Category Archives: Creation

Jerry Coyne has celebrated Amazon’s offer of a free Kindle version of James Shapiro’s Evolution: A View from the 21st Century by asking for comments on the book. (Beware: some people seem to have been charged for their download!) Coyne hasn’t read it himself, but says that Shapiro is “heterodox in his views.” He should know, since they are both at the University of Chicago. Even so, “heterodox” seems an odd choice of words.

Talking about the magical abilities of time, here’s my B B Warfield quote for today, anticipating Bill Dembski by a century or so, and without the maths: “What chance cannot begin to produce in a moment, chance cannot complete the production of in an eternity… What is needed is not time, but cause. Even an eternal process cannot rid us of the necessity of seeking an adequate cause behind every change… We may cast our dice to all eternity with no more likelihood than at the first throw of ever turning up double sevens.” Warfield, of course, never adequately grasped that natural selection can slowly build up even single sevens as … Continue reading →

BioLogos is, from its statements, committed to reconciling an Evangelical Christian position with mainstream biological science – hence “bio” and “logos.” In a whole series of posts commencing here I queried why it gives so much space to the far-from mainstream Open Theism. But other interesting streams are present there too.

In the Light of Mark Noll’s excellent piece on BioLogos, I got hold of a copy of Noll’s sadly out of print collection of B B Warfield’s writings on evolution. The amazing thing is that the book does not read like a relic from history, but like a commentary on the current evolution-faith debate.

Steve Matheson (a Reformed Chistian, like myself) started an interesting thread on his website a couple of months ago,  which stemmed from a conversation with Casey Luskin. (Cunning link to my previous post – see what I did there?) His argument was that Intelligent Design Theory is inherently unfalsifiable unless one specifies the character and limitations of the designer, because an omniscient designer such as God could (and of course, in both his and my view, did) design everything. Since that could include designing the incontrovertible appearance of non-design, nothing could be excluded from the possibility of design, design would therefore be unfalsifiable and design theory ergo unscientific.