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.