Still places at God’s Good Earth Webinar

I’m just re-posting a reminder that I’m giving a presentation on my first book, God’s Good Earth Earth: the case for an unfallen creation at a Christian Scientific Society Webinar thos Saturday, 24th October, on natural evil. It’s in the morning, in the US, or the afternoon in Europe. If you’re an Australian reader, you’ll have to set your alarm clock.

Speakers are Stuart Burgess from UK, and Fuz Rana, Scott Minnich and David Snoke from America, and the general tone of the others’ abstracts seems to be on “design” good or bad.

It’s free, though they ask for a donation in the region of $20 for the logistics (not for me!). It would be great to speak to some of you there.

I’m first up, and I’ll be making the case I make in the book that creation, unlike mankind, is unfallen, and how that might open the way to a better theology of nature to replace the semi-deistic model around which science now seems to revolve. There’s a Q&A at the end.

Details here, and you can register free here.

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
This entry was posted in History, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Still places at God’s Good Earth Webinar

  1. Elizabeth B. says:

    Thank you for your talk. Didn’t see any of the others, though it would have been good to hear.

    A topic to encourage a close read of Genesis. Interesting to ponder how theology and worldview have changed over time. The change from pre-Reformation to post-Reformation sometimes leaves me wondering if it was for the best, especially considering how the wider church continues to diverge in ways that don’t seem very positive.

    Anyway, interesting talk and book!

    • Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

      Thanks for turning up, Elizabeth. It was a lot of fun, and I was pleased that the other speakers (as well as attendees) seemed to engage with the case I made.

      Both Stuart Burgess and Fuz Rana did good presentations on “design, good and bad,” and Stuart in particular, as a designer of complex systems himself, was able to show how much has to be taken into account when judging “good” or “bad” design in nature, as in technology.

      Scott Minnich, as a medical researcher on the plague bacillus, was interesting to me as a medic too. He majored on the degenerative genetic changes that seem to have turned a harmless or mildly pathogenic gut bacterium into the scourge of historic plagues. His position, I think, tended to assume an originally benevolent creation becoming harmful, but in fact it leaves open the question of whether the change comes by directionless evolution, by cosmic effects of the Fall, or by the providential choices of God (for his own unstated reasons). My thesis, of course, would be that all things are under the providence of God in an obedient creation.

      Even that leaves open the question of whether Yersinia pestis is “a plague sent by God for transgression” (as it undoubtedly is in OT texts like 1 Sam 4-6), or is merely a part of the natural order of mutability, life and death intrinsic to the first creation governed providentially.

      David Snoke came closest to my approach in that, and I was pleased to find him drawing attention to the scriptural contrast between the perishable creation and the new spiritual creation, rather than between a fallen creation and a redeemed creation, which is the distinction I develop at length in The Generations of Heaven and Earth, more than in my first book.

      I think the whole thing will appear in some form on the Christian Scientific Society website, and if I find it I’ll put a link up.

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