Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith最新文献

{"title":"Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future","authors":"J. Twenge","doi":"10.56315/pscf12-23twenge","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf12-23twenge","url":null,"abstract":"GENERATIONS: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents--and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge. New York: Atria Books, 2023. 560 pages. Hardcover; $32.50. ISBN: 9781982181611. E-book; $16.99. ASIN: B0B3Y9RSFP. *\"Thinking without comparison is unthinkable. And, in the absence of comparison, so is all scientific thought and scientific research.\" --Sociologist Guy Swanson, 1971 *Certainly, the ideas behind Swanson's observations guide the work of San Diego State University psychologist Jean M. Twenge, who has published scores of peer-reviewed empirical studies comparing the responses of different birth cohorts (generations) on the same social survey questions over time. Although limited to the United States here, her empirical research mostly compares present attitudes to past ones and compares different generations to each other in the same time frame. She has long been thinking with comparisons. *Twenge's previous book, iGen (2017), drew on publicly available data from four major social surveys to argue convincingly that social media heavily influenced Gen Z (composed of people born between 1995 and 2012), often to their physical and psychological detriment. In her sequel, Twenge seeks to widen the scope and the audience for such research and even purports to predict the future of America. Even if the science of comparing generational cohorts will fall short in predicting the future (as seems likely), readers will benefit from learning about typical traits of different generations or birth cohorts in the United States. *Generations compares six generations of Americans: the Silent generation (born 1925-1945), Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), Generation X (born 1965-1979), Millennials (born 1980-1994), Generation Z (born 1995-2012), and Polars (born 2013-present). Each of the substantive chapters (chaps. 2-7) focuses on a single generation and contrasts its members' average responses on a wide array of social survey questions from twenty-four datasets with a combined number of 39 million respondents. Most readers will be able to identify family, friends, and neighbors from each generation that exemplify some of the attitudes that Twenge labels as distinctive. *Twenge constantly uses charts to show differences between generations and average attitudinal shifts over time. While the book is hefty and full of statistics and charts that can occasionally overwhelm the reader, the prose is mostly lively and sprinkled with humor. The overall impact is to convince the reader that generational cohorts do tend to share outlooks. My copy is studded with post-it flags marking places in the text where her observations surprised me or nailed down something I had only vaguely sensed before. As a member of Generation X, for instance, I was surprised at how many traits identified by Twenge resonated with my own life experiences, and I suspect other readers will have similar \"aha\" moments for their generation. They ","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"10 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138622161","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":"Emergence in Context: A Treatise in Twenty-First Century Natural Philosophy","authors":"Robert C. Bishop, Michael Silberstein","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23bishop2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23bishop2","url":null,"abstract":"EMERGENCE IN CONTEXT: A Treatise in Twenty-First Century Natural Philosophy by Robert C. Bishop, Michael Silberstein, and Mark Pexton. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. 363 pages. Hardcover; $103.65. ISBN: 9780192849786. *Reductionists dream of a day when all scientific truths can be derived from fundamental physics. Bishop, Silberstein, and Paxton show that dream is now dead, or at least it's quite ill. But what will replace it? One answer is \"emergence,\" although that term is ambiguous. In its weak sense, it merely expresses pessimism about our ability to fully understand how microphysics produces all other phenomena. In its strong sense, it means that some entities have a kind of autonomy from physics, with their own \"causal powers,\" including downward causation. Bishop et al. seek to replace strong and weak emergence with \"contextual emergence.\" *Let's start with an example (sec 2.4). Rayleigh-Bénard convection occurs when a fluid is trapped between a heating plate below and a cooler one above. Convection cells emerge as warmer fluid rises toward the top and cooled fluid sinks. While molecular interactions play a part in this, sustained convection is impossible without the macroscopic plates. This behavior is not wholly determined by the fluid's constituent parts but rather by the context in which the fluid exists. *What this and scores of other examples show is that phenomena at a given scale often depend on a host of \"stability conditions\" at other scales--sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Contra the reductionist, the authors argue that the behavior of entities, properties, and processes at a given level is never wholly determined by events at a lower level. Macroscopic conditions (among other things) play an essential and ineliminable role. If we knew all the truths of nature, we would see that not all dependence is bottom-up. *\"But the plates in your example are made of matter,\" says the critic, \"We can reduce those to the behavior of atoms as well.\" A complete mathematical description without idealizations? \"Well, it can be done in principle.