The Hump of the Camel

The final part of Ted Davis’ s somewhat loosely-entitled series  Science and the Bible has appeared over at Biologos. It is really a summary calling for theological engagement with evolutionary science along the lines of Mark Noll’s 1994 book, Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. What was rather depressing was less the article itself than some early responses. Continue reading →

The Daily Telegraph today reports some criticism of David Attenborough’s new blockbuster series on Africa. It’s the old complaint about anthropomorphic treatment of animal life, in this case the heart-rending mood music and scene-cutting surrounding a mother elephant’s leaving the herd to stay with her dying calf until all life was gone.

Older readers (surely that’s all of us here!) will remember that the same criticism was levelled by serious naturalists about Walt Disney’s 1950s True Life Adventures, and not without justice: they were inspiring entertainment rather than scientific reportage. Similarly, it’s been noted that the American viewer, for other than dispassionate scientific reasons, appears historically to have insisted on lots of predation-scenes in his nature documentaries, to the extent that in the past at least, this has partly guided the BBC’s film-making priorities. So there is a long history of presenting nature as-edited-for-effect, rather than literally as-in-the-raw, the latter being usually far less dramatic and, therefore, less watchable over a TV dinner. Continue reading →

The Magician’s Twin is a new book about C S Lewis’s relationship to science, and to scientism in particular. It’s a good read. But it’s published by the Discovery Institute, so BioLogos felt the need to produce a series debunking it. Children, children.

In fact after an initial post met with a fair amount reasoned dissent, author David Williams significantly revised his planned series, and it became quite a useful discussion board for a time (until I lost my ability to post there and gave up following the thread – though I’m thankfully restored to grace!). But in response there has been some activity regarding C S Lewis on Uncommon Descent. Everyone wants a piece of Lewis, it appears – as others have pointed out during the conversation. Farbeit from me, therefore, to avoid staking my own claim. Continue reading →

Overall I think this was my favourite presentation at the Tyndale Fellowship Philosophy conference on design in nature last year. Quirky and original, it contains some fundamental ideas about the interraction of faith and science, and particularly the intellectual flimsiness of materialism.

The video has also been posted at Uncommon Descent,  but I know not all of you frequent that site. There’s a nice view of the back of my head around 1:04:40, just before Steve Meyer’s comment.

Thanks to Father Christmas I now have John H Walton’s academic treatment  of Genesis in the context of ANE literature, which I find, as others have already said, to provide a much more solid case for a functional view of the Genesis creation story than his more approachable Lost World of Genesis One. But like the latter book, it should not be misunderstood as making the case for a non-literal interpretation of Genesis, but for a literal, though non-materialistic, account of creation. Continue reading →

On an Uncommon Descent thread, I was taken to task for not expanding on an answer I gave about whether there are things that are not designed. On the basis that God is the Creator of all things I had said the answer was “No.” The immediate challenge to me was whether I included my own sins in that, and I think that was intended to demolish my position. In fact, as I shall go on to show, it simply raises a whole new topic in theology which has been tackled by varying approaches from earliest times. Continue reading →

I’ve had an interesting exchange on a BioLogos thread about C S Lewis with its author, David Williams, and some others. The most striking comment would take us way off-topic if I raised it there, and that was Beaglelady’s one-liner (which she’s used before, actually) concerning the argument about how much evolution actualises God’s purposes, for example in producing mankind as we are rather than as a mollusc:

Clearly, God wanted a white male fundagelicall!

It’s very tempting to analyse this sentence critically and point out that the the first four words are regrettably irreverent, the fifth racist, the sixth sexist, the first half of the seventh what Jim Packer described as a “theological swearword” back in the fifties (and Alvin Plantinga demolishes at greater length here), and the last part mis-spelled. It’s even more remarkable that her remark was made to defend the views of Kenneth Miller, a white male, though a Catholic rather than a “fundagelicall”. Seldom in the field of human conflict was so much said in so few words. I think Winston Churchill said that. It would have been sad to have let such an achievement go completely unrecognised.

More worthy of lengthy discussion was a tangential remark by David Williams, which discussion would again take us off-topic on BioLogos: Continue reading →