The Hump of the Camel

When I was young, the issue of Christ’s miracles was a big problem to Christians. Scientific determinism had infiltrated the public mind so thoroughly that the Bible’s miraculous claims were one of the greatest stumblingblocks in apologetics. Even within Evangelical churches rationalising the miracles as social or psychological events was common.

I find it fascinating how much that has changed over forty years. Of course, atheists have become more vocal and rationalistic, but within the general community, there is much more of an attitude that, should the historical claims about Christ be true, then his miracles make sense. Yet it’s hard to pin down the reasons for this subtle shift in worldview, probably because I have been part of it. It’s an example of the kind of sea-change in society that is associated with, and may even help explain, the popularity of one kind of idea over another, even in the matter of scientific theories. Continue reading →

In my last post I showed how, to the theistic evolutionists of his time, Darwin’s original theory was capable of delivering, without God’s direct intervention, all that the Biblical doctrine of creation described (with the exception, mainly, of mankind’s spiritual qualities). To people like B B Warfield, then, evolution was a true efficient cause, for which God as the original Creator was the primary cause. But then the theory changed. Continue reading →

I want to show how changes in evolutionary science have led to changes in the theology of Christians who accept it. It should cause us to question if theology should be so much the handmaid of a variable science.

Charles Darwin developed his evolutionary theory in the context of a worldview that was, essentially, deterministic. Newtonian physics, of course, was thoroughly so. So, essentially was the uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell’s geology (particularly as it led to a complete eclipse of any catastophism at all, presumably in reaction to the Biblical Flood narrative).

The overriding social idea of the time was of progress, and particularly of progress towards the triumph of European civilisation (hence the attraction of Eugenics in later years). Negatively, this was reflected in Malthus’ idea that the struggle for survival meant, sadly, that the weak and unfit would give way to the more industrious and intelligent – an idea that Darwin, as we know, deliberately co-opted into his theory. The Origin of Speces itelf modelled natural selection on artificial selection, seen mainly as the tendency of human breeders to judge the “best” stock, not merely that suited to a particular role. And lastly, rather than pitching his theory against the evolutionary scientific alternatives of the time, he proposed it as an alternative to Special Creation. Continue reading →

I finished my last post by suggesting that any divine action in the natural world would inevitably resemble chance in its deviation from the predictions of lawlike processes. I queried whether a genuinely indeterminate chance might or might not be distinguished from God’s actions, and hence God’s work be considered “detectable.” Continue reading →

I’m returning, like a dog to its vomit, to the old questions revolving around “freedom” in creation, and the “detectability” of God’s work. That’s partly because it keeps coming up (eg on the new Alvin Plantinga thread on BioLogos), partly because certain people keep challenging me about it even if I’m dealing with something different, and partly because I haven’t finished thinking about it yet.

I’m looking here at the implications of global hypotheses about God’s involvement in the Universe. What I’m not much concerned with today are what, or why,  particular people might hold these views. As usual I’m dealing mostly with the non-human creation, but I’ll be drawing conclusions about what the issues mean for human agency as well. Continue reading →

When I first read Francis Collins’ The Language of God in 2007, it was from the viewpoint of appreciation that the head of the Human Genome Project was a fellow-Christian, defending the compatibility of science and faith. That was before I had any dealings with BioLogos the organisation. But now I thought it might be useful to return for a more critical look at the book, one 14-page chapter of which is, essentially, a manifesto for BioLogos as a concept. What does Collins mean by it, and to what extent does the present BioLogos reflect that? Continue reading →