Western Cape area of South Africa stands the Diepkloof Rock Shelter – a large sandstone feature. Earlier this year scientists reported that as a result of excavations they had uncovered 270 Fragments of Ostrich Shells 2-3 cm in diameter extracted out from the rocks. What was remarkable about these pieces is that they had been engraved.

This unique collection demonstrates not merely the engraving of a single geometric pattern but the development of a graphic tradition and the complex use of symbols to mediate social interactions. The large number of marked pieces shows that there were rules for composing designs

Texier et al Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences April 2010

Using three independent methods the researchers established that the rocks layers they were found in are around 60,000 years old. So sixty millennia ago someone was employing themselves in the art of decorating eggshells.

Humans before Adam?

Logos

In John chapter 1...

"John is seen to be revealing Jesus Christ in all his cosmic glory; the Son of God from the beginning, the present and the future. You can't get a "bigger picture" than that. Jesus is revealed as the Logos of God; the Reason God created all things, the Reason all things exist, the Reason we have been formed if only we will be formed in him. In other words, John 1 is a Creation story that, like all good creations stories, starts from the beginning and explains everything.

We benefit by using the word Logos in the full philosophical context of the day, which John supersedes in a similar way to the Genesis supersession of the Ancient Near East myths. The term Logos was widely used in the Greco-Roman culture and in Judaism. And although it has many everyday meanings (such as word, speech, statement, discourse, refutation, ratio, account, explanation, reason), through most schools of Greek philosophy the term was used to designate a rational, intelligent and thus enlivening principle of the universe. To ancient people every phenomenon had to have an underlying factor, agent, or principle responsible for its occurrence; hence demons, principalities and power and the pantheon of the gods. The Logos was deduced from thinking about the universe as a living creature.

The 6th-century BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus was the first to use the term Logos in a metaphysical sense. Heraclitius asserted that the world is governed by a firelike Logos, a divine force that produces the order and pattern discernible in the flux of nature. The Logos accounts for how things are put together, and how they interact. He believed that this force is similar to human reason and that his own thought partook of the divine Logos.

What soul, then, has skill and knowledge? Even that which knoweth beginning and end, and the reason [logos] that informs all Substance, and governs the Whole from ordered cycle to cycle through all eternity. (Marcus Aurelius, V, 21 pp. 124-125)

Perhaps the most extensive accounting of The Logos was by Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jew who lived around the time of Christ. Philo wrote allegories of Old Testament books authored by Moses, interpreting them in the light of Greek philosophy. He used the term, logos, more than 1300 times in his writings, in many varied ways. Of particular note are his references to The Logos as the Divine Reason, by participation in which humans are rational; the model of the universe; the superintendent or governor of the universe; and the first-born son of God. Although there is no direct evidence that John ever read Philo (and it doesn't matter either way), its pretty obvious that the concepts he articulated were firmly in the mind of John when he wrote his gospel.

As therefore the city, when previously shadowed out in the mind of the man of architectural skill had no external place, but was stamped solely in the mind of the workman, so in the same manner neither can the world which existed in ideas have had any other local position except the divine reason [logos] which made them ... (Philo, On the Creation V20 p. 4)

...for God, like a shepherd and king, governs (as if they were a flock of sheep) the earth, and the water, and the fire, and the air and all the plants, and living creatures that are in them, whether mortal or divine; and he regulates the nature of the heaven, and the periodical revolutions of the sun and moon, and the variations and harmonious movements of the other stars, ruling them according to law and justice; appointing as their immediate superintendent, his own right reason [logos], his first-born son, who is to receive the charge of this sacred company, as the lieutenant of the great king; ... (Philo, On Husbandry XII 45 p. 178)

So in Greek thought we can boil Logos down like this:-

a conception or idea
the plan or model of the universe
the source of order in the universe, that by which all things come into being and all things come to pass
the source of human reason and intelligence
universal all-pervading enlivening force

John takes the Greek Logos on in the same way that Paul takes on the Unknown God and Moses takes on the ANE myths; John rewrites the script and elevates Jesus Christ as Stephen Hawking's "fire in the equations," and God's own reason "why the Universe goes to all the bother of existing." Its ultimate big picture language, and John's embrace of it shows that Christianity really does have all the answers."

By J Pogson

Modus Operandi part 3

When I think about the way God brought Israel back into being and compare it to the way he made life flourish I find there are striking parallels.

Science is the exploration of the universe God created, which includes trying to understand how it works. That last phrase is important to register. The universe works to patterns and rules - each of which have their own logical outworkings. The universe is in effect one enormous process.

