Category Archives: Theology

Ed Feser has a helpful discussion on the way that, in Aristotelianism-Thomism, efficient causes can both be real, and subject to God as teleological first cause. In this way, the concept of evolution can be perfectly compatible with the God of Chriostianity who disposes all things according to his will.

James Shapiro’s Huffington Post blog carries a eulogy to evolutionary biologist Carl Woese, who died in December. Chasing through links about him, I find that Woese spoke to the argument I made here, and quite likely originated it, in 2004. His overview of evolutionary theory for the twenty first century is well worth reading here.

It’s been pointed out that the concept of “Junk DNA” came not just from the observation of apparently non-coding genetic elements and their interpretation as “parasitic”, but from a theoretical prediction by the noted evolutionary biologist Susumu Ohno in 1972. Ohno said that in mammals, natural selection could only cope with a limited number of harmful mutations without being swamped, with deterioration and extinction as the result. He estimated that, given known rates of mutation, a maximum of 30,000 genes could be subject to selection. This makes intuitive sense – even under the best circumstances how could the environment select the best combination of hundreds of thousands of finely varying … Continue reading →

Denyse O’Leary says something on Best Schools  that I too have been intrigued by for some time. Many (though not all) biologists hold to “universal descent from a single cell” as a dogma central to evolutionary theory. That’s odd, because historically even Darwin, at the dawn of knowledge about early life, spoke of life “breathed into a few forms or into one”, really only implying that there has been divergence rather than stasis. Since then, apart from the opinion of those like Carl Woese that the superkingdoms of life represent separate origins, we have a large body of evidence about horizontal gene transfer and symbiotic events at key evolutionary points. … Continue reading →

The final part of Ted Davis’ s somewhat loosely-entitled series  Science and the Bible has appeared over at Biologos. It is really a summary calling for theological engagement with evolutionary science along the lines of Mark Noll’s 1994 book, Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. What was rather depressing was less the article itself than some early responses.