As I rather feared when I was asked to write it, the comment on my post on BioLogos has degenerated into people from, or interested in, one discipline accusing those from others (and me in particular) of ignorance, usually with an implication of moral culpability. This is ironic, given that my article was written to encourage more helpful communication in interdisciplinary discussions.
After all, why do we seek knowledge at all? Continue reading
I’ve been a bit remiss in updating this blog. But in the meantime I’ve a new essay on the BioLogos website. It would have been here but they asked first…
I’ve just come across this overview paper by James Shapiro. If the evidence he gives is as presented, it really does seem to me to present a potentially fruitful 21st century view of evolution.
The weak point of Neodarwinism has always been its reliance on random mutation as the ultimate source of variation. Indeed, for many decades after it was first suggested, mutation was downplayed as a better mechanism was sought for – that’s because all the experiments with mutation showed a zero rate of positive return (here is an amusing illustration of those results). Mutation really won the Neodarwinian day, it seems, mainly by default – and maybe by the big popular push it later got from “The Selfish Gene”. Continue reading
Britain must be one of the only places in the world where you can hear a radio programme in which 3 philosophy professors discuss free will with an informed chairman. Free will poses a difficulty for naturalism because although we consciously make decisions – especially moral ones – every day, it is difficult to account for them.
The determinism of natural law would suggest free choice, and so moral accountability, to be impossible. Yet introducing the only other naturalistic mechanism, randomness (by invoking quantum physics for example) would, even if plausible, still exclude moral responsibility because ones will would be the “victim” of external random forces. So there seems no natural mechanism for the alternative to determinism, libertarianism. Continue reading
This quote about life on other planets was sent to me by my friend Penman, a regular poster on the Biologos site. It is by Richard Baxter, one of the greatest of the 17th century Puritan writers and preachers:
I know it is a thing uncertain and unrevealed to us, whether all these globes be inhabited or not. But he that considereth, that there is scarce any uninhabitable place on earth, or in the water, or air; but men, or beasts, or birds, or fishes, or flies, or worms, and moles, do take up almost all; will think it a probability so near a certainty as not to be much doubted of, that the vaster and more glorious parts of the creation are not uninhabited; but that they have inhabitants answerable to their magnitude and glory.
Richard Baxter
quoted in “Gathered Gold”
Amazing to think that so soon after Galileo Evangelicals were not only considering, but welcoming, this issue.
The only problems I have in considering extraterrestrial life are (a) are there intelligent aliens in the image of God and (b) what happens if some of them sin – the Lord Jesus can’t, surely, die again?
One of the passages that causes some difficulties for “old Earth” views of mankind, and especially of the origin and nature of sin, is Romans 5. But not only can these difficulties, I believe, be overcome, but the passage can cast considerable light on how spirituality and sin might come into a world in which the human race is acknowledged to have existed for many millennia. My essay on the subject here
Online comments on the recent case in which a Pentecostal couple were rejected as foster-parents tend to degenerate into the usual slanging matches over homophobia. But what the judges ruling seems to concern is not homosexual orientation as such, but equality and diversity legislation. They cite regulations to ensure that children are provided with foster care services which value diversity and promote equality. This is considerably more open-ended than the question of harming sexually confused children.
Mr and Mrs Johns themselves insisted that they would love any child unconditionally, but would not consent to endorse the homosexual lifestyle. They also pointed at that the issue was scarcely likely to arise in the children of 5-8 whom they were applying to foster. Social Services countered that such a child might have a homosexual brother. So we can already see that the question has broadened out from abuse of a gay child to the possibility of a childs being induced to abuse other children by not positively promoting their lifestyle. Continue reading
This article gave me that “I told you so” feeling. Before I retired in 2008 I railed against younger doctors for advising parents to use alternate ibuprofen and paracetamol to bring their kids’ fevers down. My grounds were that fever is physiological and useful, not pathological (surprising how many docs haven’t clocked this), that drugs (especially NSAIDs) have side effects, and that no evidence existed that using two antipyretics does more than one. Indeed, at the time there was no actual research to show that using even one to reduce temperature reduced the only significant complication of fever, convulsion, though it’s highly probable they would. Continue reading
Let’s talk about myth. John Walton’s work on Genesis 1 shows that ANE myth is to be understood functionally, not physically. Genesis 1 describes 7 days in which Yahweh organises the earth as his temple with mankind as his priests. Walton points out how irrelevant this makes it to the evolution debate. It is more to do with revelation than manufacture.
Let’s go further. As an account of human evolution, the Mesopotamian Eridu Genesis is rubbish. It mentions men created as kings, as temple-builders, and the first (named) cities: 100K (or 4.5 bn) year anachronisms as far as physical creation is concerned. Wrong – actually it was written to explain the organisation of Mesopotamian civilisation, and matches archaeology there. The theology is pagan, the physics outmoded – but the history and general timeframe is fine. You only run into trouble if you foolishly apply it to Big Bangs and fossils, and Walton has put that one to bed. Continue reading
Over the last few months the BioLogos blog has helped me think through an approach to creation that does injustice neither to science or the Bible, taken as the directly inspired word of God. In particular John H Walton’s book on Genesis 1 is a must-read to discover how a functionally conceived view of creation is the literal meaning, removing at a stroke many apparent contradictions with science.
During my postings on that blog I have put my thoughts in a number of essays, to which I would have linked individually here if the blog had existed at the time. Instead, here are the links all together, in no logical order.
A slightly tongue in cheek comparison of the value to science of Babylonian, Hebrew and Modern creation myths is here.
A view of myth as a truthful genre necessary even to science is here.
A look at most recent common ancestor studies to show how a single couple could be common ancestors of the whole present human race, even living within historic times, without violating genetic science – key thinking for a literal Adam – here.
A critique of George Murphy’s view of sin as an emergent product of evolution here.
A critique of the common assumption that Romans 8 teaches a creation greatly altered by the fall here.
And some musings on the surprising geographical specificity of the early part of Genesis here .
