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.
{"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}
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
《宇宙的时间:对上帝、科学和人类旅程的思考》作者:伊利亚·德里奥。玛利诺，纽约州:奥比斯图书公司，2021年。242页，索引。平装书;25.00美元。ISBN: 9781626984035。*在这本结构精巧的书中，Delio揭示了她对自己生活和工作的核心问题的反思现状:在进化过程的背景下，上帝、人类和宇宙的关系。在她的回忆录《舞蹈之星的诞生:我从摇篮天主教徒到半机械人基督教徒的旅程》中，她没有剧本的职业生涯导致了这本书的出版，这本书展示了她发现编织在宇宙结构中的同样的发展和多样性。Delio是一位方济会修女，她的宗教生活是从加尔默罗会的隐居成员开始的，她获得了药理学和历史神学博士学位，并在三一学院、华盛顿神学院、乔治城大学和维拉诺瓦大学任教。如今，她是一位屡获殊荣的作家，最著名的作品是她的基督诞生中心(Center for Christogenesis)，该中心旨在促进信仰与理性之间的对话，并激发充满进化意识的基督教精神。*传达这种灵性的迫切需求和前景是这本书的负担，德里奥的第二十本书。她坚持认为，一个出发点不是进化和宇宙故事的神学是“无用的捏造”(第16页)。她的作品中有大量的圣经参考，但她的标志性主题之一是呼吁恢复自然之书的首要地位，作为基督教神圣正典中真正的第一部《圣经》。虽然她对护教或辩论不感兴趣，但她的基本假设是独特的天主教原则，即创造的启示性特征，这一信念与新教改革者对自然神学的怀疑不一致。一个强大的圣礼想象渗透整本书，并提供其组织设计。将宇宙描绘成“新的修道院”(第17页)，Delio根据几个世纪以来在基督教修道院社区中组织日常祈祷的礼拜仪式来安排她的反思:圣餐，赞美诗，Prime, Terce, Sext, None，晚祷和Compline。德利奥将她的章节——连同原创诗歌的序言——围绕着这些沉思的时刻，引导读者通过对地球自转的祈祷，走向她所谓的信仰与科学的新综合。*德利奥的32个简短章节，每一章都是独立的文章，涵盖了从宇宙到自传的广泛主题——从量子物理学、引力波、人工智能到冠状病毒大流行期间的圣餐和她心爱的猫芒果的死亡。Delio探讨了许多社会问题，如种族主义、消费主义和同性恋恐惧症，并在气候变化威胁的背景下全面反思。她的主要目标是培育一个成熟到足以与当代科学的成就和见解相匹配的基督教。在这一过程中，她的主要对话伙伴包括跨宗教学者碧翠丝·布鲁托，激情派牧师和自封的地质学家托马斯·贝里，印度教天主教神秘主义者雷蒙·帕尼克卡尔，以及她选出的方济各会传统中的杰出人物，如圣方济各，博纳文蒂尔，以及当代精神作家和撤退领袖理查德·罗尔。教皇方济各(Pope Francis)前所未有的关于关爱受造物的通谕《赞美你》(Laudato Si)一直是Delio的试金石，但在她个人的圣人交流中，最值得骄傲的是耶稣会古生物学家皮埃尔·德·德·夏尔丹(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)，他将天主教基督教转变为一种进化的关键，几乎贯穿全书的每一页。*Delio的文章围绕着Teilhardian的观点，比如一个以有序和混乱为特征的智力星系中的行星。其总体效果是一个预言性的警告，即任何固守亚里士多德或牛顿世界观范畴的基督教体系都是无关紧要的，几乎已经过时了。像她的僧侣和乞丐祖先一样，Delio呼吁教会改革和创造性思维。然而，这本书的主要情绪是希望与敬畏，甚至是大胆的混合。德利奥的结论将“具有新的上帝意识的新物种”(第240页)的兴起等同于基督的第二次降临。*德里奥这本引人入胜的书的局限性在于，它对科学和技术的威胁方面关注不足，它没有认真考虑非宗教的急剧崛起，这使她对基督教神话的特权产生了质疑，它高估了普通读者的科学素养，它倾向于将学术和说教的交流模式过于紧密和过于不加批判地结合在一起。寻求有神论进化论或基督教泛神论线性论点的读者将不得不去别处寻找。 神职人员，高级学生，相信神学和自然科学的专家会发现一个独特的基督教宇宙论的挑衅性和虔诚的声明，告知和启发。* Peter A. Huff，宗教研究教授，本笃会价值观中心主任，本笃会大学，莱尔，伊利诺伊州60532。
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/12262.001.0001
Audrey Watters
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
