Tag: Christianity
“The Link,” or Science Fiction Double Feature: Dr. X Builds a Creature…
Almost every TV channel it seems ran a commercial announcing a documentary about the fossil find of the century, The Link, which will be encored on the History Channel tonight.
Intelligent Design and the Artist’s Soul (Part 1)
Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at Professor Scot McKnight’s Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed. In his article “Five Streams of the Emerging Church,” Scot McKnight identifies with Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger’s description of emerging Christians. One of the nine hallmarks of such Christians, according to the authors, is that they “create as created beings.” And it is this theme I would like to explore with reference to Darwinian evolution and intelligent design (ID) in a series of three posts. First, we will consider how to consider ID. Second, we’ll assess conceptions of God in this debate. And third, we will reflect upon aesthetics and Darwinian theory. What to make of intelligent design? Years ago, before I had heard of Neil Read More ›
Lemur Monkey Falls From the Sky, Robbing Man of Sleep
If they weren’t atheists, you’d think the scientists raising the ballyhoo over Ida were hailing the second coming. Here is yet another icon of evolution. Every time one of these discoveries is made, there’s a huge PR snow job from the Darwin lobby to make it seem like it answers all the questions and objections. I thought Tiktaalik did that. Or maybe Archaeopteryx. It goes at least as far back as Proconsul. Each time the Darwinists seem to forget they already found the missing link — the one fossil to rule them all — and re-find it all over again. At least CBS News was a bit more skeptical than Sky News when they reported it on Friday. While the Read More ›
Alister McGrath on Augustine and Darwinism
Scientist and theologian Alister McGrath has a new essay over at Christianity Today, “Augustine’s Origin of Species.” Knowing how Augustine has often been co-opted by Darwinians as a proto-Darwinist, I came to this article rather skeptical. But I was delightfully surprised. McGrath notes that Augustine’s dominant image of the natural world’s relation to God is that of a “dormant seed.” As McGrath explains: God creates seeds, which will grow and develop at the right time. Using more technical language, Augustine asks his readers to think of the created order as containing divinely embedded causalities that emerge or evolve at a later stage. Yet Augustine has no time for any notion of random or arbitrary changes within creation. The development of Read More ›
Jerry Coyne vs. NCSE, AAAS, & NAS
In a recent blog post titled “Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down,” University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne firmly and publicly rejects the attempts by Darwin-lobbying organizations like the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to convince the American public that Darwinism and Christian faith are compatible. In case these organizations really want to know my opinion, I’m on Jerry’s side. Except that I’m only mostly on his side. You see Jerry is spot on when he writes But his other over-generalizations about Science and Religion being incompatible are, of course, extremely over-simplified. If only Science (capital S) and Religion (capital R) actually existed as such abstractions, Jerry would have the beginnings of an Read More ›