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Category Archives: Creation
The impossible takes a little longer
Hanan (what useful links he gives!) drew our attention in a comment on my previous post to a recent quotation from John Polkinghorne on the compatibility of naturally-occurring processes with God’s will. Eddie and I both agreed that this is unexceptionable as it stands, but that it requires some contextualisation if it is to be fully endorsed.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Theology
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A potted guide to potato peeling
Hanan’s query on the last thread was trying to sort out what I meant by “guided evolution”. He, Eddie and I all made the same distinction between a universe created with “frontloading”, so that “natural laws” elegantly do all that God might wish in a hands-off way, and a “guided” process where God continues to be active in “nudging” evolution the way he wishes it to go.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology
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The plausibility and credibility of materialism
One of the perennial issues underlying the poll to which Edward Robinson draws attention in his post is the question of loss of faith. The most obvious reading of the trend towards support for evolution not guided by God, and away from guided evolution, is that believers see the evidence for evolution (in its original undirected, unpurposeful guise) and are persuaded that God could not have been involved. For all its theological faults, this is one of the central concerns of BioLogos – kids brought up in Creationist churches get to college and, realising the truth, lose their faith. The fact that the poll suggests this is rare (Creationist numbers … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology
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Gallup, Jerry Coyne, and Karl Giberson: Is the Handwriting on the Wall for Theistic Evolution?
It is not often that I agree with Jerry Coyne. Nonetheless, his recent column on the results of a new Gallup poll about creation and evolution hits some nails on the head. This Gallup poll that has been run every two years since 1982. Here are the results, up to and including this year’s:
Posted in Creation, Edward Robinson, Theology
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If all the world were paper…
… and all the sea were ink… Here’s a thought building on both the biblical worldview covered in the last couple of posts, and the analogy (if that is all it is) between the written word as both material and as message , and the creation, explored in the last post (thanks to Merv and C S Lewis).
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
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My old school as worldview
Commenting on the last post, Merv has raised a truly excellent analogy – which is actually a direct comparison – to the diffence between our own way of seeing the world (whether Christian or secular) and that of the Bible and other ancient sources.
Worldviews without science
Since we’ve been talking about worldviews, let me refresh a theme I’ve covered a little before, and that is how difficult it is for us moderns – whether Christians or not – to escape from our materialist worldview at its broadest. By this I don’t mean the idea that the material is all that exists (snare though that is), but the fact that, for all of us civilized folks, material explanations for things remain the default “reality.”
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology, Uncategorized
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Science’s original view of contingency
Writing my piece on Bede reminded me that if he can be decribed as a “scientist”, he’s an outlier – though a legitimate one – in the process by which modern science came to be established. There’s beginning to be a good body of literature supporting the even greater body of evidence that natural philosophy developed in the wake of the Christian doctrine of creation, and entails it. This can be found both in older books like that of Stanley Jaki and newer ones like James Hannam’s. In fact an essay of Hannam’s on his website includes my starting point here.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
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How the venerable Bede got us to the Moon
If it weren’t such low-hanging fruit, I’d write a riposte to that oft-repeated Gnu boast about science getting us to the Moon, whilst religion does nothing useful. In truth, I did a similar thing obliquely here, way back. But it would be easy, were New Atheists not immune to reason, to point out how most of the key names in the science that led to space travel either came to science because of their Christian faith, or came to Christ through their science, or both. The names would, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of science history knows, include Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, not … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
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Science in schools UK
The news that “creationism” has been banned in science lessons in British Academy Schools by HM Government almost passed our national press by, whereas there are a multitude of Google hits from the US. In fact, on the main “secondary” source, a UK site, nearly all the comments are from US culture warriors of one persuasion or another. My conclusion from this is that (a) Americans are too obsessed with it and (b) the British are too complacent.
Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Uncategorized
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