《教学机器:个性化学习的历史》，奥黛丽·沃特斯著。马萨诸塞州剑桥:麻省理工学院出版社，2021年。313页。精装书;34.95美元。ISBN: 9780262045698。*《教学机器》是自由撰稿人、研究人员、科技评论员奥黛丽·沃特斯写的，这本书是一部由批评性的战斗口号构成的历史。这本书的主体是20世纪20年代到60年代“教学机器”(用于自定节奏、程序化教学的机械设备)发展和消亡的历史。它密切关注b.f.斯金纳(和他的先驱西德尼·普雷西)的影响范围和局限性，商业利益和过程的作用，通过大众媒体发展的可接受的社会想象，由此产生的关于学习的经验主义发现的不确定性，本世纪中叶教学机器被书本形式的程序化学习所取代，以及计算机的兴起。这个帐户本身可能看起来有点晦涩难懂。然而，一个框架论点将教学机器的历史与当今的趋势联系起来，并批评了一些关于教育技术历史的常见神话，这些神话被用来推销当前的技术选择。这种框架论点认为，一方面，关于教育的数字化未来的“硅谷神话”(第249页)建立在对过去的错误信息之上，另一方面，当前的数字发展与过去的行为主义和极权主义冲动有着比人们普遍承认的更多的连续性。*关于前一点，沃特斯指出了萨尔·汗(Sal Khan)和比尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)等人物所提供的一种常见叙述，即教育受到根植于19世纪的静态工厂模式的困扰，并受到抵制变革的勒德教育者的支持。然后，解决方案以商业来源的数字工具的形式出现，这些工具现在提供革命性的个性化程度和学习途径。沃特斯的叙述破坏了这个故事的两半。她安排大量的证据表明,教育已经远离静态过去一个世纪,技术创新设计教育工作者经常停滞由于惯性和混乱在商业世界的一部分,和革命的言论个性化和个性化学习的惯用手段的一长串新教育技术,但在实践中也始终低于。斯金纳(B. F. Skinner)在书信中愤怒地抨击了他的商业伙伴，因为他们拖延了他的教学机器的开发，直到时机已经过去。更重要的是，沃特斯明确指出，反复出现的个性化主张是在标准化的反复出现和不断扩大的范围内出现的。教学机器的支持者强调了个性化教学的潜力，将其理解为学习者按照自己的进度学习的能力。这些学习者被要求遵循程序设定的顺序，组装预定的知识原子，准备标准化考试，并服从一个相当确定的行为操纵过程。关于个性化的讨论也许是真诚的，但它最终只能与今天的“个性化”智能手机的过程相比较，比如在为数不多的几种颜色中选择与数百万人相同的设备，或者点击与其他人相同视角的同一在线教学视频。与此同时，对个性化的诉求有助于产品的转变。*对当代的相似之处的暗示指向了本书框架议程的第二部分，即教学机器不仅仅是随着计算机的兴起而消亡的一个奇怪插曲。沃特斯指出，那些声称通过技术在教育领域取得革命性突破的人，最终往往显得出奇地保守。在20世纪50年代和60年代，技术官僚式学习和机器人教师的梦想仍然把机器人放在教室前面，教室里有一排排椅子，学生坐在上面回答多项选择题。沃特斯认为，与一些说法相反，当时的教学机器并没有让位于计算机，而是帮助建立了基于行为操纵、内容原子化和线性进步的程序化学习的假设，这些假设继续影响着今天的数字教育技术。此外，所有这一切的商业参与远非毫无兴趣，大量的研究和设计头脑投入到数字产品的创造中，这些产品强化了有利于那些靠留在网页和应用程序上的眼球谋生的人的行为。 在一章中，沃特斯将斯金纳的基于行为工程控制的教育观与弗莱雷和乔姆斯基等人以自由的名义提出的抗议进行了鲜明的比较。在最后一章中，沃特斯大声质疑，过去古怪的教学机器是否只是以监控资本主义的名义让我们更大规模地失去自由，这种损失是在基于个性化的教育乌托邦的最新重申的支持下出售的。这本书很吸引人，写得很好，可读性很高。它对其所针对的关于技术和教育的流行叙事的解构是有说服力的、耐心的和有用的。对于一本最终有一些更重要的观点要阐述的书来说，它以一种谨慎而有节制的语气叙述了这段历史。关于斯金纳式教学机器与监视资本主义机制之间的连续性的结论性论点听起来是正确的，但考虑到所有细节都集中在1920年至1970年之间的几十年里，这是一个更大的飞跃，在这之后，我们在各种作者的一段段小笑话的混乱中有点轻率地奔向现在。根据现有的证据，现在和那时之间存在家族相似性似乎是不可否认的，但详细的血统线却不太清楚。人们还想知道，极权主义控制与激进个人自由的关键对立是否足以公正地看待这一景观。最后的部分略显粗浅，但确实值得深思。对于任何对技术与社会和教育的关系感兴趣的人，以及任何认为教育技术只是改善学校的工具的人，都推荐阅读这本书。*由David I. Smith，教授，主任，Kuyers基督教教学与学习研究所，加尔文大学，大急流城，密歇根州49546。
{"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}
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.56315/pscf9-22contakes
S. Contakes
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.56315/pscf9-22barrett
J. Barrett, P. E. King
