Category Archives: Science

One of the things that seems to be forgotten in discussions about how God is involved in creation is the fact that he is eternal, and creation is not. I’m thinking principally of the biological aspects of creation, and of discussions about whether God set up the laws and initial conditions and stood back (essentially the Deist position, as held now by many Open Theist TEs), or whether creation is an ongoing activity, such as the admittedly rather indefinite “unfolding through evolution” picture in Kerry Fulcher’s video on BioLogos. It also impinges on questions in ID (or more often, thrown at ID) of how God introduces design into nature and … Continue reading →

I’ve been following BioLogos for maybe two years now, and like any other long association one begins to pick up the general “vibe” of theistic evolution. One of the main things I’ve noticed is how unformed the connection between evolution and Christian theology tends to be. TE’s know they’re not Creationists, and they know they reject ID, but beyond that where they do stand often seems vague. When the link is made firmer, it tends to be expressed in heterodox terms of Open or Process theology, as I’ve discussed at length before.

The alternative to emergence as an explanation for life, if you exclude more than astronomically-remote mere chance, is teleology. I always remember my introduction to the word “teleology”, which was in an evolutionary context. Well it wasn’t, really, but it was in the mouth of the only one of my medical teachers who took evolution at all seriously.

I’ve recently had a brief exchange on Uncommon Descent with Elizabeth Liddle over emergence. She mentioned free-will as an emergent property of the brain, though she subsequently admitted she doesn’t like the term and prefers to think in terms of systems. My argument was (and is) that, in such a context, the word is essentially meaningless. I want to extend the argument here to the larger area of life in general.

When I reviewed Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell  I was a year late commenting on what others had said about it, and the book came out a year before that. Not wishing to sully my track record, I’m over two centuries late in reviewing William Paley’s Natural Theology. I read the book because it’s almost universally compared (unfavourably) with Origin of Species, and even opponents of Darwinian evolution speak mainly of its weaknesses. I suspected that a book apparently so mistaken, which nevertheless was a bestseller throughout the nineteenth century, had probably been misrepresented. Having read Origin of Species recently, I thought it was an opportune time for comparison.