Augustine, omens and divine action

Posted on 25/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

Last month I wrote a post arguing against the neo-scholastic belief (often shared with less than clear understanding by Evolutionary Creationists) that God’s activity cannot on first principles be observed in the world, lest he be regarded as just another cause within the causal system of the cosmos. I argued that though the principle of God’s radical separateness from his Creation is sound, the conclusion that the Creation must be causally complete within itself is not. I argued from the Genesis creation account that established secondary causes are not, theologically, necessarily sufficient to explain all we see around us.

Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 4 Comments

Moral imperialism

Posted on 22/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

Carrying on the vaguely moral/ethical theme touched upon in the last post, I noticed another long and tedious thread on BioLogos about the New Atheist meme concerning the inexcusable immorality of the Bible in endorsing slavery and genocide. You can view all the old arguments there, but I want to take a slightly different approach. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology | 27 Comments

Ideological philology

Posted on 17/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

Avid Hump readers (if there are any!) may have noticed in my piece on C S Lewis my passing mention of Lewis’s own philological error, or at least oversimplification, in his book The Four Loves. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 5 Comments

Spot the difference

Posted on 14/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

I’ve been interested to see discussions from time to time about what it is that causes the Intelligent Design pioneer Michael Behe to be excluded from the “broad church” of theistic evolution by those within the “Guild”. It’s not just that he happens to be in a different denomination, but that he attracts regular opprobium, even scorn, for his ideas, and particularly for irreducible complexity. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 8 Comments

In What Sense Does Evolution Require a Creator to “Establish” It?

Posted on 11/02/2017 by Edward Robinson

Over at BioLogos, a vigorous discussion is going on under the column entitled “Signal and Noise”.

Cornelius Hunter has returned to debate the soundness of evolutionary theory, and, predictably, he is being ganged up on by all the usual suspects. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Edward Robinson, Science, Theology | 9 Comments

C S Lewis on current theistic evolution controversies

Posted on 10/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

The excellent Preston Garrison, apart from alerting me to the review of a new book on Babylonian science that led me to a whole series of posts on the ANE and Hebrew pictures of the world, recommended an old and little-read book by C S Lewis. Studies in Words, published in 1960 just three years before his death, is a philology text for students, so not the most obviously relevant book for thinking about either “biblical science” or modern science. But it actually has some useful light to cast on both. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science | 9 Comments

What we did on our holidays

Posted on 09/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

Little time to blog this week, as I was doing marathon production sessions of the material recorded by my band The Rock Section last week. It’s a covers band, so nothing original to hear, but I was quite please with the results. A sample here, and if any one’s still interested after that, full tracks here. Back to biology in the near future.

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Saltational behavioural evolution

Posted on 05/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

2016 was a good year for British archaeology, as it became clear that a Neolithic settlement at Ness of Brodgar on the far-flung Orkney Islands (dating to c.3500BC) had been a major “capital” and, in all likelihood, the fountainhead of the “stone circle ” culture that spread south through Britain over a thousand years and culminated in the mighty monuments at Stonehenge, Avebury and elsewhere. Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 1 Comment

The proteus of evolutionary consensus

Posted on 01/02/2017 by Jon Garvey

Larry Moran is a prolific blogger on evolution, and is respected enough to have big scientific names commenting in his threads. He’s also militantly anti-creationist and anti-ID, though he’s gained some respect from the latter group for being willing to engage in discussion with them, despite persisting in contemptuously labelling them “ID-creationists”. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

Conceiving creatio continua via Genesis 1

Posted on 29/01/2017 by Jon Garvey

9780567668912Herbert McCabe, and other philosophers for whom I have a lot of respect overall, suggest from time to time that according to classical theology à la Thomas Aquinas we shouldn’t expect to see any signs of God’s handiwork in creation, even though it is all utterly dependent on him ontologically. This is because he creates secondary causes to be sufficient explanations in themselves – there are no gaps for God to fill. This argument is used by them and, derivatively, by Evolutionary Creationists to dismiss not only ID but all natural theology (and, strictly speaking, an active theology of nature too) on principle. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 5 Comments