Category Archives: Science

I made a gaffe in a BioLogos comment the other day by inexplicably citing Kepler instead of Laplace as the person who showed that Isaac Newton’s famous argument for divine meddling with natural laws was unnecessary and wrong. But in sorting myself out I discovered to my surprise that the whole tale, the historic basis of criticism of the “God of the gaps”, is yet another example of science-religion mythology, like Galileo’s persecution by Christianity or Bishop Wilberforce’s apocryphal remarks to Huxley. Oddly enough, or maybe not, Googling the subject took me first to the BioLogos FAQ.

An exchange on BioLogos set me thinking – as they often do. On Ted Davis’s post about Polkinghorne  an atheist poster says: I think it is interesting that the life of Jesus did not even convince most of his Judean contemporaries that he was divine. Most Jews who lived at the time, and most who came after, did not think he was the messiah. Why is that? The redoubtable beaglelady replies: Because he condescended and veiled his divinity for his earthly ministry. Additionally, he wasn’t coercive and wasn’t interested in putting on a show. Our friend Eddie spotted, as I did, some buzzwords from the TE lexicon that remind one … Continue reading →

Usually associated with the rhetorically attractive, but incoherent, idea of a “free creation”  is the sense of abhorrence for a “tinkering God.” Both themes predominate within current theistic evolution, and the latter is usually couched in terms such as: “Why would God be such an incompetent Creator as to have to keep tinkering with the world afterwards?”

OK – let me build on some recent posts to look at what seems to be the state of theistic evolution in our time. First, some basic definitions derived from Francisco Ayala. For the purposes of this discussion: Final causation = external teleology = design (not taking design in the more restricted sense of engineering metaphors, etc) This cluster is opposed to chance/necessity, seen as the outworking of the laws and initial state of the Universe. Thus Ayala would see the fine-tuned constants, etc, as final causation/external teleology/design, but nothing in evolution downstream of them as such. It’s a useful distinction that fits well with my previous piece. To clarify … Continue reading →

Readers of this blog will be familiar with my antagonism to the “freedom of nature” school of theology seen in much theistic evolution and, notably, on BioLogos, where I’ve been critiquing it for the last eighteen months and failing to get any reply (at all) to my invitations to justify it. My latest attempt was on a post by Dennis Venema on evolution basics, in the comments of which he posted his clearest “statement of TE faith” to date. It’s here: Dennis’s comment is #76597, and mine #76711, though you should note that comments are now being removed at BioLogos after 180 days, which is a shame as it hides … Continue reading →

In retrospect I studied zoology at a time when one of biology’s disciplines was on the cusp of change. In the sixth form we looked at ecology as a branch of biology (a rather boring one compared to all those interesting animals, I thought at the time). By the time I was doing medicine at Cambridge it had become a branch of sociology, to do with how “the ecology” gets polluted by us. By and large, the latter approach has predominated in the public eye, with most of us being more concerned about global warming messing things up than by how they work in the first place.

In the discussion on my last post  GD took the discussion into the area of human freedom (which, as usual in discussing origins questions, I had avoided because of the TE tendency to conflate free-will with free-nature, whatever they mean by that). But having raised it maybe looking at some aspects of free-will itself may be of value to some. The discussion between penman, GD and myself suffers the disadvantage that we all agree, I think, on a classical theological concept of human freedom as being within, and subsumed by, God’s overarching sovereign purpose. But that’s not the commonest view nowadays. So I want to set up some questions and … Continue reading →

A good video of William Dembski with rubbish sound is posted on UD here. It confirmed to me the conclusion that the divisions in the science-faith spectrum are usually drawn in the wrong places. There are really only two important positions, corresponding to design and non-design. Period.