Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith最新文献

{"title":"Continuity, Simplification, and Paradigm Shifting in Biological Evolution","authors":"S. Garte","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-22garte","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-22garte","url":null,"abstract":"The principle of continuity in evolution is often violated by discontinuous saltations leading to \"punctuations\" in evolutionary history. Highly accurate cellular replication fidelity is a requirement for biological evolution. In previous work, I have used a statistical theoretical model to demonstrate discontinuity in the evolution of high replication fidelity. Depending on the granularity of approach, both a continuous and a saltational view of evolutionary history are consistent with a scientific worldview of creation, and with the concept of simplification in biology as articulated by Emily Boring et al. The apparent contradiction between the complexity of biological systems with the idea of evolutionary simplification can be resolved by considering the globally simplifying selection of single systems and the local evolution of increasing system complexity. Explanations of thresholds and discontinuities during evolution might require the inclusion of paradigms such as teleology and agency in biological science, with theological implications.","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87225912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey","authors":"I. Delio","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-22delio","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-22delio","url":null,"abstract":"THE HOURS OF THE UNIVERSE: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey by Ilia Delio. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2021. 242 pages, index. Paperback; $25.00. ISBN: 9781626984035. *In this exquisitely constructed book, Delio reveals the current state of her reflections on the central concern of her life and work: the relationship of God, humanity, and the universe in the context of the evolutionary process. Her unscripted career leading to this publication, narrated in her memoir Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian, has exhibited the same sort of development and diversity that she finds woven into the fabric of the universe. A Franciscan sister who began her religious life as a cloistered member of the Carmelite order, Delio earned doctorates in pharmacology and historical theology and has taught at Trinity College, Washington Theological Union, Georgetown University, and Villanova University. Today, she is an award-winning author, best known for her Center for Christogenesis, which seeks to promote dialogue between faith and reason and stimulate a Christian spirituality fully infused with evolutionary consciousness. *Communicating the urgent need and prospects for that kind of spirituality is the burden of this, Delio's twentieth, book. A theology whose starting point is not evolution and the story of the universe, she insists, is a \"useless fabrication\" (p. xvi). Her work is rich in scriptural references, but the call to restore the book of nature to its primacy as the true first testament in Christianity's sacred canon is one of her signature themes. Though she displays no interest in apologetics or polemics, her basic assumption is the distinctively Catholic principle of the revelatory character of creation, a conviction at odds with the Protestant Reformers' suspicion of natural theology. A robust sacramental imagination permeates the entire book and provides its organizational design. Portraying the universe as the \"new monastery\" (p. xvii), Delio orders her reflections according to the liturgy of the hours that has structured daily prayer in Christian monastic communities for centuries: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. Delio clusters her chapters--along with prologues of original poetry--around these times of contemplation and guides the reader through the prayers of one rotation of the earth and toward what she calls a new synthesis of faith and science. *Delio's thirty-two brief chapters, each a free-standing essay, cover a broad spectrum of topics from the cosmic to the autobiographical--from quantum physics, gravitational waves, and artificial intelligence to the Eucharist during the coronavirus pandemic and the death of her beloved cat Mango. Delio addresses a number of social issues such as racism, consumerism, and homophobia and sets the full scope of her reflections against the backdrop of the threat of climate change. Her main objective is the nurturing o","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"354 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76457130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching Machines","authors":"Audrey Watters","doi":"10.7551/mitpress/12262.001.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12262.001.0001","url":null,"abstract":"TEACHING MACHINES: The History of Personalized Learning by Audrey Watters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021. 313 pages. Hardcover; $34.95. ISBN: 9780262045698. *Teaching Machines, by freelance writer, researcher, and technology commentator Audrey Watters, is a history framed by a critical rallying cry. The main body of the book is a history of the development and demise of \"teaching machines\" (mechanical devices for self-paced, programmed instruction) from the 1920s to the 1960s. It attends closely to the extent and limits of the influence of B. F. Skinner (and his forerunner Sidney Pressey), the role of commercial interests and processes, the development of a receptive social imaginary through popular media, the inconclusive nature of empirical findings about the learning that resulted, the eclipse of the mid-century teaching machine by programmed learning in book form, and the rise of computers. This account by itself might seem a little arcane. It is, however, given added heft by a framing argument that ties the history of teaching machines to present-day trends, and critiques some common myths regarding the history of educational technologies that are used to sell current technological options. This framing argument contends, on the one hand, that the \"Silicon Valley mythology\" (p. 249), regarding education's digital future, rests on misinformation about the past, and, on the other hand, that current digital developments have more continuity with the behaviorist and totalitarian impulses of that past than is commonly admitted. *Concerning the former point, Watters points to a common narrative purveyed by figures such as Sal Khan and Bill Gates that presents education as beset by a static factory model rooted in the nineteenth