\" Let's consider another example while we wait. Physicists in the Newtonian era devoted much time to the study of planetary orbits. One surprising stability condition is three-dimensional space. In four dimensions, regular orbits that resist small perturbations would be impossible (p. 29). Note that spatial dimensions are not part of the system. They are the context in which the system exists. Three dimensions are a necessary condition for stable orbits but cannot be reduced to the system's constituents even in principle. The properties of the parts do not determine the properties of the whole. This example illustrates why emergent properties are often inexplicable or unpredictable given complete knowledge of lower-level constituents: stability conditions are typically not at some lower level. While some stability conditions are causal and mechanical, like the plates in the convection examp","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686684","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":"Naturalism in the Christian Imagination: Providence and Causality in Early Modern England","authors":"Peter N. Jordan","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23jordan2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23jordan2","url":null,"abstract":"NATURALISM IN THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION: Providence and Causality in Early Modern England by Peter N. Jordan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 218 pages. Hardcover; $99.95. ISBN: 9781009211987. *How should religious conviction shape scientific thought? This is the question many early moderns asked themselves, and which Peter Jordan explores in his book. In a close analysis of prominent early modern English theologians and scientists, Jordan weaves together a coherent intellectual outlook that provides important commentary on the relationship between science and religion. *Jordan's selection of early modern Protestantism will not be new to those interested in the relationship between science and religion. Jordan's PhD advisor, Peter Harrison, who oversaw the dissertation from which this book developed, has left his mark on this topic for the last three decades in books such as The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (1998), The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (2007), as well as The Territories of Science and Religion (2015). As a consequence Jordan's guiding assumption, that Christian thought created a context within which early modern science was explained, is not anything novel. What is unique is his recognition that early modern theology was not entirely static or homogenous in its relationship to science. By focusing on shifting ideas of the Christian doctrine of providence, what Jordan highlights is the way in which certain thinkers accommodated the doctrine of providence to embrace new scientific developments, such as mechanism and atomism. As a result, this work reminds us that the area of early modern science and religion, while well studied, still has areas of investigation that may bear important fruit. *The book itself, which contains an introduction, conclusion, and five chapters, is organized into four parts. The first part introduces his analytical term of \"providential naturalism,\" by which he means a perspective on the natural world that integrates Christian commitments to providence and explanations of the natural world. It is because he is analyzing the doctrine of providence that his selection of English Protestants makes sense. As he explains in chapter two, English Protestants developed a well-structured formulation of providence, which explained the wide variety of ways in which God acted within the world, activities which could contain--though were not entirely constrained by--the natural world. The important implication of this, which Jordan explores later in the work, is that the newer developments of science, which did not fit the expected patterns of Aristotelianism, and hence of the expectations of how the natural world should function, could nevertheless find an articulation within a world that was believed to be fundamentally controlled and shaped by God. *The second part provides important contextualization for the development of the theories of providence. In a work looki","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686685","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":"On Fred Cannon, \"Acts 17:26: God Made of One [Blood]—Not of One Man—Every Ethnic Group of Humans\" (PSCF 74, no. 1 [2022]: 19–38); and William Horst, \"From One Person? Exegetical Alternatives to a Monogenetic Reading of Acts 17:26\" (PSCF 74, no. 2 [2022]: 77–91)","authors":"James C. Peterson","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23peterson3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23peterson3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686693","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":"Experimenting with Humans and Animals: from Aristotle to Crispr, second edition","authors":"Anita Guerrini","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23guerrini","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23guerrini","url":null,"abstract":"EXPERIMENTING WITH HUMANS AND ANIMALS: From Aristotle to CRISPR, second edition by Anita Guerrini. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. viii + 208 pages. Paperback; $28.95. ISBN: 9781421444055. *There has been a haunting thought ever since I began to use live mammals for my research in neurophysiology: \"Will my descendants accuse me of cruelty towards animals as much as we do to the scientists under the Nazis?\" A number of neurophysiologists have been threatened and attacked to stop their research, and, as a consequence, there are few neurophysiologists left using rhesus monkeys along the West coastline of the US and Canada. Research with rats is increasingly of concern to some, and mice might be the next subject of attention. Research staff and students, who are required to remain on budget with their projects, are put under increasing pressure and stress in order to take better care of their laboratory animals without receiving compensation or support. In the meantime, almost nobody seems to care to know how many animals were sacrificed to develop the celebrated COVID-19 vaccines. Are we, biomedical researchers, ever going to have a resolution to this ethical tension around us? Are we going to be viewed by future historians as the heroes of science--or as abusers of living creatures? *Anita Guerrini's Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR does not answer the question. As the author states in the beginning of her book, her objective is to tell the history of \"trial and error, prejudice and leaps of faith, clashing egos and budget battles,\" to help us evaluate \"the value, and the values, of Western science,\" and to \"influence the future.