It’s time to flag up another long (53 posts, as of now) BioLogos thread on which the questions I have been raising with the organisation for, now, two and a half years are not addressed. I seem to be in getting into the habit of waiting a week and then drawing your attention to it.
The one-sided conversation (how ironic that the newsletter BL sends me regularly is called “The Conversation“!) will, sadly, disappear in six months because of the BioLogos editorial policy. But I’ll only sketch the issue as it’s the same-old same old – see here, here, here, here, here, and here (for example). As the title Stress and God’s built-in Neurosabbath suggests, the OP was a touching story about how a scientist in a pastor’s congregation discovered a wonderful stress-relief pathway in the hypothalamus of the brain. Not unjustly, God’s detailed provision for our well-being was the message.
I started the discussion by asking how such a detailed “design” issue was compatible with many statements on BioLogos about the contingency of creation, including man as merely one emergent intelligent species, and especially the non-involvement of God in the detail of “design-faults” and so on – the old themes.
I had a reply from the new content editor, philosopher James Stump, which boiled down to not giving a reply whilst affirming both the contingency of evolution (specific example, pentadactyly) and its not precluding God’s “supervision of even the smallest details.”
My reply raised many issues arising from that, and he gave one more reply which, in summary, said that BioLogos represented a broad range of theological views.
Since then, several commentators – Eddie, hanan-d, Chip and GJDS – have raised similar issues and asked direct questions to James. Indeed, that has comprised the bulk of the posts, apart from “points of order” from PNG and the usual smokescreen raised by Roger Sawtelle’s idiosyncratic answers to some other question from the one asked.
But as is now the established pattern, the BioLogos staff continue to build their reputation as one of the most non-interactive blogs on the planet by a policy of total non-reply. Not even their theological supporters ever attempt to participate in these threads – but then, given their inscrutable silence, it would be pretty hard to work out if one was supporting them, I suppose.
