Category Archives: Prometheus

Let me present three apparently disparate themes and then show that, together, they give some useful theological insights.

I’m reproducing here a longish post I’ve just done over at Biologos (#82822), only because posts there are ditched after 6 months and I’d like to preserve it. Ted Davis posted a link to an excellent article by Dennis Danielson, on the prevalent myth that the old “geocentrism” implied anthropocentrism. But it also answered a question to me by PNG about sources for TOF’s claim in his blog series on heliocentrism that Renaissance folks preferred the new views because they elevated man to the celestial realm. My post follows:

In the last post  I suggested that “laws of nature” are better understood as the properties of the natures of entities themselves, as in Aristotelian metaphysics. Seen in this light, the concept of “freedom” in nature makes little sense, since there are no “external” laws either maintaining order or restricting freedom. Rather, everything in nature is simply created to act according to its God-ordained nature. It would be no violation of the natural order by God either to create some new type of nature in the world directly, or to act on existing forms according to their existing natures. On the other hand neither would it be a problem for … Continue reading →

Michael Ruse, in his book Debating Design, quotes (as have many others) a letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray about why he cannot see the hand of a good creator in nature. The interesting thing is how he presents his argument. I’ll summarise it.