The Hump of the Camel

John Haught’s chapter in Debating Design is hardly new (2004), but as one of the original “big hitter” theologians in the science-faith discussion, his ideas have greatly influenced the current mainstream of theistic evolution. They’re therefore worth examining, adding as they do another (if similar) strand to the yarn spun by others like Howard van Till. It should be noted from the start that Haught is a Process Theologian, though of a different cast to other PTs: apart from raising the question of how his theology can be legitimately transferred to Evangelical convictions such as those of BioLogos, it makes one wonder how one should decide which type of Process Theology is the “orthodox” one. As in Van Till’s case the big, though unstated, issue, is that much of this kind of theology is done by the process of “it seems obvious to me (and similar deep thinkers…).” That’s why the ground shifts not only over time, but between authors. In philosophy there are never conclusions – only ongoing discussions. Should the same really be true of Christian faith? Continue reading →

Though I didn’t mention it in my last post (to save confusion), one of the links I used (here – tip: I could only open it by saving it and changing the suffix to “pdf”) was actually intended as a rather whimsical mathematical exercise. This was to show whether, given a God who might wish to avert cosmic disaster, he could, in fact prevent major instability by minor corrections to orbital trajectories. Continue reading →

I made a gaffe in a BioLogos comment the other day by inexplicably citing Kepler instead of Laplace as the person who showed that Isaac Newton’s famous argument for divine meddling with natural laws was unnecessary and wrong. But in sorting myself out I discovered to my surprise that the whole tale, the historic basis of criticism of the “God of the gaps”, is yet another example of science-religion mythology, like Galileo’s persecution by Christianity or Bishop Wilberforce’s apocryphal remarks to Huxley. Oddly enough, or maybe not, Googling the subject took me first to the BioLogos FAQ. Continue reading →

An exchange on BioLogos set me thinking – as they often do. On Ted Davis’s post about Polkinghorne  an atheist poster says:

I think it is interesting that the life of Jesus did not even convince most of his Judean contemporaries that he was divine. Most Jews who lived at the time, and most who came after, did not think he was the messiah. Why is that?

The redoubtable beaglelady replies:

Because he condescended and veiled his divinity for his earthly ministry. Additionally, he wasn’t coercive and wasn’t interested in putting on a show.

Our friend Eddie spotted, as I did, some buzzwords from the TE lexicon that remind one of the kind of stuff I’ve commented about in Howard van Till and his successors (start here). He begins to probe what she means by “coercive” and point to some of the nature miracles to question it. Continue reading →

Usually associated with the rhetorically attractive, but incoherent, idea of a “free creation”  is the sense of abhorrence for a “tinkering God.” Both themes predominate within current theistic evolution, and the latter is usually couched in terms such as: “Why would God be such an incompetent Creator as to have to keep tinkering with the world afterwards?” Continue reading →

OK – let me build on some recent posts to look at what seems to be the state of theistic evolution in our time.

First, some basic definitions derived from Francisco Ayala. For the purposes of this discussion:
Final causation = external teleology = design (not taking design in the more restricted sense of engineering metaphors, etc)
This cluster is opposed to chance/necessity, seen as the outworking of the laws and initial state of the Universe. Thus Ayala would see the fine-tuned constants, etc, as final causation/external teleology/design, but nothing in evolution downstream of them as such. It’s a useful distinction that fits well with my previous piece.

To clarify this, suppose that hidden within these constants and laws was, say, a convergent evolution principle created so precisely as to be bound to lead to man. In that case, man would be a result of design in Ayala’s terms. But in fact (a) no such principle is certainly known and (b) Ayala says that the evils in nature show that God’s teleology is not at work in evolution. Note that such “evils” include death, waste and suffering, on which the whole of evolution hinge. So (at least to be consistent) Ayala must deny the existence of such “design laws” and restrict God’s purpose to what we know from physics: that he made the Universe broadly congenial to life. Continue reading →

Readers of this blog will be familiar with my antagonism to the “freedom of nature” school of theology seen in much theistic evolution and, notably, on BioLogos, where I’ve been critiquing it for the last eighteen months and failing to get any reply (at all) to my invitations to justify it. My latest attempt was on a post by Dennis Venema on evolution basics, in the comments of which he posted his clearest “statement of TE faith” to date. It’s here: Dennis’s comment is #76597, and mine #76711, though you should note that comments are now being removed at BioLogos after 180 days, which is a shame as it hides how ideas develop over time, or not. Continue reading →

In retrospect I studied zoology at a time when one of biology’s disciplines was on the cusp of change. In the sixth form we looked at ecology as a branch of biology (a rather boring one compared to all those interesting animals, I thought at the time). By the time I was doing medicine at Cambridge it had become a branch of sociology, to do with how “the ecology” gets polluted by us. By and large, the latter approach has predominated in the public eye, with most of us being more concerned about global warming messing things up than by how they work in the first place. Continue reading →