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
{"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}
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
《天才制造者:将人工智能带入b谷歌、Facebook和世界的独行侠》，凯德·梅斯著。纽约:达顿出版社，2021年。371页，包括注释、参考文献和索引。精装书;28.00美元。ISBN: 9781524742676。*正如凯德·梅茨(Cade Metz)在致谢部分所说，这是一本“不是关于(人工智能)技术，而是关于构建它的人……我很幸运，我想写的那些人都很有趣，口才很好，彼此完全不同”(第314页)。这就是这本书的内容。它讲的是像DNNresearch创始人杰夫•辛顿(Geoff Hinton)这样的人。由于背部不好，他快60岁的时候再也没有坐过。这是关于他之后的其他人，包括Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, Andrew Ng, Yoshua Bengio, Jeff Dean, j<s:1> rgen Schmidhuber, Li Deng, Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, Demis Hassabis和Shane Legg，他们每个人都有自己的优点，缺点和怪癖。*这本书还跟踪了b谷歌、微软、Facebook、DeepMind和OpenAI等公司对人工智能的兴趣发展。DeepMind可能是其中最不为人所知的。正是这家由Demis Hassabis领导的公司，通过使用一种名为强化学习的新技术，训练神经网络来玩Atari的老游戏，如《太空入侵者》、《乒乓》和《Breakout》，首次登上了头条。它吸引了很多投资者的关注，比如埃隆·马斯克、彼得·蒂尔和bb0的拉里·佩奇。*虽然大多数公司都对应用人工智能来改进产品感兴趣，但DeepMind的目标是通用人工智能(AGI)——一种能做人类大脑能做的任何事情的技术，而且只会做得更好。DeepMind也是第一家在两个问题上表明立场的公司:如果公司被b谷歌收购，(1)他们的技术不会被用于军事目的，(2)一个独立的道德委员会将监督DeepMind的AGI技术的使用，无论它何时到来(第116页)。*本书第一部分《一种新机器》(A New Kind Machine)讲述了该领域的早期参与者如何度过早期的“人工智能冬天”，尝试各种新算法和技术，取得突破，也有失望。从一开始，就存在着个性的冲突、合作与竞争、承诺与违背。*这本书的第二部分，题为“谁拥有智力?”，探讨了上述提到的人中有多少人被不同的公司所吸引，并在它们之间来回移动，有时合作，有时相互竞争。这些公司了解神经网络和深度学习的力量，但如果没有顶尖研究人员的指导，他们就无法开发这些技术，而这些研究人员的数量有限。为了吸引最优秀的研究人员，这些公司竞相开发令人兴奋和引人注目的技术，比如自动驾驶汽车和在国际象棋和围棋中下棋(并击败)最好的人工智能。*在第三部分“混乱”中，作者探讨了玩家如何开始意识到AI系统的缺点和潜在的危险影响。人工智能系统在各种任务中变得越来越有能力。名人的“深度造假”和假新闻的自动生成(通常在Facebook上)让许多人质疑人工智能的发展方向。Ian Goodfellow表示:“人工智能在许多其他领域打开了我们从未打开过的大门。而我们并不真正知道另一面是什么”(第211页)。埃隆·马斯克(Elon Musk)是一个持谨慎态度的令人惊讶的人物，他多次警告说，超级智能演员可能会崛起。此外，据发现，中国政府已经在使用人工智能进行面部识别，并在公民移动时跟踪他们。*其他的担忧使社区受挫:人们发现，训练中的小而意想不到的缺陷可能会对人工智能系统的工作能力产生重大影响。例如，“通过在停车标志上贴上几张便利贴，[研究人员]可以使汽车误以为它不在那里”(第212页)。*此外，训练数据中的偏见被暴露出来，导致一些人认为人工智能系统不会平等地惠及少数群体，甚至可能歧视他们。此外，美国政府正在接洽b谷歌，以协助开发可用于战争的项目。最后，Facebook正在努力遏制假新闻，并发现即使是人工智能也无法有效地用于打击假新闻。*在书的最后部分，作者探讨了人工智能研究人员对未来和重大问题的态度。人工智能系统最终能够接管所有的工作，甚至是体力劳动吗?人工智能是否可以被控制和指挥?AGI会完全实现吗?*最后一个问题在“宗教”一章中探讨。“相信AGI需要一个信念的飞跃。但它以一种非常真实的方式推动了一些研究人员向前发展。
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.56315/pscf6-22braband
L. Braband
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：