Apparently, the Santa Fe Institute had a workshop on immortality last fall. There’s no evidence of a theological or religious or even much of a philosophical component to the proceedings. That’s maybe a little surprising, seeing as how SFI tends to be expansively interdisciplinary. But there’s plenty to discuss on the scientific side of things, so fair enough. I learned about it via Sean Carroll’s podcast (see below). In this special holiday episode, he shares a version of his contribution to the workshop and comments on a few of the other presentations. Give it a listen, or read the transcript here and then let’s discuss.
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cosmological evolution
Science Corner: Dawn – A Proton’s Tale of All that Came to Be
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a biophysicist, a writer, a theologian walk into a bar. OK, so that’s not actually how Dawn was written, but the diverse backgrounds of the three co-writers–Cees Dekker, Corien Oranje, and Gijsbert van den Brink respectively–do sound more like résumés for the cast of a niche joke than for collaborators on a novel. And not just any novel, but one that spans 14 billion years–from the instants after the Big Bang until the moment the manuscript was sent to the printers (or so it seems, given the current events mentioned in Chapter 23, “Space”). As the subtitle “A Proton’s Tale of All that Came to Be” suggests, the protagonist of this novel is also unique; I’ve never read a book from the point of view of a subatomic particle before. (Talk about your unreliable narrators; subatomic particles make up everything!) So what does a proton have to say?
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The Mechanism of Creation – The View from Science, Pt. 1
There are two main points of tension between the scientific account of natural history and the creation account in Genesis 1. In my last two posts I discussed the tension around the timing of creation events. In the next three posts I’m going to discuss the scientific view of the mechanism of creation. Then in several following posts I will talk about questions and tensions that Christians may have concerning the scientific view.
The theory of evolution is the dominant scientific explanation for the history of life on earth. Evolution is a loaded word that can mean different things to different people. There are four basic meanings relevant to our discussion:
- change over time
- common descent
- a mechanism-natural selection
- a justification for atheism.
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