Category Archives: Creation

In retrospect I studied zoology at a time when one of biology’s disciplines was on the cusp of change. In the sixth form we looked at ecology as a branch of biology (a rather boring one compared to all those interesting animals, I thought at the time). By the time I was doing medicine at Cambridge it had become a branch of sociology, to do with how “the ecology” gets polluted by us. By and large, the latter approach has predominated in the public eye, with most of us being more concerned about global warming messing things up than by how they work in the first place.

In the discussion on my last post  GD took the discussion into the area of human freedom (which, as usual in discussing origins questions, I had avoided because of the TE tendency to conflate free-will with free-nature, whatever they mean by that). But having raised it maybe looking at some aspects of free-will itself may be of value to some. The discussion between penman, GD and myself suffers the disadvantage that we all agree, I think, on a classical theological concept of human freedom as being within, and subsumed by, God’s overarching sovereign purpose. But that’s not the commonest view nowadays. So I want to set up some questions and … Continue reading →

A good video of William Dembski with rubbish sound is posted on UD here. It confirmed to me the conclusion that the divisions in the science-faith spectrum are usually drawn in the wrong places. There are really only two important positions, corresponding to design and non-design. Period.

Ed Feser has a helpful discussion on the way that, in Aristotelianism-Thomism, efficient causes can both be real, and subject to God as teleological first cause. In this way, the concept of evolution can be perfectly compatible with the God of Chriostianity who disposes all things according to his will.