Category Archives: Science

Easter changed everything

Didn’t it?

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BioLogos and design – disagreement, incommunication or evasiveness?

The two BioLogos threads I mentioned here attracted some attention at Uncommon Descent. There seemed some consensus amongst even those who disagree on detail that Darrel Falk and other BioLogos people are somewhat less than forthcoming on just how they relate God’s creative input to outcomes in the “natural” order.

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 11 Comments

Underwater dinosaurs

Something about this story tickled my fancy. It made me think of this Monty Python sketch, but I’ve posted a link to that before on this blog, so it would be shortchanging you to repeat it. Instead here’ a less obvious memory of another elderly scientist with aquatic interests: Perhaps a more realistic representation:

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Miracles and the ordinary wonders of the Universe

Penman has replied to my last post  on Simon Conway Morris’s positive take on Biblical miracles. I think a post-length reply might be more helpful, not least because it gives me the opportunity to move away from Morris the individual. I mainly wanted in that post to show that childhood reading was what started him “ticking” – I’d not want to be responsible for a discussion about him behind his back that made him sick, rather than tick…

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What makes Simon Conway Morris tick

I’ve just received my copy of the Cambridge University alumni magazine Cam. I graduated nearly 40 years ago, but have only been receiving this journal for a couple of years. No doubt it’s angled at those of us with sufficient age and resources to make bequests in favour of our alma mater. Be that as it may it has an interesting article about Simon Conway Morris which, as one would expect from him, is mainly about evolutionary convergence.

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How the human got his hands

A new piece of research tries to help answer the question of how humans became bipedal. The researchers “tested” the hypothesis that carrying became easier with a bipedal gait by observing chimps in the field under conditions where resources were depleted, and found they adopted bipedalism in order to carry things better. QED.

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The non-evolution of conscience

I’ve been thinking about Romans again, in the context of Christian attempts to map questions about Adam and original sin to evolutionary theory. I made some preliminary points here, but I want to consider one particular aspect today – the nature of sin in the Bible generally, and in Romans particularly.

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There ain’t no allegories on the Euphrates

Just a quick one. How often do you hear people saying that Genesis 2-3 should not be taken historically, but as an allegory of the human condition generally: “Everyman’s Fall”. Adam and Eve, and their fall, should be taken figuratively. These are the same people who remind one that history only really became a genre with the Greeks, that we’re reading an ANE text too literally, and so on. It suddenly occurs to me that nobody ever seems to ask whether there  actually was ever an ANE genre of theological allegory of the kind  on which they insist. I can’t find any trace of one in John H Walton’s review … Continue reading

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Jim Packer, fundamentalism and time warps

I’ve just been re-reading Jim Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God, partly from nostalgia as well as from a desire to see how the concept of fundamentalism might have changed since 1958. “Nostalgia” because the book was lent to me by an older Christian when I took over the leadership of my school Christian Union back in 1968. I didn’t read it for about five years, but it did at least leave me with the rare privilege of knowing what the word “fundamentalism” originally meant. And that is simply affirmation of the five “fundamentals” of historic Christianity identified in a series of documents in the USA early in the … Continue reading

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The philosophical foundations of science – sand?

One of the things that surprises me greatly is how little support materialism gets from philosophy. In fact, materialism is rejected so much as a matter of course, apparently, that philosophers seldom even make much of it. This is because, according to those in the field, it is simply untenable as a worldview. I gather that most of the history of materialist philosophy is contiguous with the history of Marxism – and with the latter more or less in terminal decline the former is also largely a museum piece.

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