It is through this enormous process that God works to guide and shape his creation - with us as the eventual consequence. This is where the parallel comes in with the way that God shaped the political processes to lead Israel back to life, and also the way in which we can understand God's hand on our lives. We can see the effect of it but really are unable to say specifically where it has worked

Think of our own creation. Each of us was made by God...

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
Psalm 139 V 13

We know how this happens: meiosis, fertilisation, mitosis, specialisation of cells etc; all processes through which God works. With this in mind we could expect that acts of 'special creation' i.e. that defy natural explanation are few and far between in the universe we live in. God is a potter.

Modus Operandi (part 2)

The Bible contains many varying prophecies about future events. One of the most striking is the prophecy that the people of Israel would be regathered to have their own nation once more (having initially been thrown out around 600BC). One of the prophets who foretold this was Ezekiel:

For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land. And I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the ravines, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God.

Chapter 34

This prediction was fulfilled dramatically in 1948 only THREE years after the horrors of the holocaust and the attempts to wipe the Jews out as a people. Such a turnaround is depicted graphically in the famous words of Ezekiel 37 where a valley full of dry bones is the scene of an incredible resurrection. No wonder the witness of the Jewish people has long been seen as proof of God's hand in the world He created. There is a famous story in which the Kaiser asks Bismarck, “Can you prove the existence of God?” Bismarck replies, “The Jews, your majesty. The Jews.”

But the point of this post is to think about how this happened. Ezekiel describes God as a Shepherd but it is impossible to show exactly where God acted. There must have been millions of seemingly random decisions and actions by politicians and people throughout the centuries that brought us to 1948. Nowhere can we say, 'This is where God did it!' It is impossible, yet the fact is that it happened. God shepherded the Jews back to their own land. His hand was unseen, yet its effect is undeniable. God is a potter, shaping the lives of his people.

Stages of Faith... one last quote!

Perhaps the most important thing that can be said in concluding this book is that our study of faith development, so far, underscores the fact that we human beings seem to have a generic vocation - a universal calling - to be related to the Ground of Being in a relationship of trust and loyalty. That vocation calls us into a covenantal relationship with the transcendent and with the neighbour - when the neighbour is understood radically to be all being. Faith development studies confirm the judgment that human beings are genetically potentiated - that is to say, are gifted at birth - with readiness to develop in faith.

Modus Operandi (part 1)

Perhaps the most fascinating and engaging aspect of looking at science from a religious point of view is the realisation that we are really gaining insight into the way God works. The Romans quote from the bottom of the page throws that door wide open.

Over the past eighteen months or so I've been interested to see a picture developing. It feels like digging away at a seam of rock. There is new richness to be discovered with each layer, and the direction is unpredicatable. Writing about it, reading more, and talking with friends, have all helped shape the ideas as they emerge. Yet it feels like there's so much more to discover

One thing I've realised is that there is a reassuring consistency between the God revealed in the Bible, the God of the Universe and the God of my experience. These three are one.

My experience of God is not one of dramatic, overt intervention, nor are there voices that speak to me in the night. I can't point to a miracle and with certainty say 'That was God' and I've never received a vision. God's hand has always been unseen but at the same time, looking back, quite visible. Whilst I have had moments in my life where God's work seems so obvious, most of the time it is in the background. God is a Potter.

More from Stages of Faith

Another quote...

Since I began systematically to work on a theory of faith development it has been clear to me that my normative images... have been strongly influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr...

In developing the concept of radical monotheistic faith, Niebuhr understood himself to be bringing to expression the dominant thrust of biblical faith. He understood it as the central element in the covenant relationship between a liberated Israel and the God of the Exodus. He understood that the Torah was given and elaborated in order to give form to a righteous community, a community fit to be priests to other nations. He saw Jesus as steeped in the Jewish vision of a covenant relationship with God and in the Jewish hope of a coming reign of God that will redeem, restore and fulfill God's creation in a kingdom of right-relatedness between God and humanity, between peoples and between people and nature. Niebuhr saw Jesus as the pioneering embodiment of radical monotheistic faith, the "pioneer and perfecter" of the faith to which we are called. He saw the resurrection of Jesus, in power and glory, as God's ratification of the truth for all people, of the proclaimed coming Kingdom of God.

That sounds good to me, looks like I'll be reading some Niebuhr next!

Considering irreducible complexity...

‘Irreducible Complexity’ is a phrase coined by Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box to describe how some parts of living organisms are too complicated to be put together by Darwinian mechanisms.