century and buttressed by resistance to change on the part of Luddite educators. The solution then comes in the form of commercially sourced digital tools that now offer revolutionary degrees of individualization and access to learning. Watters's account undermines both halves of this story. She marshals a substantial body of evidence to show that education has been far from static over the past century, that technological innovations designed by educators regularly stalled due to inertia and disorganization on the part of the business world, and that the rhetoric of revolutionary individualization and personalization of learning has been the stock-in-trade of purveyors of a long string of new educational technologies but has also consistently fallen short in practice. A generous amount of space is devoted to B. F. Skinner's bouts of epistolary fury directed at his business partners who stalled development of his teaching machines until their moment had passed. More significantly, Watters makes clear that the recurring claim of individualization came within a recurring and expanding envelope of standardization. Proponents of teaching machines made much of the potential for individualized instruction, understood as the ","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88255209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Attempt to Understand the Biology of Gender and Gender Dysphoria: A Christian Approach","authors":"T. Jelsma","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-22jelsma","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-22jelsma","url":null,"abstract":"The recent rise in the number of transgender individuals has perplexed many. A study of possible biological origins of gender dysphoria presents a complex picture. In some cases, prenatal hormonal imbalance may cause early-onset and persistent gender dysphoria. In contrast, late-onset cases are associated with a high incidence of comorbidities such as trauma, depression, and autism. In such cases, social isolation and an impaired body image may make individuals susceptible to social media suggestions of gender dysphoria. Moreover, affirmative counseling without addressing underlying comorbidities can strengthen this misperception, further moving these individuals along a trajectory toward transition. Care must be taken when considering early transition, given the fact that childhood gender dysphoria frequently desists. One must balance sparing a child from the distressing sexual changes of puberty with beginning transition in someone who might otherwise have desisted. Recent studies of perception suggest that it is a top-down predictive, \"best guess\" process. Although these \"guesses\" are continuously modified by sensory experience, they can persist; they might also apply to some cases of gender dysphoria. While some people have managed to detransition back to their natal gender, we should not assume that this is possible with everyone. As Christians, we need to examine each case individually, removing the stigma and supporting them through this distressing condition.","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"2016 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86585879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chemistry to the Glory of God?","authors":"S. Contakes","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-22contakes","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-22contakes","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"36 1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77770888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing","authors":"J. Barrett, P. E. King","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-22barrett","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-22barrett","url":null,"abstract":"THRIVING WITH STONE AGE MINDS: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing by Justin L. Barrett with Pamela Ebstyne King. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021. 160 pages, index. Paperback; $20.00. ISBN: 9780830852932. *I was looking forward to reviewing this book for several reasons. Firstly, I have been following the work of Justin Barrett for some time. As a clinical psychologist working in academia in the UK, I taught for several years an undergraduate module in psychology of religion in which I dedicated several hours to his work in cognitive science and developmental psychology of religion. Barrett, formerly director of the Thrive Center for Human Development at Fuller Theological Seminary and, prior to that, director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at the University of Oxford, has forged an unlikely career for a person of faith in a subdiscipline of psychology popularly considered the sole preserve of skeptics and nonbelievers. *Secondly, if I carry a bugbear about the empirical psychology of religion, it is that at times it tends to avoid application, a sense of the implications of its findings for human living. In this respect, Barrett's collaboration with Pamela Ebstyne King is a welcome addition to this project. Currently based at Fuller Theological Seminary as executive director of the Thrive Center and Professor of Applied and Developmental Science, King adds applied nuance and some succinct epigrams that bring home the implications of evolutionary psychology in everyday life. *Thirdly, it seems very important to me that people of faith generally, and Christians particularly, continue to explore and write about the field of evolutionary psychology, not least because it is often presented as a competing narrative of even nonliteral readings of the Genesis account, in direct opposition to a benevolent creator and a universe that could be considered in any way purposeful. I have lost count of the number of young adults I have encountered who refuse to consider the possibility of there being a creator, or who have lost faith in God, as a result of reading secular or atheistic accounts of human evolution. *Barrett and King have produced a short and well-informed book designed for any interested intelligent reader. No prior knowledge of evolutionary psychology (EP) is required to follow their train of thought. In the early chapters of the volume, they state clearly the basic principles of EP and how the EP account of what it means to be human is remarkably consistent with the biblical understanding of the hallmarks of human life designed in the image of God. They focus on three overlapping domains of competency that are notably human--sociality, expertise acquisition, and self-control--or, as King pithily summarizes: the human capacities to relate, learn, and regulate (p. 46). The early chapters of the book convincingly argue that there is nothing incompatible with these elements of human nature, p","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"155 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74837916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World","authors":"C. Metz","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-22metz","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-22metz","url":null,"abstract":"GENIUS MAKERS: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz. New York: Dutton, 2021. 