Category Archives: Theology

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 →

Continuing the thoughts in my last post, it occurs to me how much of the prevalent TE theology appears to be influenced by the Open Theism propounded first by the late Clark Pinnock around 1980, and by other popular leaders such as John Sanders, Peter Wagner and (over here) Roger Forster. This may have been encouraged by the espousal of the new theology by scientists and other writers on theistic evolution like John Polkinghorne, Francis Collins, Karl Giberson, John Haught and Ken Miller. But some similar view of God seems to inform even those who (as far as I know) would not call themselves Open Theists, such as George Murphy … Continue reading →

One of the things I find most perplexing about theistic evolution, in the guise of BioLogos, at least, is how unnecessarily skewed against mainstream evangelical teaching much of it is. I don’t think this is the fault of people like president Darrel Falk. In a recent blog, he corrects an item on NPR (“an American Radio network, I believe, M’Lud”) which seems to make belief in evolution antithetical to belief in a historic Adam and Eve.

I’m surprised the new book from James Shapiro has not received more attention that it has so far. After all, as Archaea discoverer Carl Woese says on the cover, “the book is a game changer.” Evolution – a View is basically a general primer of the discoveries about cell and genome structure of the last few decades, and their connection with newly understood mechanisms for evolution. It’s by a leading bacterial geneticist, himself the discoverer of mobile genetic elements in bacteria, and it is grounded in the research literature and extensively referenced.