Category Archives: Theology

Paradigm shifts and long spoons

I’ve nearly finished Suzan Mazur’s book, The Paradigm Shifters, which consists of a number of interviews with new thinkers in evolutionary science, mainly members of the Third Way group, about which I’ve written here and here.

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God would not violate his own laws

It is still a remarkably common objection to miracles, or to other than excessively-rare miracles, that God would not violate the laws of nature that he himself commanded. Not uncommonly, to allow for miracles arguments are made that show that God need not actually break the laws to do them.

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Sufficient means

A while ago biologist Francisco Ayala, in discussion with William Lane Craig, made a rather fatuous argument against ID proponent William Dembski’s “Universal Probability Bound.”

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Denton, Falk and theodicy

  Eddie Robinson drew attention, on BioLogos, to ex-BioLogian Darrel Falk’s favourable review of Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. Eddie praises Darrel’s generosity, and I’d add that he shows considerable courage, given the flak he took for his previous generally favourable review of another Intelligent Design text, Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt, a year or two ago even from his own Theistic Evolution constituency. I see even the first reply to his Amazon review is warning him off supping with the devil, and on past form expect some of the same response at BioLogos (or at least claims that Falk didn’t write what he wrote!)

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Soft scientism in western Christianity…

…or “at least you can rely on science.” Materialism is the belief that only material entities and processes exist, and virtually all Evangelicals reject it, in principle. Nevertheless it’s now pretty well recognised, if only by readers of The Hump, that living in a materialist society makes it easy to take on board materialism’s assumptions even when opposing it.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 9 Comments

Location, location, non-location

The last two blogs, on Genesis cosmology, were partly written in interaction with a discussion on BioLogos on that subject, to which I contributed just a couple of posts. One thing Eddie questioned in my presentation there was the perception that I might be elevating “the heavens” as a special, more holy part of creation.

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Letting the air out of Genesis 1

Here’s the phenomenological treatment of the Genesis creation account I promised you, if you’re interested in the cosmology of the Bible. You’ll need to read my piece on “air” first to see where I’m coming from, but you might also want to take a look at a two-part scholarly article here and hereĀ  by Andrew Perry, of Durham University.

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On the resurrection…

… and on a good number of other matters too, from Creation to Scriptural Inspiration…

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When creation is not good enough

I found myself astonished by the sheer scale, and immediacy, of media outpouring over the death on Monday of David Bowie. I don’t know what it was like elsewhere in the world, but from the first “We heard half an hour ago…” on the non pop-culture BBC Radio 4, pretty well the whole radio output of the day seemed to be replaced by every available media person’s appreciations, however trivial. Here was the BBC news: “I’m sorry to have to cut short your thoughts on tomorrow’s national doctors’ strike, but you’ll appreciate that in the light of David Bowie’s death this specially extended programme…”

Posted in Music, Politics and sociology, Theology, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The rate- (or purpose-) limiting step of Creation

I was struck by a succinct observation by poster StephenB on an Uncommon Descent thread about theistic evolution: For guided evolution, the design precedes the process. For Darwinian evolution, the process precedes the design (appearance of).

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 7 Comments