Category Archives: Theology

If Adam wasn’t alone, then what?

Posted on 10/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

A. Leo Oppenheim, writing in the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography on Man and Nature in Mesopotamian Civilization, makes an interesting (and usually unnoticed) distinction between the two “creation stories” of Genesis. The relationship between man and nature in the ancient Near East is nowhere as pointedly formulated as in Genesis 1:26, where it is said that God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The parallel version of the Creation story (Genesis 2:19) formulates the same relationship differently, and in a … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology | 5 Comments

Essences, fuzzy or firm

Posted on 08/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

In this post, on the possibility of “adamic man” living with some other kind of “humanity”, I dropped in a passing comment on the difficulty for Darwinian gradualistic evolution of being able to come to grips the meaning of a word like “human” at all. Merv picked this up (remembering at least one exchange on universals we’ve had in the past): Does the fact that we can’t look at our continuous visible spectrum and point precisely to where it stops being red and starts being orange (other than by arbitrary selection of a cutoff frequency) mean that there can be no sustainable category of “red” colors? It just doesn’t seem … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 25 Comments

Talking with the animals

Posted on 06/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

In the rich discussion arising from this piece (thanks to Colossian Forum for the original stimulus), pngarrison comments: The possibility of Adam and Eve being one couple among a population, with only their descendants being fully human makes no sense to me. Their descendants would be confronted with how to treat the sub-humans who looked like them, made a living like them, possibly talked like them. How would they even tell for sure who was fully human and who wasn’t? If they could tell the difference, would it be o.k. to treat the sub-humans like animals? If they were in the middle East, you end up saying the people in … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

The literal literal meaning of Genesis

Posted on 05/03/2015 by Jon Garvey

This recent highly-commented post, and a local request to teach on the recent insights into the biblical creation story, have put my mind back on to Genesis. I’ve use this illustration before:

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

Primary reality

Posted on 28/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

There’s an interesting take on the historicity of Adam on the Colossian Forum, as part of a project funded by BioLogos, Beyond Galileo – to Chalcedon: Re-imagining the Intersection of Evolution and the Fall, of which at least one of our readers, J Richard Middleton, is a participant.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology | 35 Comments

How order develops spontaneously in news

Posted on 26/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

This Independent headline caught my eye: New theory could prove how life began and disprove God. As you’ll see, that’s the sub-editor’s sense of priority: the article itself just says the new theory “throws out the need for God”. The Indie’s source, with its stress on the punch-drunkness of God and the terror of Christians, is actually a piece by Paul Rosenberg at the Richard Dawkins Foundation, rather than the original review in Quanta Magazine. The latter was obviously un-newsworthy when it appeared over a year ago as it just mentioned the science, not the demise of God. Quanta was itself a secondary source for the work of physicist Jeremy … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

The presentation of self in everyday ecology

Posted on 21/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Apologies to sociologist of my youth Erving Goffmann for the title. Our friend Hanan, as always perceptive, e-mailed me with some quotes from a blog, or perhaps a conversation, on ecology: Ecosystems adapt not because they’re in harmony, but because they’re in tension. Sometimes that tension yanks everything in a new direction when things are changed, and sometimes everything falls apart… “Harmony” suggests that everything is working together. What’s really happening in an ecosystem is that everything is working on its own, and on its own, for its own reasons (so to speak), reacting to everything around it. Even symbiosis, like between bees and flowers, isn’t the bees and flowers … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

Another “Third Way” to cut the cake

Posted on 13/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

I was interested to see this piece of sociological research last week, which is well worth downloading and studying in detail. As you’ll see, the study uncovers a hitherto apparently invisible group, comprising 21% of the US population, which they call “post-secularists”. I don’t want to waste space doing a full summary, as the one in the Huffington Post seems to cover the bases laid down in the paper succinctly and pretty fairly.

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Ritual purity and ideological pollution

Posted on 11/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

I went to check for any new stuff on the Third Way website of alternatives to Neodarwinism over the weekend, and noticed a further addition to the “Ts and C’s”. It seems they now consider themselves in danger of becoming ritually unclean:

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

More on stochastics

Posted on 09/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

In two recent posts here and here I tried to show, via the route of Thomas Aquinas’s Fifth Way, that “randomness” as it is actually found in the world is a sign of order, not disorder, and therefore points to God no less than does final causation in nature.

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