Cancelling society to save lives

A wise retired surgeon said on a radio phone-in yesterday that, just a few years ago, we wouldn’t even have known about COVID-19 until the pandemic was past its peak, and we would probably have concluded that it was just a particularly bad winter for elderly deaths from respiratory disease. Maybe ignorance is bliss.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

God’s River of Love

Long ago God formed a River of Love. It flowed from the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, and ran with the clear water of life, a water so powerful that when it washed against those who bathed in it, it turned their rebellion and enmity against heaven into a love that reflected God’s own, and poured out from them to share the good news of forgiveness and healing to other people. As for those who drank of that water, they were enabled to live forever in the very presence of God.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Hump retrospective 8: the origin of spiritual evil

Satan before the Fall

Because it’s unfashionable to think about Satan in science-faith discussions (which goes along with the semi-deist viewpoint that reduces the whole of existence to “God” v “Nature”), the question of what the devil was doing before the Fall, in an old earth scenario, gets little attention.

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Posted in Hump Retrospective, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Hump retrospective 7: the natural evolution of mankind

…with consciousness, spirit and eternal life

Sy Garte, in his excellent new book The Works of His Hands, mentions three intractable problems in science (because there seems no way they can arise through “materialistic natural causes”); and all three are origins questions.

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Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Science, Theology | 5 Comments

Faith, and faith

This is taking time out from my “retrospective” series.

Does anybody else remember the old Science Fiction story about an anti-gravity machine?

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Posted in Hump Retrospective, Music, Politics and sociology, Prometheus, Theology | 3 Comments

Hump retrospective 6: worldwide flood

In my “quest” to sort out origins questions, this “old chestnut” problem was really a question of filling in details, rather than finding entirely new solutions, because I was already aware of work by exegetes arguing that Scripture allows for a regional Flood.

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Posted in History, Hump Retrospective, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

Hump retrospective 5: mankind late to the party

One of the theological problems I had with an old earth a decade ago is less commonly remarked than some others: if mankind was created to rule and subdue the earth, as Genesis 1 teaches, how did it manage without him for over four billion years?

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Posted in Creation, Hump Retrospective, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 1 Comment

Hump retrospective 4: the impossibility of Adam

Anyone who reads The Hump regularly is well aware of the answer I found to the apparent scientific impossibility of an historical Adam and Eve. After all, that is the subject of the book of mine that came out last month, The Generations of Heaven and Earth.

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Hump retrospective 3: creation with no need for a Creator

In Britain, at least, a common position of many ordinary Evangelical Christians (until they start reading American books, anyway!) is, “I don’t see why God couldn’t have created through evolution.” The rub is that they usually have little idea of what evolutionary theory says: what they mean is that species might well change over long periods of times, under the creative direction of God, as an alternative to each being created de novo.

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Hump retrospective 2: old earth with death, carnivores and natural evils

Creation “groaning” for 13bn years?

My retrospective review of this aspect of the last ten years of my research is timely, it seems. For reviewing Joshua Swamidass’s Genealogical Adam and Eve YECs Robert Carter and John Sanford mention Josh’s citing of my book God’s Good Earth, in relation to the subject of death before the Fall.

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Posted in Creation, Hump Retrospective, Science, Theology, Theology of nature | 2 Comments