Believe Differently

Recently I have been reading a lot of philosophy of science. The subject interests me from an epistemological perspective. It is close to an a priori position for me but I am convinced that there is no foundation upon which, or from which, we can base our understanding of our world, despite the fact that [...]

Large Christian gatherings normally freak the Jesus out of me - literally! But I absolutely love Greenbelt. I have just got back from this year’s festival – well actually, I got back Tuesday but this is the first chance I have had to write on my blog – and I thought I would point you [...]

If you follow my blog you will know that if there is one thing that riles me more than anything else, it is absolute truth claims, especially when they are attributed to knowledge concerning God.1 Next on the list, though, are such claims that attempt to base their validity on the scientific world view.2 Interestingly, [...]

I started writing this as a response to Saj’s comment on my post on scientific truth, but actually I got a little airborne in my thinking and decided to frame it as a new post.
Saj quoted James Watson:
There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.
… and got me thinking.

I hate the phrase “biblical principle” – especially when it is used by smarmy television evangelist types! The phrase is always invoked – admittedly probably subconsciously by most users of it – to imply a kind of quasi scientific quality to a piece of bible teaching. The implication – as far as I can figure [...]

I am currently re-reading Brian D. McLaren’s “The Secret Message of Jesus” and want to quote verbatim some of his thoughts which tie in very closely, but from a slightly different perspective, with the post I wrote a while back entitled “Intelligent Design”. In that post I questioned the mechanistic metaphor behind and inferred by [...]

In my last post on this subject I concentrated on the philosophy of Hume and Popper and linked it with Kuhn’s thesis on the “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. My intention was to try and demonstrate why it is philosophically not viable to consider the scientific world view the standard by which we measure all truth. [...]

I will be writing my “part II” post on “Scientific Truth” soon but thought in the mean time I would share with you part of the inspiration for the original post - you might also want to look at the developing conversation initiated by Saj. A couple of Saturdays back I was listening to Radio 4’s [...]

This blog entry is, in part, a response to Ray’s comment on my post on “Intelligent Design”
Ray, thanks for your comment. It made me realise how much I miss the daily morning philosophical conversations we used to have on the way to work.

This is going to be a bit of a long post and it [...]

During an idle work conversation with a colleague the other day, we got onto the subject of “Intelligent Design”, and it provoked a thought  which made me realize just how loaded the “Design” word actually is. To speak of creation being “designed” is to invoke, almost subconsciously, a huge deterministic mechanistic metaphor for interpreting our reality – the [...]