Whilst the idea is one I have some sympathy with – there may indeed be biological machinery out there that wasn’t put together by natural selection – the problem is that we just don’t have the data to be able to confidently say one way or the other.

The other problem is that seemingly irreducible systems can, with the steady march of science, suddenly become reducible. Here’s a recent example.

Mitochondria are the boiler room of our cells, providing all the energy. They actually look like discreet cells in themselves, and for good reason. Numerous lines of evidence suggest that they started out as bacteria that became incorporated within the more complicated ‘eukaryotic’ cells. It’s the ultimate in symbiotic relationships where the 2 become 1.

One of the many puzzles that this theory presents is how did the bacterium come to be able to transport across its membrane proteins that previously it would have been keeping out. A group of researchers have identified how this seems to have happened. Having identified strikingly similar proteins in bacteria that are used in the mitochondrial transport machinery they observed:

(i) that protein components found in bacteria are related in sequence to the components of mitochondrial protein transport machines, but (ii) that these bacterial proteins are not found as part of protein transport machines and (iii) that some apparently “primitive” organisms found today have protein transport machines that function with only one or few component parts.

In other words a stepwise process for the co-opting of proteins from one function to another seems to be emerging.

Stages of Faith

I like this, from James W. Fowler's book:

I have found it useful to make a distinction between two kinds of reasoning.

The first I call the logic of rational certainty. This mode of knowing aims at objectivity understood as a knowing free from all particular or subjective investigation. Its truths need to be impersonal, propositional, demonstrable and replicable. The logic of rational certainty, however, is a misleading ideal when we speak about forms of knowing in which the constitution of the knowing self is part of what is at stake. The model of disinterestedness represented by scientific enquiry does not fit with the kind of knowing involved in moral reasoning or in faith's compositions. This is not to say that there is not a form of disinterestedness or 'objectivity' in moral and faith knowing. It is to say that this latter mode of knowing proceeds in a manner in which the knowing self is continually being confirmed or modified in the knowing. For the latter, more comprehensive form of knowing I have chosen the term logic of conviction.

In widening our understanding of knowing so as to include the logic of conviction, we must not capitulate to critics who see this as representing an anti-rational or irrational understanding of faith. Rather we need to see "reasoning in faith" as a balanced interaction between the more limited and specialized and the more comprehensive and holistic logics we have described.

Okay, I know, its wordy - but true all the same!

Brains can shrink too!

Homo floresiensis skeletons were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. They date to within the last 100,000 years but the consensus (though contraversial) is that they are not modern humans. One of the interesting features of this example of Homo is that its brain size is smaller than its predecessors, showing how selection pressures don't always push one way - even though the general drift towards an increase in capacity remains true.

The image above compares one of the specimen skulls with a modern human example.

I thank You God

I thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(I who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
double unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

E.E. Cummings

Dawkins is right, Dawkins is wrong (part 2)

One of the issues here is quote mining - the searching out of quotes to back up an agenda even if they are taken out of context or the wider context ignored. In doing this Dawkins is applying to theology exactly the same techniques that Creationists apply to evolutionary biology.

Why wouldn't he, for example, use any of Luke 13? It's because it doesn't fit in with his agenda:

There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

Here Jesus is saying the exact opposite of what Dawkins is trying to suggest (and indeed the Rev). The point is that in a general sense our mortality is a result of our wrongdoings BUT that doesn't mean we have the right to label people as worse sinners because they have suffered more.

Or how about John 9? Why didn't Dawkins make reference to John 9?

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.

Sorry Richard, but you're wrong again, and here is the reason why faithheads who weep Christian tears are indeed living out their calling. The Christian response is to weep and mourn over suffering, but it goes further than that - to try and bring comfort, help and support. Jesus healed the man and demonstrated to the discipes how to bring light into the world.

This is where Dawkins' comments stop being an interesting argument and actually become distasteful. It is widely acknowledged that Christian aid agencies are amongst the most efficient, caring and quick to respond NGOs you can find. It is also a fact that the Christian faith is all round the world motivating millions of people to offer aid in whatever means they can. What kind of person would sneer at that?

Finally, a quote from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks following the Asian Tsunami:

The religious question is not 'Why did this happen?' but 'What can I do to help?'

Dawkins is right, Dawkins is wrong (part 1)

The Times recently carried a piece by Richard Dawkins about the response in some Christian quarters to the Haitian earthquake. His point is two-fold:

1) True Christian theology understands this as divine retribution for sin, not the blind action of geology, and this is typified by Rev Pat Robertson who has declared that this is punishment for the actions of the people in 1791
2) Mild-mannered faith-heads who dispute Rev Robertson's analysis are being hypocritical to their religion

The new and improved Richard Dawkins may have been through the PR machine since The God Delusion but he is still pointed enough to be thought provoking.

