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Category Archives: Theology
A potted guide to potato peeling
Hanan’s query on the last thread was trying to sort out what I meant by “guided evolution”. He, Eddie and I all made the same distinction between a universe created with “frontloading”, so that “natural laws” elegantly do all that God might wish in a hands-off way, and a “guided” process where God continues to be active in “nudging” evolution the way he wishes it to go.
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology
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Let’s go back
The summer I went up to University I had a job decorating somebody’s house. Hearing I was a Christian and that I was going to Cambridge to study medicine, the owner tut-tutted and said it would be hard to keep my faith. I’m not sure if that was because religion has no answer to suffering, or because it has no answers period. One reason I didn’t lose my faith, though, apart from the stubborn desire to prove her wrong, was that I expected to run into all kinds of different belief-systems, promoted by people far cleverer than me, but I told myself that all other things being equal my beliefs … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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The plausibility and credibility of materialism
One of the perennial issues underlying the poll to which Edward Robinson draws attention in his post is the question of loss of faith. The most obvious reading of the trend towards support for evolution not guided by God, and away from guided evolution, is that believers see the evidence for evolution (in its original undirected, unpurposeful guise) and are persuaded that God could not have been involved. For all its theological faults, this is one of the central concerns of BioLogos – kids brought up in Creationist churches get to college and, realising the truth, lose their faith. The fact that the poll suggests this is rare (Creationist numbers … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology
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Gallup, Jerry Coyne, and Karl Giberson: Is the Handwriting on the Wall for Theistic Evolution?
It is not often that I agree with Jerry Coyne. Nonetheless, his recent column on the results of a new Gallup poll about creation and evolution hits some nails on the head. This Gallup poll that has been run every two years since 1982. Here are the results, up to and including this year’s:
Posted in Creation, Edward Robinson, Theology
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If all the world were paper…
… and all the sea were ink… Here’s a thought building on both the biblical worldview covered in the last couple of posts, and the analogy (if that is all it is) between the written word as both material and as message , and the creation, explored in the last post (thanks to Merv and C S Lewis).
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
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My old school as worldview
Commenting on the last post, Merv has raised a truly excellent analogy – which is actually a direct comparison – to the diffence between our own way of seeing the world (whether Christian or secular) and that of the Bible and other ancient sources.
Worldviews without science
Since we’ve been talking about worldviews, let me refresh a theme I’ve covered a little before, and that is how difficult it is for us moderns – whether Christians or not – to escape from our materialist worldview at its broadest. By this I don’t mean the idea that the material is all that exists (snare though that is), but the fact that, for all of us civilized folks, material explanations for things remain the default “reality.”
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology, Uncategorized
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On worldviews
Dr Arthur Jones’ brief visit to The Hump’s comments reminded me that it may have been he, back in the 1980s, who first introduced me to the concept of worldviews. Amongst other useful stuff on his website there is a pithy description of “worldview” as the spectacles behind our eyes with which we view the world. Because we look through them, we generally don’t look at them, and more often we’re not even aware that we have such a pair of specs. It’s like vocal accents – I speak ordinary English, you have a strange American drawl/ plummy British dialect. This has obvious implications in the matter of education, but it goes wider.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology
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Science’s original view of contingency
Writing my piece on Bede reminded me that if he can be decribed as a “scientist”, he’s an outlier – though a legitimate one – in the process by which modern science came to be established. There’s beginning to be a good body of literature supporting the even greater body of evidence that natural philosophy developed in the wake of the Christian doctrine of creation, and entails it. This can be found both in older books like that of Stanley Jaki and newer ones like James Hannam’s. In fact an essay of Hannam’s on his website includes my starting point here.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
34 Comments
Bad Religion
I’ve added Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion – How We Became a Nation of Heretics to the Books We Like page. A very important book, in my view, and essential reading for all American Christians, if you’ll accept that from a Brit. It’s salutory reading for us, too, since many of the detrimental trends seen in America have either sprung up independently here or crossed the Atlantic in the holds of ships.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology
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