The Hump of the Camel

I was interested to hear about Michael Flannery’s 2011 book Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life. I’ve not read it yet, but some chapters are online here. The book is published by the Discovery Institute, clearly because it makes the case that Wallace, the co-founder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, was a forerunner of the Intelligent Design Movement. DI is not the first to make such a claim, though, Stephen J Gould having written an essay to that effect in Panda’s Thumb. Continue reading →

Jerry Coyne has celebrated Amazon’s offer of a free Kindle version of James Shapiro’s Evolution: A View from the 21st Century by asking for comments on the book. (Beware: some people seem to have been charged for their download!) Coyne hasn’t read it himself, but says that Shapiro is “heterodox in his views.” He should know, since they are both at the University of Chicago. Even so, “heterodox” seems an odd choice of words. Continue reading →

Talking about the magical abilities of time, here’s my B B Warfield quote for today, anticipating Bill Dembski by a century or so, and without the maths:

“What chance cannot begin to produce in a moment, chance cannot complete the production of in an eternity… What is needed is not time, but cause. Even an eternal process cannot rid us of the necessity of seeking an adequate cause behind every change… We may cast our dice to all eternity with no more likelihood than at the first throw of ever turning up double sevens.”

Warfield, of course, never adequately grasped that natural selection can slowly build up even single sevens as many times as you like.

BioLogos is, from its statements, committed to reconciling an Evangelical Christian position with mainstream biological science – hence “bio” and “logos.” In a whole series of posts commencing here I queried why it gives so much space to the far-from mainstream Open Theism. But other interesting streams are present there too. Continue reading →