Category Archives: Theology

Lacking any replies from the organisation itself, the discusson I started on the BioLogos thread I referred to here, now with 79 posts, has lurched through one on “Expanding the Paradigm”  (68 posts) on to Ted Davis’s latest on Robert Boyle (31 posts). A new contributor is Sy Garte, who although he has contributed articles to the site before (as have I) is similarly unaffiliated. His contribution is to suggest that many will choose not to answer the question of God’s involvement in evolution because the issue isn’t settled definitively, though I can’t see how it ever will be if Christians won’t discuss it… if indeed it can be said … Continue reading →

There’s a long, excellent and thought-provoking piece by V J Torley on Uncommon Descent today, replying to David Bentley-Hart’s critique of ID as theology. For me it’s very timely, since only yesterday I was wondering about how Thomas Aquinas would see God’s role in the imposition of form on matter, especially in relation to natural causation. VJT has delivered all the references, which is great. A major plank of Hart’s critique is the oft-repeated idea that a God who needs to tinker with creation is a lesser God than he who gets it right first time. Such thinking is prominent in TE thinking, but is also applied to Thomistic thought, … Continue reading →

It’s time to flag up another long (53 posts, as of now) BioLogos thread  on which the questions I have been raising with the organisation for, now, two and a half years are not addressed. I seem to be in getting into the habit of waiting a week and then drawing your attention to it.

Following on from my post yesterday there is something else significant to be considered if the Neodarwinian paradigm should soon be modified, extended or even swept away altogether. I quoted Jablonka and Lamb’s list of just some of the processes and issues now being incorporated into a twenty-first century view of evolution. Molecular biological insights, new mutational mechanisms, HGT, ecology (including niche construction), behaviour and culture were listed. They might have added developmental issues, epigenetics and other non-genetic inheritance, physiological condiderations as per Denis Noble, symbiosis, hybridisation, etc etc. Some of these are unarguable, others more speculative. But they all serve to make evolution far more complicated, which is, in … Continue reading →

Hmm – a comment of mine on Uncommon Descent seems to have been promoted into a post. Not sure about the thread’s title, but the answer is “Goddidit.” I feel I’m changing into a design…

The second half of the Attenborough series on vertebrates, which I watched last night, kept the teleology  coming. I guess it’s pretty plausible to say that because marsupial young are at risk of predation and infection, mammals needed to develop a placenta so they could be born well-developed. However, to be strictly ateleological one ought to say that those mammals that happened to develop a specialised uterus equipped for gas and nutrient exchange and massive growth capacity, and a modified lower genital tract, muscular and skeletal structure to allow live birth of large offspring, together of course with greatly enlarged lactation gear and radically altered habits of nurture; at the same … Continue reading →