Category Archives: Theology

One of the virtually axiomatic doctrines of modern Christianity is the corruption and fall of the natural world along with man’s moral nature. Natural evil is accounted to be a result of sin, not only in the sense that men suffer and die from disease or disaster, but also in the sense that these exist in the natural world at all. In the controversy over origins, this is a stumbling block to Biblical literalists, one of whose arguments is that if mankind was born into a world already long-established in the business of death and decay, it is a denial of the original goodness of the creation from Genesis 1. … Continue reading →

I see (or actually, someone told me) that my piece on Signature in the Cell has been quoted on the news page of Uncommon Descent, the Intelligent Design site. This, naturally, is quite flattering – after all, UD is almost as famous as those other websites, Telic Thumb and Pandas in Genesis.

I’ve finally got round to reading Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. This is the second ID text I have read, having tackled Darwin’s Black Box  in 1998. In the view of some people on the BioLogos forum, that makes me an addict of “mendacious intellectual pornography.” Indeed, it was BioLogos that persuaded me to read Meyer.

As I rather feared when I was asked to write it, the comment on my post on BioLogos has degenerated into people from, or interested in, one discipline accusing those from others (and me in particular) of ignorance, usually with an implication of moral culpability. This is ironic, given that my article was written to encourage more helpful communication in interdisciplinary discussions. After all, why do we seek knowledge at all?