Category Archives: Science

One complaint people like myself and Eddie Robinson have about writers on theistic evolution is their selective use of the Church Fathers to show that they supported, or would have supported, evolution against Creationism or Intelligent Design. I want to show here that their views on the current scene would probably have been more like “a plague on all your ignorant houses”. How you build an orthodox theology of nature is then up to you!

I had a brief conversation on BioLogos with someone who’d been a little troubled by the ancient arguments about “vestigial organs”, found in Darwin and echoed in textbooks for kids since as proof of evolution. I ended up suggesting that in very concept the idea is worthless and ought to be dropped. The trouble is that, like much of the popular presentation of evolution, it is actually not a good argument for evolution, but a polemic “case for evolution against creation”, and so is ideologically driven, even though it’s of no value to science and less to theological discourse on creation.

The end of John’s gospel contains what amount to a couple of prophecies by the risen Jesus. They come at the end of the famous passage where Jesus reinstates Peter, after his triple denial, through a rather painful triple reaffirmation of his love for the Lord. Forgiveness didn’t come completely cost-free to Peter.

It’s foolishness, I know, but let me dwell a little more on the “solid raqia” idea that I deliberately and sensibly avoided in the last post . The issue is, essentially, that the wise and good say that the Hebrews definitely believed in a solid raqia (or firmament) over the sky, that they definitely taught it in Genesis 1 and that there definitely isn’t such a thing surrounding the earth. Therefore their science was wrong and one must either say that Scripture is just untrustworthy, or that it doesn’t matter because the true message is not scientific (though that often turns out to mean “vaguely mythical and equally wrong”).