Monthly Archives: August 2017

Death by of natural causes

I’d like to follow up Edward Robinson’s piece on the “natural/supernatural” distinction by showing some examples of how meaningless the concept of “natural” is in everyday life. Of course, for the card-carrying believer in Naturalism as a worldview, “natural” must mean “everything”, which makes it a useless word anyway – unless it’s used in contrast to “artificial”, which as I’ll show is not without its problems either.

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BioLogos on the Natural/Supernatural Distinction

Many times on BioLogos, columnists or commenters have deplored the use of the term “supernatural” to describe God’s activity. The usual criticism of this term is that it seems to imply a universe which normally works by itself, with God jumping in every now and then to do “miracles” — understood as violations of the normal causal nexus of “nature”. This would suggest that where nature is acting, God is not acting, and vice versa. Various BioLogos writers and readers have suggested that this would be a “deistic” notion of God rather than a Christian one (the Christian notion affirming that God acts in all things), and many have accused … Continue reading

Posted in Creation, Edward Robinson, Philosophy, Science | 19 Comments

Hump articles on “Genealogical Adam” hypothesis

I’ve done several articles recently more or less motivated by the Genealogical Adam hypothesis, and Joshua Swamidass has asked me to put links to them, and to his own article at Peaceful Science, which is mainly about the science of the thing. I will do this below the fold, as well as linking to various others I did between 2011 and 2015, considering “matters arising” from treating the idea of a historical Adam as the forbear of all living men, though not the sole original ancestor. I hope you’ll forgive the fact that these pieces arise from thoughts as they have occurred to me, rather than being a systematic development … Continue reading

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More on the scientific dating of Adam

Back in May I did a piece on how the profound (and fascinating) changes in lower Mesopotamian topography over the millennia can endorse the broad historicity of the Genesis 2 narrative. But I did leave one or two loose ends then, some of which I might be able to tie up here.

Posted in Adam, Genealogical Adam, History, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

Humanity beyond Adam’s line in Genesis

The genealogical Adam hypothesis, which I’ve been dusting off again in recent posts because of Joshua Swamidass’s focus on it, has been accused of being an “concordist” position, designed solely to make belief in a literal Adam consistent with modern discoveries in fields from ancient history to genetics. But to some extent any interpretation is concordist, because we have to reconcile any text to what we already know, or believe we know.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology | 16 Comments

What it means to be created human

The creation of man, as envisaged by the Bible, isn’t as obviously biological as is often assumed, which is important if one wants to take a “science and faith” approach that doesn’t lapse into mere scientism. Take, as a limiting case, the Christian who, according to both Jesus in John’s gospel and Paul, is a “new creation”. As far as I know, every man or woman who has ever been a Christian was born by generation in the usual biological way, and if one accepts evolution has ape ancestors – none of which has any bearing on the process of their new creation whatsoever, which is of the Spirit.

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What is man – no, really?

“Adam” means “man” in Hebrew (as “human” rather than “male individual”), and quite apart from the deliberate wordplay in Genesis it is generally believed to have some kind of etymological link in Hebrew with “adamah“, meaning “red” and hence “red (=fertile and tilled) soil”. This would not be far-fetched, since our own English word “human” appears to derive from a Proto-Indoeuropean (PIE) root meaning “earth”, thus distinguishing men from the gods of heaven. One question for the “genealogical Adam” hypothesis of my last post, in which Adam is an historical figure and universal common ancestor, but not the first man, is how he gets to take the word for all … Continue reading

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Original sin and the genealogical (MRCA) view of Adam

Despite modern denials, original sin (known in the East as “ancestral sin”) has been assumed by all major branches of Christianity down the ages. I wrote on its affirmation by Irenaeus in the 2nd century here (against many modern writers who pin it all on Augustine two centuries later).

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Of nesting hierarchies

I was collecting some tools from our stable (no longer used for horses) and noticed, not for the first time, a hornet buzzing about there. A careful examination confirmed my suspicion that there was a nest hiding in the corner of the ceiling. I decided that with several grandchildren due to be tromping about in there this month, disturbing a few hundred of these of these not especially aggressive, but certainly large and well-armed creatures was not to be entertained. So I confess I terminated their natural history with an insecticide.

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All and everything…

… but nothing at all to do with the book of that name by George Gurdjieff. Science Daily has an article about an interesting recent paper on genes and disease, that in effect sounds the death knoll for the genetic model of disease and opens a potential can of extremely hungry worms for biology as a whole.

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