I’ve read some other articles by Craig (yes, they are very ‘crunchy’), and I am familiar the Anthropic principle. In an article by the author of my original link (can’t remember which one), he affirms the idea that, at some point, you have to rely on faith in something, whether that be my personal God, an impersonal ‘force’, blind luck or magical space-pixies (I realise that you are well aware of this fact btw).

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I do appreciate the view that religion will still exist in the far future, it is kind of boring to see these future worlds with no religion – I imagine they would be mostly anarchic and brutal, not all clean and friendly.

Oh, and Summer is nearly over… (you and your Northern-centric view of the seasons)!

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I occasionally read the ihobo blog, but I haven’t put it in my feed reader. It’s not that I’m not interested in games any more, I just don’t play too many (Team Fortress 2, Guitar Hero, and whatever flash games I find on Kongregate).

I’ve also started playing through a bunch of puzzle games on an old Mac emulator (so Fool’s Errand and games like that).

I guess I’m not super interested in the theory behind games at the moment, I still have a few dev-blogs in my reader, but nowhere near as many as I used to.

Enjoy the remaining days of (your) Winter!

“although I am reading less of it these days, as you have moved most of your stuff to ihobo”

Just the Wednesday post on Games. Not interested in games any more?

Absolutely! This is the whole nub of the issue here: you *must* turn to a macguffin at some point. Non-theists usually turn to the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics – but this too is pure metaphysics. It is just as valid a move to turn to God instead.

William Lane Craig does a brilliant job of exploring this idea in this piece:
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/barrow.html

It might be a bit “crunchy” for you, but I think you’ll enjoy the thrust of his argument all the same!

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to this, but you know how it is.

As for Firefly, I agree with you that Whedon’s presentation of Christianity is rather odd (and this for a number of reasons) but I still love that he put religion right into the centre of his science fiction show. You have to appreciate how damnably rare it is for this to happen, and while I think his view of future Christianity is bizarre, I’d still much rather see science fiction writers postulate a future in which religion maintains its relevance rather than the “atheistic fantasy” that religion falls away to irrelevance in the near future.

Well, we’ll get to this around the start of the Summer I suppose.

In love and fellowship,

Chris.

I thought you might find this one interesting. In one of his other essays he mentions ratcheting, so it’s not something un-thought of.

Also, I stumbled over this via wikipedia when I was looking up the infinite monkey theorem (for work purposes, nonetheless ), it wasn’t in looking up creationist theories/justifications etc. It was a bit
serendipitous, as he seems to have some similar beliefs to my own, and lives within driving distance of myself… His article Evolution Explains Everything is pretty interesting too (the latest entry there is in 2006, so it’s not to hard to read everything).

“as soon as you have a replicating molecule”
See that ^, that’s where I have a problem with ratcheting – a replicating molecule has to occur at some point. Possibly by magic.

I can see ratcheting occurs, but take a step back, and you see that the ratchet needs to be created too – what defines “progress”, for instance.

I’m still reading the stuff you post (although I am reading less of it these days, as you have moved most of your stuff to ihobo), I don’t always comment, as I often feel there is nothing substantive I can add (although come the Firefly-religion article, I have a few things to say, like Joss Whedon seems to have never read the Bible ).

Thanks for your thoughts.

From a theological perspective, what’s amazing about evolution isn’t that you can achieve information from nothing (although make no mistake, that is amazing!) but that we live in a universe with conditions that allow this to happen, and that we live in a solar system with conditions to encourage that to happen, and on a planet where that *has* happened.

The materialist response to this mystery is to say “well if it wasn’t like that, we wouldn’t be here!” which is a surprisingly bland attempt to void the divine mystery of it all. When that is one’s attitude to the patently miraculous, it’s no surprise that God would be difficult to imagine!

Incidentally, I’m doing a six parter on myths of evolution over the next month and a half. It’s all science-grounded stuff, I never tip over into theology, but you might be interested in some of the ways that paradigms like “the selfish gene” are really stories spun out of the observable facts, since these sort of ideologies are used to impugn religious beliefs but are suprisingly mythological in their construction.

Thanks for the site tip – he has some good stuff on Feyerabend that I enjoyed reading.

Hope all is well with you and yours!