\" In other words, the purpose of the book is not to make ethical arguments or to appraise a certain aspect of historical development, such as the progress of ethical care for human and animal subjects. It is, rather, to reveal the reality that ethical views and sentiments have changed, collided, merged, and contradicted each other across time and political landscapes. *This text poses questions, implicitly and explicitly, to enable us to address some of the issues and challenges we are facing at present. A first question arises from the history of vivisection (chap. 1). Vivisection refers to experimenting with (mostly dissecting) live animals, and sometimes even humans. This appears for the first time in recorded history back in ancient Greece, meaning it was practiced for two millennia without anesthesia, a discovery not made until the eighteenth century. More strikingly, vivisection was done as part of \"edutainment\" shows in ancient times. Criticism of the practice was not necessarily about the cruelty but rather about the usefulness of the knowledge obtained from dying or dead animals. The rights or well-being of animals were not much of an issue in the ancient age as human dominion was a firmly held belief. Such an ethical view continued to be dominant until early Mode","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686705","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":"Our 75th Anniversary at Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","authors":"James C. Peterson","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23peterson","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23peterson","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p />","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686520","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":"On Keith B. and Ruth Douglas Miller, \"Taking the Road Less Traveled: Reflections on Entering Careers in Science\" (PSCF 49, no. 4 [1997]: 212–14)","authors":"Oscar Gonzalez","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23gonzalez","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23gonzalez","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p />","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686681","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 Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World","authors":"Tim Palmer","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23palmer","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23palmer","url":null,"abstract":"THE PRIMACY OF DOUBT: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World by Tim Palmer. New York: Basic Books, 2022. 297 pages. Hardcover; $30.00. ISBN: 9781541619715. *Tim Palmer, a distinguished physics professor at the University of Oxford, has authored a captivating popular science book exploring chaos in complex systems. Early in his career, he switched fields from mathematical physics to weather forecasting and made significant developments in ensemble weather prediction, revolutionizing our understanding of weather patterns. The author discusses how delving into this realm reveals a chaos geometry, describing difficult-to-understand real-world phenomena. He takes the reader through various complex systems that exhibit a marked sensitivity to initial conditions, like the renowned \"butterfly effect.\" Chaos geometry describes a system that is predictable and stable for a long time, but occasionally veers into new directions. The study of chaotic complex systems challenges traditional notions of predictability. *The book is divided into three parts. Part 1: The Science of Uncertainty explores the concept of chaos geometry. Palmer captivates readers from the start by sharing a true story about a renowned BBC weather forecaster. In 1987 this forecaster infamously failed to predict the most severe storm in 300 years, striking England. This incident highlighted the unsettling truth that complex systems can deviate significantly from historically stable patterns. As a polymath, Palmer generously shares captivating examples and illustrations from fields such as history, philosophy, and art. Part I is solid science and mathematics, but without equations. *Part II: Predicting Our Chaotic World explores Palmer's influential technique to forecast inherently uncertain systems, running models multiple times with slightly different initial conditions. Chaos geometry offers a powerful description of the behavior of these systems. The author focuses on Lorenz's idea that even with infinitesimally small uncertainty, we cannot predict beyond a finite horizon in time. The author extends the concepts from Part I from well-established domains such as climate, to emerging areas such as disease, economics, and conflict. *Part III: Exploring the Chaotic Universe and Our Place in It delves into speculative realms and may appeal to readers of PSCF as it engages with metaphysical inquiries regarding Christian theism. Palmer grapples with perplexing intellectual dilemmas, including free will, consciousness, and the nature of God. In his pursuit to unravel nature's workings, he confronts philosophical and theological quandaries. At its essence, he posits that the universe operates under determinism and challenges the notion that uncertainty in nature is primarily ontological as Bohr espoused, rather than epistemic as advocated by Einstein. Raising a thought-provoking query, the author asks, \"Could there be some","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686707","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":"On Roy Clouser, \"Three Theological Arguments in Support of Carol Hill\"s Reading of the Historicity of Genesis and Original Sin\" (PSCF 73, no. 3 [2021]: 145–51)","authors":"David L. Wilcox","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23wilcox","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23wilcox","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p />","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686710","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":"On Peter Rüst (Ruest), \"Creative Providence in Biology\" (PSCF 53, no. 3 [2001]: 179–83)","authors":"Brian Greuel","doi":"10.56315/pscf9-23greuel","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-23greuel","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p />","PeriodicalId":53927,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135686722","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}