Methodological Naturalism

If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism – the philosophical position that restricts all explanations in science to naturalistic explanations -  it follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like: generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that the theories are naturalistic. More and more evidence could come in suggesting that a supernatural being exists, but scientific theories wouldn’t be allowed to acknowledge that possibility.
- Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (quote found here)

I'm more inclined to think that the reason scientific theories don't acknowledge God's existence is that God is not part of the natural world.  Science studies the creation; theology studies the Creator.  I'm discovering that I lean more and more towards an instrumentalist (not sure if I'm quite a social constructivist) view of science.  The purpose of science is to understand and explain the world in particular kinds of terms - "natural" ones - so that we can do our best to control nature, or at least to improve our experience in this world.  I do still believe in truth - ultimately, there is one true understanding/explanation of nature - I just doubt humanity's ability to find it, and to know that we've found it.

NZ, Part 5: Oreti Beach

We were privileged to experience the hospitality of many members of Matt's family in New Zealand: home cooked dinners, accommodation, and great company.  We stayed with Matt's uncle and aunt on their farm near Invercargill, enjoying a dinner of home grown lamb, vegetables and salad; home made blackcurrant syrup with home made soda water; home made meringues and lemon curd for dessert.  After dinner, they drove us onto Oreti Beach - not just to the beach, but on to the sand.  We went for a walk despite the cold, watching a kite surfer and taking photos of the sunset and other random things, like seaweed, driftwood and Millie's paw prints.

Sunset from Matt's iPhone

Sunset from my camera

Fascinating seaweed

NZ, Part 4: Slope Point

After leaving Dunedin, we headed down to Invercargill, taking a scenic route through the Catlins.  Unfortunately the weather was not great, and we were trying to avoid taking the rental car on gravel roads, but we did take a detour to Slope Point, the southernmost point of the South Island of New Zealand.  The path to the lookout runs through a sheep paddock (closed during lambing) and it was a very windy and very cold walk.

 

NZ, Part 3: Around Dunedin

Our time in Dunedin was quite busy.  I was at the conference and a subsequent workshop for 6 days in total, and we had a lot of family to see.  On my one completely free day (except for a family dinner), we toured the Cadbury factory, had an early lunch, and then I wandered off to occupy myself for the afternoon with things that Matt wasn't particular interested in.

Firstly I went to the Otago Museum to see butterflies in the rainforest exhibit:

Then I wandered towards Baldwin Street, reputedly the steepest street in the world.

The oldest Anglican church in Dunedin

And I walked all the way to the top of Baldwin Street - some beautiful views!

At the top of Baldwin Street

NZ, Part 2: University of Otago

This was the second conference I had attended at the University of Otago in Dunedin.  A very pretty campus, and very different from universities in Sydney - no real boundary between the campus and the rest of the city.  Here are a couple of photos I took in December 2005, and a couple of the same place in February 2011.

2005

2011

2005

2011

NZ, Part 1: Larnach Castle

Matt and I recently returned from a holiday in New Zealand.  The initial impetus for the trip was a conference I wanted to attend at the University of Otago in Dunedin, but it was also a good opportunity to see some of Matt's family and to do some sight-seeing together.

As part of the conference, we had the option to participate in an excursion to Larnarch Castle (or "the camp", as it was known by its original owner.)  It was almost worth it just for the bus trip up to the castle - some really lovely views of Dunedin and entertaining commentary from the bus driver.  The tour of the castle was fascinating, though a little sad - the story of the family who originally built the castle was rather tragic.  The castle was purchased in 1967 by a couple called the Barkers.  It was in a state of complete disrepair, but Margaret Barker lovingly and painstakingly restored the house and the grounds.

After a tour of the house and climbing the tower, we had tea, scones and shortbread in the ballroom, and then wandered through the beautiful gardens.

View from the tower - a hazy shade of Dunedin

"The Camp"

Thistle

Warning!

The next few posts on my blog will be full of photos - highlights from our recent trip to New Zealand!

P.S. Apparently this is my 600th post!

Anastasia - December 2010

I had a wonderful time over Christmas because my brother and his family were staying with my parents for a week, so I was able to spend lots of time with them.  Here are a few of my favourite photos of my adorable niece:

Watering the garden

At Le Pain Quotidien, Westfield Sydney

Eating a vegemite roll

Bouncing on her new trampoline - a Christmas present from her grandparents

She just has the most gorgeous smile!

Crafty Christmas - 5

The first sewing project I decided to complete for Christmas was an apron and oven mitt set for my niece.  This was actually one of the first things I made with the sewing machine I bought last January.  I made a calico version first, just to be sure it would work, before splurging on ultra cute fabric for the real thing.

