Category Archives: Theology

In the Light of Mark Noll’s excellent piece on BioLogos, I got hold of a copy of Noll’s sadly out of print collection of B B Warfield’s writings on evolution. The amazing thing is that the book does not read like a relic from history, but like a commentary on the current evolution-faith debate.

Steve Matheson (a Reformed Chistian, like myself) started an interesting thread on his website a couple of months ago,  which stemmed from a conversation with Casey Luskin. (Cunning link to my previous post – see what I did there?) His argument was that Intelligent Design Theory is inherently unfalsifiable unless one specifies the character and limitations of the designer, because an omniscient designer such as God could (and of course, in both his and my view, did) design everything. Since that could include designing the incontrovertible appearance of non-design, nothing could be excluded from the possibility of design, design would therefore be unfalsifiable and design theory ergo unscientific.

Having been singularly unenthusiastic about Eugene Koonin’s invocation of the infinite multiverse to lessen the odds for the origin of life, I was a lot more impressed by his 2009 overview  of evolutionary theory in the light of genomics. It was a comprehensive, thorough (and therefore rather heavy-going for a non-biologist like me) appraisal of the currently understood mechanisms of evolution and their implications for the Neodarwinian synthesis. His broad conclusion is that the time is near (but not quite at hand) for a new theory: Collectively, the developments in evolutionary genomics and systems biology outlined here seem to suggest that, although at present only isolated elements of a new, … Continue reading →

The more I think about it, the more the good folk at BioLogos appear to me to be between a rock and a hard place in formulating a theoretical framework appropriate to their mission. From the start one should acknowledge that, like any such organisation, BioLogos is a broad church. That in itself can cause problems, but it goes with the territory and, in any case, leads to fruitful debate. Rather, I’m restricting myself to the predominant theology of its main supporters, which as I have discussed at length in the last few posts is Open Theism, and to that part of its aim that has to do with reconciling … Continue reading →

Flatland has often been used as an analogy for space-time. Flatlanders live in 2-dimensional space, like drawings on a page. Height, for them, is a difficult dimension for them to imagine, as time is for us. But they can move and act freely within their two-dimensional landscape. Imagine, then, a Flatland in which height is a real dimension through which Flatlanders move unconciously and inexorably, as we do through time. You could picture the “real” Flatland as a cylinder slowly sinking through the relativistic “area-height continuum”. In the Flatland scheme of things, a Flatlander is born at some point in height c`, at area coordinates ab. He moves feeely round … Continue reading →

Open Theology’s propositions Open Theism’s axiomatic starting point is that of the libertarian view of free-will, that is that man is essentially, and unchangeably, free to choose all his actions independent of any external, or even internal, influence. This comes directly from its Arminian roots, though such a view developed gradually and was not clearly stated in the original Five Articles of the Remonstrants. This libertarian view is extended in evolutionary versions of OT to the extreme that the whole of creation must possess this kind of freedom, or God be a despot. After this emerge the following propositions:

I’m still trying to get to grips with the Open Theism that is the ruling theological paradigm at BioLogos in particular, and apparently amongst theistic evolutionists in genereral. At the core of Open Theism is the idea that God is restricted to time just as we are, so cannot know the future because it does not yet exist. Time being a physical part of creation, one would be able to ascertain exactly in which time-frame God is working only by learning his velocity. In theory, he would have a completely different sense of elapsed time were he to be managing the affairs of a light-speed photon rather than those of … Continue reading →