Category Archives: Politics and sociology

In my series on the phases of theistic evolution I touched on the interesting link between the spirit of the age and which scientific theories (and what kind of theistic evolution) are popular, or even possible. It’s hard sometimes to tell what dictates that spirit, but it does seem that it is at least as much the case, or possibly more so, that worldview dictates science rather than that the scientific evidence forms the worldview. Which is curious indeed.

In another context Gregory linked to an article by Steve Fuller. In this post the argument of the article itself is not important. But part of what it said was to point to the work of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Of Maxwell Wikipedia says: Maxwell is considered by many physicists to be the 19th-century scientist having the greatest influence on 20th-century physics. The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists says he is generally considered: …the greatest theoretical physicist of the 1800s, as his forbear Faraday was the greatest experimental physicist.

For your edification, let’s attempt a synthesis of economics, free will and Intelligent Design. Maybe it will kick off a whole new academic discipline. Or maybe not.

I’ve just read a lecture by Steve Fuller, in which he mentioned that, at around the time of the Scopes trial, it was pretty well impossible to find a scientist working in a Christian institution (and I assume this largely means US denominational universities) who would accept the reality of either miracles or the physical resurrection of Christ. I would suggest it would have been almost equally hard to find a theologian in the same institutions who believed in them either, at that time. I’ve not checked any sources, but it makes sense – even when I was young there was a strong feeling that science and the supernatural were … Continue reading →

There have been a few scattered discussions on BioLogos recently about the question of the “obsolete” cosmology in the Bible, and especially in Genesis 1, and I’ve done a recent blog  on that subject. One of the things that becomes quickly obvious is how very hard it is for moderns to see the theological content of ANE texts as other than add-on stories to mistaken science, rather than as the expression of a worldview that had very little interest in the purely material qualities of the Universe. Or rather, that saw the material aspects of the Universe from a theological point of view.