This isn't a great photo - it's a bit grainy - but here's Anastasia wearing her apron and gloves to cook at her brand new stove.

Resolutions and good habits

In my first post of the year, I said that I decided not to make New Year's resolutions because I never keep them anyway.  It's a good thing I didn't resolve to blog every day, because I would have already failed that!  Instead of resolutions (and in addition to my 30 things) I am trying to cultivate certain good habits.  For a change, I'm being somewhat sensible.  I'm not trying to overhaul my entire life in one go.  I didn't expect that this year, finally, everything would change on January 1.  Rather, I'm giving myself one or two habits to work on each week.  Since I believe that the right stationery makes everything easy (well, not really, but sometimes I shop that way) I've armed myself with a Kikki K weekly habits pad.  Each page provides room to list the habits I'm focusing on, boxes to tick each day, and a reward to work towards. 

Photo from kikki k

Last week, the first full week of the year, I was working on developing habits of reading the Bible and doing the dishes every day.  So far, so good, although I did have to do four days worth of Bible reading on Tuesday.  This week I'm aiming to exercise and make the bed every day.  So far, so good, but it's only Monday!  That's still more success than I've ever had with resolutions.

Graphing natural theology

The Google Books N-Gram Viewer is a new tool for examining cultural trends by searching for the frequency of words and phrases in published books over time.  Here's a couple of results relevant to my research interests:

The first graph is based on a search for "natural theology" in books published between 1600 and 2000; the second adds "natural religion", a related term sometimes used interchangeably with natural theology, sometimes used for something quite different.  "Physico-theology", another related term, didn't show up at all, since only phrases appearing in 40 or more books are included.  The graphs are a bit small to see here, but there is a massive spike for natural theology (blue)  around 1750.  Natural religion (red) far outstrips natural theology, but by 2000, natural theology is slightly higher.

I can imagine that this could be quite interesting and perhaps useful for someone like me who is interested in the history of a concept (although I know nothing about statistical analysis).  I've done searches in Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online to find all uses of these terms in published works, but it's also interesting to see the overall trends.  I hope that Google Books will continue to add to the number of books included in the search results.  I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this!

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who has commented on my latest blog posts.  It's nice to know that people are still willing to read and comment, even after an absence of nearly a year!  I think that linking from Facebook helped with that...

Thanks especially to everyone who has offered to help me with my list of 30 things to do when I'm 30.  So far I've had all these offers:

• Laurel-Li has offered to help me learn to crochet well enough to make the granny square slippers (4 and 6)
• Laetitia offered to help with my wedding and honeymoon photos (11 and 12), even though we've never met!
• Chaotic Jupiter suggested I go to some craft shows with her and Amelie&Atticus (10)
• Gin Oak offered company for all the craftiness on my list (1 to 8)
• Anne and Matt offered to help with a trip to the Hunter Valley to fulfil 19
• Graeme offered to help with 24 - travelling to some place I've never been before - if I want a trip to Bahrain, I guess!
• My brother has signed himself up for a pair of granny square slipper socks (they're just like the ones our grandma used to make us) and will also alert me to any craft fairs or markets in Canberra
• And my parents are very generously taking me to the Bather's Pavilion for my birthday, taking care of 16.

So I think I'm off to a good start!

Good advice

I found this list of advice amongst a series of unpublished drafts of blog posts.  I'm not sure where I found it, but it's good advice and even though I've now finished my PhD, it's still encouraging, especially points 3 to 5.

1. Procrastination is part of being a PhD student, and waiting for your thoughts to coalesce which often delivers the inspiration can often feel like procrastination, because it seems like nothing is happening
2. Your motivation will vary in response to different stages over the course of your PhD
3. Your best work is probably yet to come (and is not going to be your PhD thesis)
4. Don't expect your career peak now
5. No PhD student is ever 100% happy with their thesis submission
6. You are not alone ... Lots of PhD students feel the same from all around the world

Crafty Christmas - 4

Bunnies for my niece!  These are from Aranzi Aronzo's book Cute Dolls.  The fabric for the bunnies was leftover from making Christmas stockings, and the dresses were made from scraps from my first Christmas 2010 project: an apron and oven mitts for my niece.  I'll post photos of those once I check with her parents that I'm allowed to post photos of her online.  I forgot to take a photo of the apron and mitts by themselves, and by the time I remembered, the apron was stained with Vegemite.  My niece loves her Vegemite sandwiches!

I think the bunnies would have looked better if they'd been made with jersey cloth like the book suggests, but I was just using what I had on hand.  And the facial features do make the bunnies look like they have moustaches.  But at least my niece was able to recognise them as bunnies!