Here’s where Dawkins is right: Robertson’s views are loathsome. He puts himself in a position of authority, knowing the mind of God, and apparently revealing it to the world. (As an aside these public declarations of God’s decision-making process often closely resemble the political motivations of the one bringing the revelation).

In a general sense it is true that the suffering in all our lives is a result of our wrongdoings, but Dawkins proclaims:

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for “sin” — or suffering as “atonement” for it

Christian theology is not a celebration of suffering. There is a seed of truth in what Dawkins says but as ever, by design or ignorance, he is mis-representative. What the Bible does do is expose suffering as the natural consequence of our selfishness. When we do something wrong it hurts people. The sacrifices of the Old Testament, like the scape-goat, were simply a lesson in consequences. The crucifixion of Jesus is the pinnacle of that teaching.

So how do natural disasters fit into this picture? Here are some points to consider

- Natural disasters are part of the fabric of creation. The earth’s history has been violent and tumultuous for the entire 4 billion years of it existence
- They are indiscriminatory, except in the few occasions where God has told us otherwise
- They illustrate how the whole framework of creation is built around our mortality
- There is a cost involved in creation, where beauty contrasts with horror, good contrasts with evil, light contrasts with dark
- It therefore seems logical that the universe was created in anticipation of human sin – which is the conscious decision to do wrong.

Part 2 will see how the mild-mannered faith-heads, rather than being hypocritical, are living out their calling.

On Genesis One... Part 2

To understand Genesis 1 you have to understand that this is a polemic against all the stories in the ancient world, about how the world came to be the way it is, which are all stories about multiplicities of gods, huge cast lists of deities, all of whom are fighting, squabbling, plotting each other’s downfall or hacking each other to pieces, and they come in endless shapes or forms. And of course Judaism gets rid of the entire cast list. All of a sudden you get this extraordinary radical idea, that there is just one God, and he has no company up there. The only company he has is this creature that he has created in love in his own image. Which is why Genesis 1 is so serene. God says ‘Let there be’ and there is.

Jonathan Sacks
Chief Rabbi, London

Y?

This post will be of keen interest to only around half of us. What is the history of the Y-chromosome?

It seems that they started off minding their own business being standard chromosomes but over the course of time 2 unique characteristics have developed.

Firstly, the Y chromosome has hardly any interaction with its partner, the X chromosome. (Normally recombination can happen between chromosome pairs).

Secondly, the number of active genes on the Y chromosome is greatly reduced – it is almost devoid of functional genes. Of the few genes that are there, most (unsurprisingly) are related to male development and fertility.

This process has happened repeatedly in different parts of the animal kingdom, and by looking at Y chromosomes at different stages in living species scientists are able to suggest a general mechanism.

The most primitive state is either hermaphroditism, or where the gender is determined by environmental factors – in other words there is no genetic influence and there is nothing particularly significant in the appearance of the chromosomes. Then there is a stage where small groups of genes start to influence gender, followed by semi-chromosomal selection, and finally a full blown chromosomal situation where XX = female, XY = male.

Studies suggest that the human Y-chromosome started keeping himself to himself around 300 million years ago. Now there are only 19 genes left on Y that have a corresponding partner on X.

The few areas where the sequence on a Y chromosome matches the sequence on an X can be thought of as ‘fossils’ that reveal the evolutionary history that goes before.

On nature

"Nature" said Thoreau in his journal, "is mythical and mystical always, and spends her whole genius on the least work."

The Creator, I would add, churns out the intricate texture of least works that is the world with a spendthrift genius and an extravagance of care. This is the point.

Pilgrim at tinker Creek, Annie Dillard

On Genesis One... Part 1

If we want to understand the exalted language of Genesis 1:1-2:3, we must accept it on its own terms. We fail if we attempt to degrade it to the level of a potted history.

Treating it as history demeans the Bible's teaching of creation and creates a conflict between it and the witness of creation itself. It also generate a lot of silly uncertainties and unaskable questions, like how were there day and night before the sun, was it night on the opposite side of the earth, how long were the evenings and mornings north of the Arctic Circle, and were the great lights really below the waters above.

If we read Genesis 1:1-2:3 with the respect that is due to it, we find that it is not just compatible with the geological (and biological) wonders we are fortunate enough to know and understand, but enriches their appreciation.

B Philp