Category Archives: Theology

“Chance” is in some ways a slippery concept – in nature there are many different flavours of chance, and one really ought to consider them case-by-case. Many involve the unusual intersection of quite predictable events – like the kid in my street when I was at school, who always ran across the main road behind the bus when he got home, and always got away with it because there were a lot more spaces than cars. Until one day he and a car occupied the same space, and he died. We all knew it would happen, but it was a chance event.

I never met or knew Oliver Barclay, but his life had a great influence on mine as one of the spiritual giants – not too strong a term – who served the Evangelical movement in Britain after the Second War. Barclay was a Cambridge trained zoologist, but was persuaded to became involved in the Inter Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical students in 1945. IVF was an example of a necessary and ultimately successful splinter movement. Evangelicals had started the Student Christian Movement in 1889 as a missonary organisation, but by the late nineteenth century, like so much of the Church, it had lurched into liberalism, and IVF was a secessionist group.

You know that feeling you have when something niggles away at the back of your mind and won’t go away? Well, for the last 45 years… It’s not quite that bad. But I was reading a little while ago about Haeckel’s forged drawings of embryos, purportedly showing their recapitulation of evolution. And the writer mentioned the interesting phenomenon that vertebrates which differ markedly in life do indeed go through a stage in which they are, at least to some extent, fairly similar. However, it is found that they differ greatly in the earlier stages of development – a fact which is not only hard to square with Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, … Continue reading →