Monthly Archives: August 2014

Deep time – what’s the story?

Posted on 08/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

When one draws back from the “evolution is a proven fact” polemic, and aims to pin things down more rigorously, the least-contestable parts of the received scientific wisdom, vague as that is overall in the public arena, are the great age of the earth, and the succession of species (as opposed to common descent, which has some strong evidence but of a more inferential kind). Deep time’s strongest theological suit, in my book, is that a careful reading of the Bible makes no statement about the time of the creation – the chronological evidence of histories and genealogies actually takes one back to Adam, and it is an inference that … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, History, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

Law and nature

Posted on 07/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

GD mentions in a recent comment how the Aristotelian concept of nature’s predictability is fundamentally different from that of modern science. To previous generations of natural philosophers, habitual actions were the result of the forms applied to matter by God. They were the intrinsic tendencies of substantial forms, and so part of their essential natures.

Posted in Science, Theology | 4 Comments

More on selection, optimization and doubt

Posted on 05/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

I want to expand a little on why I have conceptual problems with standard Neodarwinian evolution as a more-or-less complete explanation for the origin of the species, touching again on optimization, which I dealt with recently in the context of formal causation.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 42 Comments

Thinking through theistic evolution

Posted on 03/08/2014 by Jon Garvey

I only recently encountered a large-scale 2009 survey of UK views on evolution and creation, called Rescuing Darwin (a strangely unconfident title for his Bicentennial Year). I won’t review it fully because the detailed analysis produces a confusing and not particularly clear picture, like the US survey recently discussed by Debbie Haarsma on BioLogos. For those interested, I will just quote the headline figures, as they are rather surprising for what is a far more deeply secularised society than the US.

Posted in Creation, Theology | 4 Comments