I’m afraid things are still rather slack on the Hump post front, though not on the work front generally: I did a review of N.T. Wright’s fantastic chapter on Christ and the Cosmos over at Peaceful Science; I got the indexing finished on God’s Good Earth, which means it’s now actually in press, and I’m simply awaiting news on availability (and price); and I’ve been beavering away on the new book, to accompany (one hopes) those on Genealogical Adam by Josh Swamidass (due out November) and Andrew Loke (due out I have no idea).
Two little snippets of interest. The first is that I was e-mailed by a biology graduate named Josy O’Donnel, who runs an excellent blog on matters conservational and natural. Although I didn’t feel the purposes of our sites were quite the same, her site shares a great sense of sheer delight in the natural order, and some good writing, so I commend it to you.
The second thing was that I happened to fall into conversation yesterday with the visiting son of one of my elderly friends at church, who is a soil chemist by profession. I gathered that he’s interested in origins stuff, but seems to be in a church dominated by YECs and finds it hard to put in a word for old earth or evolution. Yes, that does happen even in England, though far less that in the US.
It’s tough to delight in God’s creation but to be constrained in sharing that with ones brethren because they get poor theology from (US) websites (don’t react – theistic evolutionists get plenty of poor theology from thier websites too – that’s why we exist!). Anyway, he was intrigued and enthused to hear about my book on a good creation (news of which had somehow seeped into the service). But then he talked about placing Adam in real history – and I was able to tell him we are working on that in Genealogical Adam. And he talked what religion might be like for people outside Eden in that kind of scenario – and I was able to tell him I wrote that chapter last week. And he talked about possible locations for Eden, and I could tell him that was covered in another chapter… and so on, until I was late for lunch.
In short, for this guy the stuff that we’ve been working on for so long here, or at least that which has found its way into books being written by me or by likeminded folks like Joshua Swamidass and Sy, is going to scratch where biblically faithful working scientists are actually itching. In my case, since I have in mind biblically faithful non-scientists as my target audience, it’s quite exciting: maybe we really can do something to bring them together. Or even more.