371 pages including notes, references, and index. Hardcover; $28.00. ISBN: 9781524742676. *As Cade Metz says in the acknowledgments section, this is a book \"not about the technology [of AI] but about the people building it ... I was lucky that the people I wanted to write about were so interesting and so eloquent and so completely different from one [an]other\" (p. 314). *And, that's what this book is about. It is about people such as Geoff Hinton, founder of DNNresearch, who, once he reached his late fifties, never sat down because of his bad back. It is about others who came after him, including Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, Andrew Ng, Yoshua Bengio, Jeff Dean, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Li Deng, Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, Demis Hassabis, and Shane Legg, each of whom had their strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. *The book also follows the development of interest in AI by companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, DeepMind, and OpenAI. DeepMind is perhaps the least known of these. It is the company, led by Demis Hassabis, that first made headlines by training a neural network to play old Atari games such as Space Invaders, Pong, and Breakout, using a new technique called reinforcement learning. It attracted a lot of attention from investors such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Google's Larry Page. *While most companies were interested in the application of AI to improve their products, DeepMind's goal was AGI, \"Artificial General Intelligence\"--technology that could do anything the human brain could do, only better. DeepMind was also the first company to take a stand on two issues: if the company was bought out (which it was, by Google), (1) their technology would not be used for military purposes, and (2) an independent ethics board would oversee the use of DeepMind's AGI technology, whenever that would arrive (p. 116). *Part One of the book, \"A New Kind of Machine,\" follows the early players in the field as they navigate the early \"AI winters,\" experiment with various new algorithms and technologies, and have breakthroughs and disappointments. From the beginning, there were clashes between personalities, collaboration and competition, and promises kept and broken. *Part Two of the book, titled \"Who Owns Intelligence?,\" explores how many of the people named above were wooed by the different companies, and moved back and forth between them, sometimes working together and sometimes competing with each other. The companies understood the power of neural networks and deep learning, but they could not develop the technologies without the direction of the leading researchers, who were in limited supply. To woo the best researchers, the companies competed to develop exciting and show-stopping technology, such as self-driving cars and an AI to play (and beat) the best in Chess and Go. *In Part Three, \"Turmoil,\" the author explores how the pla","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"174 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76770663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Agriculture: An Industrial Paradigm or an Ecological Paradigm","authors":"L. Braband","doi":"10.56315/pscf6-22braband","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf6-22braband","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p />","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"84 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80443163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Design of Noah’s Ark and Its Significance for Biblical Faith","authors":"A. Dickin","doi":"10.56315/pscf6-22dickin","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf6-22dickin","url":null,"abstract":"This article reexamines the design of Noah's ark based on a combination of biblical and Mesopotamian sources. Although the biblical description of Noah's ark is considered to be divinely inspired, it seems questionable whether it could have been built to the size and design that is popularly conceived. The Genesis account lacks detail about the method of construction, but since it shows evidence of a common source with ancient Mesopotamian versions, these can provide additional information to constrain our interpretation of the Bible. For example, the very large amounts of bitumen specified in the Mesopotamian sources suggest that this was used as a structural component, to reinforce a raft-like ark and create a smooth and durable platform for large numbers of animals. On this platform, a reed-built hut could have been securely fastened to provide a dry shelter for human habitation and food storage; that being the case, and using readily available materials, it was possible to construct a large and sea-worthy ark of the dimensions specified in Genesis, using primitive ancient tools.","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78458519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From One Person? Exegetical Alternatives to a Monogenetic Reading of Acts 17:26","authors":"William Horst","doi":"10.56315/pscf6-22horst","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf6-22horst","url":null,"abstract":"Biblical scholars and theologians who defend the classical view that Adam and Eve are the sole progenitors of humanity typically appeal to Acts 17:26 as a key proof text. This verse is part of Paul’s speech in Athens, and is usually translated to say something like, \"from one ancestor [God] made every human nation to dwell upon the entire face of the earth\"; in this instance ancestor is normally understood to be Adam. This article surveys several alternative exegetical analyses of the passage that do not suggest that humanity descended from one single couple, and compares the considerations that weigh in favor of and against each plausible option. Ultimately, it is argued that the Christian tradition of the unity of truth suggests that faithful interpreters of Acts may opt to favor those plausible interpretations that align with the scientific consensus of polygenism over those that imply monogenism.","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82456619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}