Category Archives: Adam

Well, the BioLogos thread to which I pointed two days ago has been abandoned by the questioners with, predictably, no reply from the hosts. The same conversation passed to another hopeful thread, a re-post of an old call to Evangelicals to engage courageously in rethinking their comfortable assumptions etc. Unfortunately nobody has been on hand to dialogue with those who did think, and also posted. Poster hanan-d suggested sympathetically (and seriously) that the silence from BioLogos staff is due to their sense of spiritual doubt from cognitive dissonance – they want to retain their faith in God as Creator, but the science suggests blind chance as the cause of living … Continue reading →

A couple of months ago I embarked on reading (intermittently) through the Old Testament Apocrypha, most of which I’ve not read before, though it contains useful insights into the times between the testaments. Reading 2 Esdras in the New English Bible, I realised it was the same as the “4th Ezra” cited by Tom Wright in the quote I included in this piece on Adam. There he says: [In Judaism] there isn’t a doctrine of Original Sin until 4th Ezra and 2 Baruch, which were written after the destruction of the temple in AD 70. Where the destruction of the temple has forced them to say ‘we were aware of … Continue reading →

I thought it worth expanding the comment I made on penman’s quotation from N T Wright in a recent post, because it occurs to me that not everyone sees the creation issue in the same broad context that I (and those like Wright) do. Essentially, this is the context of biblical theology.

Penman, always helpful in providing useful links, has pointed me to a quotation from an interview with theologian N T Wright. In the wide-ranging interview by Andrew Wilson, he is asked about belief in a historical Adam and Eve.

Ed Feser finishes his review of reviews of Thomas Nagel’s important book Mind and Cosmos  here. I did my own non-review here. Feser deals there with reviews by two analytic philosphers and two Aristotelian-Thomists like himself. In assessing the former, by J P Moreland and Alvin Plantinga, although they are Christians, he brackets them with atheist Nagel in sharing a personalist view of divinity formed by Enlightenment philosophy.

Contrary to what is popularly supposed, young earth views did not predominate amongst conservative Christians at the time Darwin published The Origin of Species. I’m grateful to historian of science Ted Davis for pointing that out to me in one of his BioLogos posts. In fact, it’s obvious from the Origin itself, in that although Darwin’s main “opponent” is special creation (a slight straw man itself by 1859), he makes no attempt to argue for deep time, although he does mention the need for it in passing.