The Hump of the Camel

Having been singularly unenthusiastic about Eugene Koonin’s invocation of the infinite multiverse to lessen the odds for the origin of life, I was a lot more impressed by his 2009 overview  of evolutionary theory in the light of genomics.

It was a comprehensive, thorough (and therefore rather heavy-going for a non-biologist like me) appraisal of the currently understood mechanisms of evolution and their implications for the Neodarwinian synthesis. His broad conclusion is that the time is near (but not quite at hand) for a new theory:

Collectively, the developments in evolutionary genomics and systems biology outlined here seem to suggest that, although at present only isolated elements of a new, “postmodern” synthesis of evolutionary biology are starting to be formulated, such a synthesis is indeed feasible.

Where he stands on the question of whether the Modern Synthesis can accommodate the new elements is obvious from a table examining the status of six primary propositions of Darwin’s original theory, as modified by the synthesis, in which all need to undergo major revision and three are concluded to be simply false. Continue reading →

The more I think about it, the more the good folk at BioLogos appear to me to be between a rock and a hard place in formulating a theoretical framework appropriate to their mission. From the start one should acknowledge that, like any such organisation, BioLogos is a broad church. That in itself can cause problems, but it goes with the territory and, in any case, leads to fruitful debate. Rather, I’m restricting myself to the predominant theology of its main supporters, which as I have discussed at length in the last few posts is Open Theism, and to that part of its aim that has to do with reconciling an Evangelical view of God with mainstream science.

BioLogos was set up by scientists who professed Christianity, so I’m sure the main reconciliation they had in mind was between their own mainstream scientific thought and their Christian thought, rather than trying to make Christianity acceptable to the scientific world at large. The latter aspect, however, is not entirely absent both from a broad apologetic viewpoint and in the fact that BioLogos has sometimes enlisted the support of unbelieving scientists, for example in attempting to refute Intelligent Design. Neither is it humanly unlikely, or particularly reprehensible, that Christian scientists should also wish to maintain the respect of their peers whilst acknowledging their faith. Continue reading →

Flatland has often been used as an analogy for space-time. Flatlanders live in 2-dimensional space, like drawings on a page. Height, for them, is a difficult dimension for them to imagine, as time is for us. But they can move and act freely within their two-dimensional landscape.

Imagine, then, a Flatland in which height is a real dimension through which Flatlanders move unconciously and inexorably, as we do through time. You could picture the “real” Flatland as a cylinder slowly sinking through the relativistic “area-height continuum”. In the Flatland scheme of things, a Flatlander is born at some point in height c`, at area coordinates ab. He moves feeely round his landscape, which appears to him two dimensional but, because of the inexorable progress of height, is actually three dimensional space. He can’t actually ever return to ab, because if he tries, its real coordinates will be abc“ rather than abc`. After some arbitrary height-transition he will die (at coordinates abc“`). Continue reading →

Open Theology’s propositions

Open Theism’s axiomatic starting point is that of the libertarian view of free-will, that is that man is essentially, and unchangeably, free to choose all his actions independent of any external, or even internal, influence. This comes directly from its Arminian roots, though such a view developed gradually and was not clearly stated in the original Five Articles of the Remonstrants. This libertarian view is extended in evolutionary versions of OT to the extreme that the whole of creation must possess this kind of freedom, or God be a despot. After this emerge the following propositions: Continue reading →

I’m still trying to get to grips with the Open Theism that is the ruling theological paradigm at BioLogos in particular, and apparently amongst theistic evolutionists in genereral.

At the core of Open Theism is the idea that God is restricted to time just as we are, so cannot know the future because it does not yet exist. Time being a physical part of creation, one would be able to ascertain exactly in which time-frame God is working only by learning his velocity. In theory, he would have a completely different sense of elapsed time were he to be managing the affairs of a light-speed photon rather than those of a believer on earth or, yet again, another sentient being on a world moving away from us at sub-light velocity. Open theists don’t seem to grapple with the physics of God, but maybe that’s for another post, or another writer. Continue reading →