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Category Archives: Science
A good creation reduced to vanity – but not evil
One more passage and I’m through. Romans 8.18ff is often used both by Creationists to show that death resulted from the fall, and by others to show that the death and decay in it is not God’s will. A careful study shows that this is a complete misinterpretation, and here is an essay by me, and a rather better one by Dan Leiphart demonstrating this. In summary, the Bible contains no doctrine of a fallen natural creation, but rather that now, as at the beginning, it is good and entirely the work of God. The small number of passages often used to deny this actually don’t do so. I don’t … Continue reading
A better creation in Isaiah
Another set of passages urged in support of the doctrine of a fallen natural world is Isaiah chs 11 and 65. The first is in the context of a Messianic prophecy, in which the Branch of Jesse will defeat Israel’s enemies and unite them, judging the wicked in favour of the righteous. Verse 6 begins: The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant … Continue reading
The good creation in Genesis 6
Another passage sometimes cited to support the idea of a fallen creation is the preamble to the flood narrative in Genesis 6. As the KJV puts it: The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and behold it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, the end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold I will destroy them with the earth.
Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology
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The good creation in Genesis 1 – and after
Several Bible passages are often cited to show that “natural evil”, particularly in the form of meat eating, was never intended in God’s original creation. From the literalist perspective, that means it did not actually happen before the fall. If Genesis is taken metaphorically, maybe it refers to what God would have preferred if … well, if he’d created things different, which is problematic in itself. Certainly, in any old earth understanding, it’s not possible to argue that the world actually was free of animal death or predation when man existed on earth. But today I want to start examining these passages specifically by looking at the apparent vegetarianism in … Continue reading
Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology
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The Bible’s teaching on the corruption of creation
Mainstream Christian belief is that we live in a fallen world, in the sense that the natural creation is dysfunctional and responsible for natural evil. Some theistic evolutionists reject the fall as a factor (or reject the fall altogether!), but still see the creation as tainted by death and sin, the latter understood as meat eating, parasitism, animal suffering and so on. They sometimes invert the Biblical picture and say that this imperfect creation resulted in mankind’s sin. I disagree. Either way, this dysfunction would be a pretty key factor in life, and so the corruption of nature ought to be a major theme in the Bible’s teaching, right? In fact, it … Continue reading
Augustine denies natural world corrupted – official
One of the virtually axiomatic doctrines of modern Christianity is the corruption and fall of the natural world along with mans moral nature. Natural evil is accounted to be a result of sin, not only in the sense that men suffer and die from disease or disaster, but also in the sense that these exist in the natural world at all. In the controversy over origins, this is a stumbling block to Biblical literalists, one of whose arguments is that if mankind was born into a world already long-established in the business of death and decay, it is a denial of the original goodness of the creation from Genesis 1. … Continue reading
On theodicy and humility
Einstein quote of the day: The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. It is indeed a wonderful and strange thing that naked apes can understand so much about the working principles of the Universe. But this may be one area in which the anthropic principle actually does operate. We have no reason to believe we can understand everything, and some reason to suspect we wouldn’t realise that we couldn’t perceive the unknown areas. Perhaps what we know of the Universe seems comprehensible only because of our incomprehension of the rest.
Peer review problem in science fiction
For a bit of relaxation I have just re-read an old sci-fi paperback from my shelves, Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky. I was struck, for some reason, by the following passage, describing how an archaeologist of the distant future, named Arvadan, had suffered the unprecedented indignity of having his senior dissertation rejected (peremptorily) by the Journal of the Galactic Archaeological Society:
Posted in Politics and sociology, Science
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47 kinds of chocolate chip
Back in 2007 (you see I’m late, as ever) Allen MacNeill published a list of 47 sources of variation within living cells. I believe he’s since expanded it to over 50. As you’ll see from the link, his intention was to knock down an ID “straw man” that random point mutation cannot produce nearly enough variation to give natural selection traction. Every evolutionary biologist, he points out, can refute that from the hosts of other mechanisms now known to occur. His critique of ID is a little unfair, I feel, having seen firsthand how often orthodox Neodarwinists knock down ID on the basis that point mutations are more than sufficient, … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, Science
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Semi-creationism is alive and well in TE
One of the key insights in recent times that enables Christians to integrate a Biblical worldview with a scientific one is that expressed in John Walton’s seminal Lost World of Genesis One. In this he shows how the Genesis creation account was originally intended not as a material description of creation, but as a functional account of God’s ordering of it as his temple, with mankind in the privileged position of both priest-king and temple-image.