I found this rather nice meditation on what is is to be human in Gregory of Nyzanzius’ Second Theological Oration, XXII. I reprint it for no better reason than that it appeals to me: Continue reading
Today the UK Parliament discusses enabling homosexual marriage and thereby totally redefining marriage. We are assured that, although there is a free vote, it will pass its second reading because all three major parties are for it. The political élite appears, therefore, to have disenfranchised the Christian churches and the other main religious groups, which have come out almost universally against the move (barring the infinitesimally small number of Unitarians and Quakers, as I mentioned here). There is no longer a political party representing Christian teaching – a sobering point to have reached. Continue reading
I guess the whole world knows that King Richard III’s skeleton has been found in Leicester. Two things about it particularly interested me. Continue reading
Ed Feser has a helpful discussion on the way that, in Aristotelianism-Thomism, efficient causes can both be real, and subject to God as teleological first cause. In this way, the concept of evolution can be perfectly compatible with the God of Chriostianity who disposes all things according to his will. Continue reading
James Shapiro’s Huffington Post blog carries a eulogy to evolutionary biologist Carl Woese, who died in December. Chasing through links about him, I find that Woese spoke to the argument I made here, and quite likely originated it, in 2004. His overview of evolutionary theory for the twenty first century is well worth reading here. Continue reading
It’s been pointed out that the concept of “Junk DNA” came not just from the observation of apparently non-coding genetic elements and their interpretation as “parasitic”, but from a theoretical prediction by the noted evolutionary biologist Susumu Ohno in 1972. Ohno said that in mammals, natural selection could only cope with a limited number of harmful mutations without being swamped, with deterioration and extinction as the result. He estimated that, given known rates of mutation, a maximum of 30,000 genes could be subject to selection. This makes intuitive sense – even under the best circumstances how could the environment select the best combination of hundreds of thousands of finely varying traits? It’s even rather astonishing that, in the real world of predation and harsh weather, as many as 30,000 independent variables could be under the control of natural selection. Continue reading
When I posted recently about David Attenborough I mentioned that I mistakenly thought I’d blogged about science documentaries before. But my intention, had I actually done so, would not have been to criticise their truthfulness, but to use them as an example of the inescapability of genre considerations. Continue reading
Denyse O’Leary says something on Best Schools that I too have been intrigued by for some time. Many (though not all) biologists hold to “universal descent from a single cell” as a dogma central to evolutionary theory.
That’s odd, because historically even Darwin, at the dawn of knowledge about early life, spoke of life “breathed into a few forms or into one”, really only implying that there has been divergence rather than stasis. Since then, apart from the opinion of those like Carl Woese that the superkingdoms of life represent separate origins, we have a large body of evidence about horizontal gene transfer and symbiotic events at key evolutionary points. Life has been so thoroughly mixed that some refer to a “web of life” and regard Darwin’s “tree” as no longer tenable. Continue reading
Once more I’ve missed contributing to a thread on BioLogos, this time not because of technical problems but because I thought the conversation had died last week. Steve Lemke’s essay on the problem of evil in evolution gave rise to a late reply from Ted Davis, which raised once more the scientific difficulty of holding that there was no animal death before the fall, the problems that inevitably brings to theodicy, and quoting R J Russell’s suggestion of going “beyond mere kenosis” to an eschatological model of theodicy in order to mitigate this. I’ve commented on Russell’s phrase directly here, and on the historical novelty of the so-called “traditional” view that the world fell with Adam here and, I hope, at some stage will be able to do so in print. Continue reading
In the last post I mentioned Ted Davis’s summary of his series Science and the Bible. At the heart of his article is a list of what he takes as key and non-negotiable Evangelical doctrines:
He goes on to say this:
The 64-dollar question is: can these beliefs be maintained without simultaneously affirming the necessity of an historical, separately created first human pair? Continue reading
