[DISCLAIMER: I’m ‘live-blogging’ so there will be errors, maybe many] I’m at the Evolution, Genetics, and the Historical Adam Conference at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The question for the conference is: Did Adam exist? The debate has achieved critical mass and now has its own Four Views book, an accomplishment reserved for only the most debated of topics. The speakers today represent two sides of the debate – Dr Nathaniel Jeanson argues that the Genesis account should be taken literally – six days, less than 10,000 years ago, and a guy, formed from the dust and the breath of God, called Adam, the first man. Dr Venema argues that Adam……
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Review: Redeeming Science by Vern Poythress
A Christian worldview maintains that in a sense the world has no bottom. The doctrine of creation out of nothing denies the eternal existence of any ‘prime matter’. There is no matter that is just ‘there,’ before God starts to work. Rather, God created everything, not just structure on top of previously existing prime matter. And God created everything by his word. The word introduces the structure and the meaning. The law of God is the continued structure for the world. The world has no ultimate independence from this word or law of God, but is utterly dependent. Understanding the world does not mean understanding the prime matter, because there…
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Why Bill Nye is Wrong
Bill Nye Bill Nye argues that an abortion is analogous to an egg that does not attach to a woman’s uterine wall (here). So… If a fertilized egg is a human, then the woman is responsible for the death of any human that does not attach to a uterine wall. The woman is not responsible for the death of the human. Therefore the fertilized egg is not a human and abortion is justifiable. This is a bad analogy. An abortion is not analogous to an egg that does not attach to a woman’s uterine wall. No one is blaming anyone for miscarriages or for fertilized eggs not attaching to the…
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“It’s All Interpretation” Works Both Ways
“Science merely reports the facts and innocently develops theories to explain phenomena. Theology, on the other hand, is only a matter of interpretation. You can read the Bible how you want and interpret it according to your presuppositions. Science can get to the “facts” but theology only gets to someone’s opinion.” A stereotypical statement perhaps, and not one many actual scientists make, but a common enough accusation made in conversations about theology’s relationship with the natural sciences. Let me first admit that human beings are interpreters, they seek to find the meaning of what they observe. Furthermore, they should seek a meaning that is the correct meaning. Some have given…
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Science and Religion: Dembski’s Proposal
Ian Barbour has died. He was 90. Barbour’s life was spent attempting to solve one important problem – how science and religion relate to one another. He wrote: If science and religion were totally independent, the possibility of conflict would be avoided, but the possibility of constructive dialogue and mutual enrichment would also be ruled out. We do not experience life as neatly divided into separate compartments; we experience it in wholeness and interconnectedness before we develop particular disciplines to study different aspects of it. There are also biblical grounds for the conviction that God is Lord of our total lives and of nature, rather than of a separate ‘religious’…
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Creation and Evolution: Plantinga’s Solution
Just how do we relate science and faith, specifically, the Christian faith? Christians who take their Bible seriously will also take reason seriously. God is eminently reasonable; one could even say God is reason. But all too often there is a feeling that Christians are caught between irrational, reason and science denying positions and compromise with their faith. Plantinga outlines three approaches to the problem. First, the two-truth approach. According to this view one might affirm a proposition in science and deny it in theology. Second, the truth-from-a-standpoint approach suggests that we can hold to apparently contradictory propositions since we can be sure of both being true according to the discipline…