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Post Archive
Category Archives: Science
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.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
10 Comments
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
Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology
13 Comments
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
Posted in Science, Theology
19 Comments
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.
Posted in Science
5 Comments
Evidence for our loss of cosmic consciousness
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.
Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
1 Comment
Roots of racism
We have some issues with racism in football over here. Not many, it should be said – the Football Association has worked hard to root it out both amongst supporters and players. But the (now removed) England captain is now awaiting trial on charges of racially abusing a fellow-player. It was also reported that at a European game (where to be frank crowd racism is far worse) spectators were chanting abuse at one of the black British players. The roots of race-hatred are complex. At one end are fairly primitive human impulses like xenophobia. There are also genuine social antagonisms caused by immigration, unemployment and terrorism attributed to racial minorities. … Continue reading
Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
3 Comments
Everything acts according to its nature – bar God?
I want to return to what I call the “hyperkenotic” view of God, that came into the explanatory model of much of theistic evolution via Howard van Till and, before that, Process Theology. The idea is that God emptied himself of his omnipotence, and even of his omniscience, with a view to acting responsively to his creation. In theistic evolution, this means allowing material substances “freedom” to evolve without the “interference” or “coercion” of an autocratic God.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
6 Comments
… and the theological equivalent of Emmenthal
My last post should not be taken to imply that science is false or useless – merely that in itself it’s an insufficient predictor of normal reality. In other words, the naturalism agenda can’t be sustained by it, and there are (or at least, may well be) more things in heaven and earth than that particular philosophy dreams of. Discussing the subject of that post with a theologically trained saxophonist(!), before I wrote it, it occurred to me that a parallel phenomenon occurs in the theology of the Bible, which might be helpful to some. Many people are troubled by the contrast seen in the Wisdom Literature, and particularly in … Continue reading
So full of holes you could drive a miracle through it
I read a provocative idea recently (it may have been in Steve Fuller’s writing, but it may not). It is that science is good at understanding things at the very smallest scales (molecular and below), and at the very largest scales (like the behaviour of galaxies and Universes) – but everywhere in between, where most of our interests lie, it is only approximately true.
Thoughts on Biblical cosmology
One of the commonplaces of the “liberal evangelical” BioLogian approach to Bible interpretation is to use the example of ANE cosmology as a way of showing that the Bible cannot be taken as a scientific text. The concept of the Universe said to underlie Genesis, and common to the rest of the ancient world, is that shown in this diagram: It should be noted from the first that this is not an ancient diagram, but a modern interpretation of ancient descriptions. It is very easy to misinterpret the past, one example being the assumption that the mediaeval mappae mundi also suggest a flat earth surrounded by water, whereas in fact … Continue reading