Category Archives: Science

Our dawn chorus, though usually initiated by a resident cock pheasant, Philip, squawking for food, has been dominated recently by a blackbird, probably brain-damaged. The blackbird is one of Britain’s most inventively melodic birds (check out this YouTube clip). But this one has become obsessed with a simple diatonic motif, in Bb, which it will usually repeat back-to back before breaking up into half-hearted warbles. Here is my transcription:

One of the strands running through some of these posts is that if we want to understand God’s ways in creation (and therefore scientific questions like evolution), we must also understand how he acts now. I’m speaking here as to Christians, who accept Scripture’s inspiration and authority, but who sometimes say these questions of God’s governance in the world are moot. The same (they say) is therefore true of God’s involvement in natural processes and the vexed question of natural evil. There seems to be a feeling that the kind of philosophical-theological views proposed in such concepts as concurrentism are imposed upon the biblical text. But I’m going to argue … Continue reading →

The Christian doctrine of creation is incomplete without a consideration of the concept of the new creation. Not only is Christianity inextricably linked to the idea that, in Christ, the whole cosmos will soon be renewed, but that renewal has been revealed as the end towards which the old creation was always headed. 

One of our readers pointed me to a useful overview  by Simon Conway Morris of his thinking on his pet theory of convergent evolution. I don’t want to review it here, as it’s clear enough in itself. But I will summarise it in relation to The Hump’s recently coined approach to things scientific, Classic Providential Naturalism.