University news
Mission is happening
Some of the highlights at UTas
March - 'The Problem with Christianity is ...' week
Posters invited people to write their comments and these led to lots of new people coming to talks and discussions about:
its attitude to homosexuality
the bad behaviour of Christians
it kills rational enquiry
its stupid beliefs like miracles, the roles of men and women, the Trinity and original sin
the Christian lifestyle.
July - Mission with Michael Jensen who stretched our thinking on the following subjects
'Necessary Heresies - Marion and Pelagius'
'How to be Truly Happy'
'Martyrdom and Identity: the Self on Trial'
'How to Have a Worry Free Life'
August - Christianity-Islam Week
Public talks: 'Interpreting the Bible and the Qur'an' and 'The Preservation of the Bible and the Qur'an'
Debate: 'Is Jesus God?' The Islamic speaker, Musa Cerantonio, has not explained why he failed to appear, but we have made many solid new friends and much follow-up is happening for which we can give thanks.
Darwin's Compass - Simon Conway Morris in Hobart
On 16 September 250-300 people gathered in the University Centre to hear Prof. Conway Morris FRS, an Anglican from Cambridge University, explain his view of the broad evolutionary process and how it can be interpreted. Evolution is commonly described as being driven entirely by chance, with the implication that (as Steven Jay Gould famously put it) if the tape of life were to be re-run there would be no way of predicting what forms the world would be populated with, and no reason to suppose that anything like humans would appear.
But Prof Morris pointed to the widespread phenomenon of convergence, that is, the tendency for evolution to come up with the same solutions to environmental challenges from very different starting points.
Thus not only do humans and octopuses have a camera-like eye, but so also do some clams and jellyfish. Prof. Morris gave a wide range of further examples and drew the conclusion that evolution is surprisingly predictable, and what's more, that the emergent forms are a tiny proportion of all the possible combinations. The implication is that evolution can be seen as a 'search engine', picking out an underlying pattern.
Prof. Morris' ideas can be explored further in his book Life's Solutions: inevitable humans in a lonely universe. His visit to Australia was arranged by ISCAST (Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology).
Downloadable files of this talk and two more that he gave at the Conference on Science and Christianity in Geelong will be freely available from the ISCAST website. The UTas mission talks are available here.