The Hump of the Camel

I want to return to what I call the “hyperkenotic” view of God, that came into the explanatory model of much of theistic evolution via Howard van Till and, before that, Process Theology. The idea is that God emptied himself of his omnipotence, and even of his omniscience, with a view to acting responsively to his creation. In theistic evolution, this means allowing material substances “freedom” to evolve without the “interference” or “coercion” of an autocratic God.

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I read a provocative idea recently (it may have been in Steve Fuller’s writing, but it may not). It is that science is good at understanding things at the very smallest scales (molecular and below), and at the very largest scales (like the behaviour of galaxies and Universes) – but everywhere in between, where most of our interests lie, it is only approximately true.

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One of the commonplaces of the “liberal evangelical” BioLogian approach to Bible interpretation is to use the example of ANE cosmology as a way of showing that the Bible cannot be taken as a scientific text. The concept of the Universe said to underlie Genesis, and common to the rest of the ancient world, is that shown in this diagram:

It should be noted from the first that this is not an ancient diagram, but a modern interpretation of ancient descriptions. It is very easy to misinterpret the past, one example being the assumption that the mediaeval mappae mundi also suggest a flat earth surrounded by water, whereas in fact they reflect a belief that the whole inhabited world was on one landmass in the northen hemisphere of a globe, and therefore represented roughly as a flat, broadly circular, map.

There has been much discussion over whether the word “raqia” (firmament) necessarily represents a solid sheet, as the liberals say, or whether it has a more flexible meaning. More important, though, are the arguments of G K Beale and others that the “three layer cosmos” of the diagram isn’t a physical representation at all, but a spiritual one. Continue reading →

There’s a rather revealing recent thread over on BioLogos. The article heading it up is part of Dennis Venema’s technical series on “junk DNA”, but a new poster named Crude opens the discussion thus:

In your view, is evolution an entirely unguided process? Or was it guided by God, even if not in a way science is capable of detecting?
Atheists (well, let’s say most atheists) believe that evolution is a process which accomplishes what it does without guidance or input from any divine mind – the outcomes being neither foreseen or preordained. Do you disagree with that view, and if so, how?
I think it would add to your critiques if your views on as much were made clear – though perhaps you’ve stated them elsewhere.

Apart from raising the very same key questions JamesR and I pursued with little success on another recent thread  of, currently, 149 posts the question was quite relevant to Dennis’s post for two reasons: firstly his use of terms like “junk” in itself implies an ontological position, and secondly although Dennis, one of the seven BioLogos team members, has dealt quite extensively with human origins he has never made his own theological position very clear.

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