Category Archives: Theology of nature

On distinguishing miracles from providence

Posted on 11/02/2019 by Jon Garvey

In my recent piece about Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, I mentioned how Bacon, supposedly the staunch supporter of methodological naturalism, included both a scientificcally detectable miracle and a providential answer to prayer in an apologetic for the new science that is only 22 pages long. He would appear to cut the world-cake rather differently from many of a scientific bent now, who divide the world sharply between the “natural” and the “miraculous.”

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The Language of God

Posted on 05/02/2019 by Jon Garvey

No, sorry Francis Collins, not that one. Nor Galileo’s mathematics. I’m referring to the whole science-faith interface, and more.

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Design and all that metaphysics

Posted on 28/01/2019 by Jon Garvey

A thread at Peaceful Science tosses around the usual argument-suspects about Intelligent Design. It was set up in an unhelpful way by the common ID argument contrasting Mount Rushmore (a large statue in America, m’Lud, in the form of a carved mountain) with Mount Everest, a “natural” mountain.

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Theistic Science and Bacon’s New Atlantis

Posted on 24/01/2019 by Jon Garvey

Francis Bacon produced what I suppose one would call a “Utopian Novelette,” unfinished at about 22 pages, just three years before he died. It seems to have been intended as a kind of manifesto for the new scientific project he had, to a great extent, initiated, and so it is worth looking at retrospectively in the light of that project’s enormous success. The Kindle edition is also free, which is another incentive.

Posted in Creation, History, Philosophy, Science, Theology of nature | 5 Comments

It’s always the naturalism that blinds.

Posted on 06/01/2019 by Jon Garvey

One reason I post decreasingly often at BioLogos (and also at Uncommon Descent) is that it seems that all origins sites (except this one, so far) eventually  become populated by a bevy of science-orientated positivists. These post on every vaguely physically-orientated subject, quite often picking on every sentence of a post and making criticisms grounded on the standard materialist line. They usually support each other whether claiming to be atheists or Christians (or ex-Christians – though seldom ex-atheists), and their main aim seems to be to drive home the message that “Science disproves that God acts in nature.” The net result is that anybody with the temerity to explore how … Continue reading →

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Before the powers went bad

Posted on 12/12/2018 by Jon Garvey

Daniel Deen (aka Philosurfer), over at Peaceful Science, has just reviewed a chapter by Brian Curry in the book Christ and the Created Order. The chapter is interesting in focusing on the role of the “powers” that are so prominent in New Testament teaching, but so completely absent from science-faith discussion generally.

Posted in Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology, Theology of nature | 2 Comments

More on Molinism

Posted on 18/11/2018 by Jon Garvey

Molinism has come up for discussion again on Peaceful Science. Although it’s popular nowadays with significant Christian thinkers like William Lane Craig, it seems to me to be a complicated philosophical way of failing to solve the problems for which it is designed, whilst creating more.

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Does Jesus judge the nations?

Posted on 30/10/2018 by Jon Garvey

Somebody’s leading a discussion on Christian gratitude and generosity. He cites Deuteronomy 6, where Moses reminds people, once they arrive in the promised land and have cities they didn’t build, houses they didn’t provision, cisterns they didn’t dig, and crops they didn’t plant, not to forget the Lord who brought them there from slavery in Egypt. But one man, an older Christian, says he has a problem with that, because these things were taken from the Canaanites, sometimes by violence.

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Free will and final causation

Posted on 25/10/2018 by Jon Garvey

In a Peaceful Science thread continuing the discussion of the view mentioned in my last post, John Harshman criticises what he calls the incoherence of the very idea of free will.

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Denying creation

Posted on 10/10/2018 by Jon Garvey

Writing on the gender differences in the account of the Fall in the garden prompts me to reflect on a factor in the modern (or actually, postmodern) zeitgeist that profoundly affects our reception of the whole biblical doctrine of creation, let alone Adam and Eve. This arises from my old bogey of Promethean thinking, spelled out at length in God’s Good Earth but in brief here, but which has its own peculiar manifestation only in our times.

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