Category Archives: Theology of nature

All flesh is grass

Yesterday a (highly) local landmark met its end, succumbing to a relatively moderate windy night as winter merges into spring. I’ve come to know the ancient ash tree – I suppose 150 years old or more – as “the jackdaw tree” since we moved here fifteen years ago.

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Are we in a simulation? Materialist and theist approaches

The idea that the world is nothing but a “simulation,” akin to that in the Matrix films, has cropped up over the last few years in serious academic papers, in many YouTube videos, and even in comments by Elon Musk. And now it has reached the popular press in the form of this Daily Mail article.

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Skin in the game

It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that the bloke who wins a Nobel Prize for, say, the No-threshold linear mutagenesis model of radiation is not the most susceptible to research debunking it. Nor is a renowned race activist immersed in intersectional theory the most amenable to evidence that racism has decreased. For they both have “skin in the game.”

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The religious apologetics of naturalistic materialism

James Tour, as many of you will know, is a noted chemist who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve, unashamedly engaging in apologetics alongside his groundbreaking research, particularly that involving nano-particles.

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Providence, raindrops and horsehoe-nails

One throw-away line in a video for the excellent Christian course Discipleship Exploredcaught my attention. The narrator, speaking of God’s care for us, said that “each drop of rain has its intended target.”

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Forgetting the gift and the giver at harvest time

It’s the time of year when churches still tend to have some kind of harvest festival. I was reminded of that this morning both by having to get the songs for our harvest service out to the various musicians, projectionists and so on, and even more by my daily reading happening to be Acts 14, in which Paul and Barnabas discourage the Lycaonians from treating them as gods by reminding them that the true God has revealed himself to them because “he has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” Ironically, … Continue reading

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (3)

We left the last blog post with a simple “toolkit” from Genesis 1 which, whilst it may not “define” man in the way Aquinas sought to do, certainly describes him theologically in a way that enables us to interrogate the archaeological record for biblically human origins.

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (2)

Let’s start our exploration by considering the scant information Genesis contains on what it took to be a human being “in the beginning.”

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Exploring the theological status of ancient man (1)

When I wrote The Generations of Heaven and Earth, whose central theme is the Genealogical Adam and Eve paradigm, I spent some pages discussing the status of those people “outside the garden,” on the assumption that an Adam and Eve around the Chalcolithic period, as suggested by the text, would have had many contemporaries. By that time, after all, and indeed very much earlier, human traces are known from all around the world.

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Humpism, not ID, is the real enemy of Science™

What’s the connection between Nigel Farage and the the Intelligent Design Movement? Well none, directly, or else it would certainly have appeared in his Coutts Bank Dossier and been used as further evidence of his unsuitability to be their customer. But conceptually there is a connection, in that what first made me aware of the prevalence of propaganda, disinformation and cancellation in our society was the way that ID was treated by mainstream scientists, their progressive Evangelical acolytes in the form of BioLogos, and broader societal organs like the press and judiciary.

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