Category Archives: Creation

My brother likes to be useful to the world by participating in BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) projects, in which the computing power of the broad masses is used for processor-heavy tasks like screening data from the SETI program (a hiding to nothing) or testing climate change models (potentially immensely valuable). When I was visiting him recently, I displaced the BOINC screen-saver in order to check the news, and found an item purporting to have mathematical evidence that the universe is a hologram. The idea of the cosmos as an illusion (of what, for whom?) is a common conceit, usually in the form of its being a computer … Continue reading →

In a previous article I briefly reviewed Loren and Deborah Haarsma’s book on theistic evolution. The version of theistic evolution presented as their own preference, allowing for several other models, seems basically to endorse Jacques Monod’s dipole of chance and necessity, but viewed as a theistic mode of design. The initial “deposit” of the creation could be sufficient, the book suggests, to have produced the whole natural world, without the need for further divine activity, though their theology happily grants the possibility of the latter. But the position is that the fine tuning of the original laws and conditions makes known evolutionary mechanisms sufficient to guarantee the sort of bisophere … Continue reading →

In my last post I looked in more depth, through the writing of Karl Giberson, at the “free process” idea of creation that has been so prevalent at BioLogos since I became a visitor and contributor there maybe three years ago. I want today to look at the views of Deborah Haarsma, BioLogos President for the past year. This has been prompted by Ted Davis’s invitation to me, on one of his BioLogos threads about Robert Boyle, to read the book she and husband Loren co-authored (Origins – Creation, Design, and Evolution), which he thought would accord with my own viewpoint. He asked me to feed back my conclusions there, … Continue reading →

I’ve not really had much to do with the writing of leading theistic evolutionist Karl Giberson, except for noting his occasional public outbursts against Evangelicalism’s failure to embrace his ideas fully. But I probably should have done, because he was Executive Vice President of BioLogos from 2009, and since his departure from them has written a book with its founder, Francis Collins. And, I discover, he has much shown more forthrightness in his writing about the “Free creation” than the curious coyness of BioLogos (to the point of temporarily shutting down comments rather than addressing my questions about it not long ago).

A long and rancorous thread has, I hope, begun to peter out at BioLogos. I referred to it in an earlier post, written when it was merely controversial. The bitterness masks the fact that, hidden deep, some propositions were actually given some kind of answer, though in typical BioLogos fashion (sad to say) it’s taken 140+ posts, none by staff members, to slug out what could have been answered amicably in about seven. Let me try and summarise what I think is the actual reasoning, gleaned from a number of people’s possibly varying positions.

The question of God’s oversight of evolution has come up yet again on BioLogos, as it must so long as it’s denied there. Bren, in defending evolution as a substantially undirected process, raises again the analogy of evolution being like a child given freedom to make mistakes by its parents. It’s a superficially plausible idea, and was used on me by Darrel Falk a couple of years ago, so maybe its origin is in one of those popular theistic evolution books in which theology is done by buzzword. But since it is being used to overthrow the fundamental monotheistic doctrine of universal providence, it had better have some pretty good … Continue reading →