Crafty Christmas - 3

My brother and husband both like playing Angry Birds on their iPhones, so when I saw a tutorial for making plush Angry Birds, I figured this was a suitable addition to their Christmas stockings.  I made them from felt rather than fleece, because that was what I had on hand.  I think they would be easier to make from fleece - the felt, being fairly stiff, was not the easiest to hand sew (to close the opening after stuffing, and to hand sew the beak).  Still, I thought they were pretty cute, even though one has a rather crooked beak.

Crafty Christmas - 2

In my recipe folder, I have instructions on making a gingerbread house from a 1994 issue of Family Circle magazine.  A number of years ago I wanted to try making one, but I decided to try making gingerbread biscuits using the recipe first, to see how it would work out.  Since then, making gingerbread biscuits at Christmas time has been an annual tradition.  My husband has enjoyed decorating the biscuits - he goes for elaborate liquorice allsort designs whereas I'm more minimalist with silver cachous - and he's often complained that as a guy, he's not allowed to go to those gingerbread house events that many churches run for ladies around Christmas time.  So, I thought making a gingerbread house would be a nice thing for us to do together this year.  I made the pieces at home and then we put them together at my parents' place on Christmas Eve, ready to be a decoration for our family Christmas celebration there on Christmas Day.

Note the trees along one side, the red bushes along the other, the liquorice gate and the ingenious letterbox at the front - all my very creative husband's work!  I did the Freckle tiles and Smartie trim - less creative, but fun (and tasty!)  The front looked too bare, so I added the Smartie cross and turned the gingerbread house into a gingerbread church!

Skweezettes ARE happy!

In October 2008, I posted that my husband had found a site to play Skweek, my favourite arcade game when I was a kid, online.  Fortunately, playing Skweek did not kill my thesis, and in April 2010 (after finishing the thesis) I finally managed to finish the game.  There are 99 levels in Skweek, and it's actually easier to play on random, rather than straight through from 1 to 99.  I came close to finishing once before, completing 98 levels.  When I did finally finish, it was a bit of a surprise.  Playing on random, I had no idea how many levels I'd completed.  And then all of a sudden... happy Skweezettes!

Crafty Christmas - 1

Some of the crafty things I made as gifts and decorations this Christmas just passed.  As usual, I was overly ambitious with my plans, and I decided to make embroidered Christmas stockings for my immediate family.  I made eight in total - for my husband, parents, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew-or-niece-to-be.  According to the Purl Bee, these stockings are designed to be a quick project.  Ha!  Perhaps I'm just incredibly slow (I am relatively new at sewing, and very new at this kind of embroidery), but it took me a fair while to sew each stocking, and the embroidery took me about 45 minutes per letter!  I didn't quite finish - one letter missing on my niece's stocking, several missing on mine - but oh well.  They did look nice!  Here's one of the stockings:

And here's another with the little presents I put inside:

I'm going to reuse the stockings next year - I'm not dedicated enough to make something like this every year!

30 Things To Do When I’m 30

In lieu of making New Year's Resolutions this year (since I never keep them anyway) I've made a list of 30 things I would like to do when I'm 30.  I'm giving myself a head start - my birthday is not for a couple of months yet - but I think it will probably take me more than a year to get through this list.

If I was making New Year's Resolutions, blogging more would be on the list (although that's not a SMART goal...)

1. Sew a quilt
2. Sew a skirt
3. Sew a dress
4. Learn to crochet
5. Crochet an amigurumi
6. Crochet slipper socks
7. Learn to knit
8. Knit a scarf
9. Have all completed cross-stitches framed
10. Go to a craft market and/or craft fair
11. Choose photos for wedding album
12. Print honeymoon photos and put in album
13. Eat at a restaurant I haven’t been to before
14. Have cocktails at bar I haven’t been to before
15. Have fish & chips on the beach at Manly
16. Have lunch at The Bather's Pavilion, Balmoral Beach
17. Get a massage
18. Get a facial
19. Go to a winery
20. Go bushwalking
21. Go bike riding
22. Go to the zoo
23. Go to Melbourne for a weekend
24. Travel some place I haven’t been before
25. Unclutter my life
26. Implement “Getting Things Done”
27. Submit an article to a journal
28. Write a book proposal
29. Start researching something not directly related to my PhD
30. Have my PhD degree framed

A question...

In Exodus 9, God sends a plague on the Egyptians that causes all their livestock to die. Later in the same chapter, he sends another plague, this time of hail. The Egyptians are told to bring all their livestock in from the fields, otherwise the hail will kill them. But aren't all the Egyptian livestock already dead? Is it understood that a significant time has passed between plagues? Or did the Egyptians pinch livestock from the Israelites?