Why have so many people had such a childlike faith in “the science” over the last 18 months? Is it wise? What can we do about it? In this video we look at the problems of trusting in “the science”.
These videos are now also available in podcast format.
Over the last 15 months we’ve got used to the sight of social media fact-checkers. But are they impartial and unbiased? And is there a deeper problem going on in the field of science?
In this video I look at the evidence surrounding face masks and some of the complexities involved. At the end of the day, I believe it doesn’t come down to a question of evidence but how we want to be as a society.
We are often told that restrictions are necessary in order due to worrying variants etc. But is that really “following the science”? I think the lockdowns have rather turned us back towards a dark age of superstition.
About 18 months ago, I ran a session at our church called “Genesis vs Science”. A few people had been asking questions about Genesis and the Bible and how it squared up with questions of science e.g. the Big Bang and evolution. The whole thing was recorded and for a while was available on our church website, unfortunately for various reasons it’s not there at the moment.
So, I’ve decided to upload the sessions here so that there’s a permanent archive of them in case they’re useful.
The morning was split into two halves – the first session was on the foundations of science, and the second was specifically about Genesis.
The first session started out with this video, which you may wish to watch first:
This is the handout, which you can download to refer to during the sessions:
This academic year, I’ve been taking a class on the Doctrine of God. Last week we were studying God’s eternity, and as part of that we looked at the Kalam Cosmological Argument (William Lane Craig’s formulation of it – that link goes through to his website, where you can watch a short video on the Kalam which is actually quite good. He didn’t come up with the original argument himself, but he did extend it).
The argument itself is pretty simple. It goes like this:
This other day I read Nick Spencer’s article “The big fat lies of evolution” (you’ll have to read it to understand the title). He talks about the way a layperson – not a scientist – casually used an evolutionary mechanism to explain obesity. He concludes:
But the use of this narrative [i.e. the evolutionary narrative], by someone who is not by profession an evolutionary biologist … does show how deeply such evolutionary Just So stories have penetrated into our culture, neatly bypassing our cognitive faculties and settling down into the comfortable positions of reserved for received wisdom.
Oscar Wilde once remarked that “everything to be true must become a religion”. Just so with evolution, as it accumulates the myths and legends that no respectable religion would be seen in public without.
I found this fascinating. I’ve been thinking about this a little bit recently – how it seems that evolution has reached the “no-one is allowed to question it” stage, at least in wider society. Just this morning on Twitter I saw another round of creationist-bashing (although I imagine pretty much every second on Twitter, someone is ridiculing creationism – it’s apparently an easy target). Now, I’d just like to put my cards on the table and say I’m not a 6-day creationist. However – I wonder if there’s more going on here than meets the eye. The attacks on creationism seem to happen with a religious fervour you don’t find in other places. People rant and rave against it with a shiny-eyed religious zeal. (more…)
Yesterday Mrs Phil bought me a copy of the latest New Scientist magazine, “The God Issue”, because it looked interesting. I’ve had a chance to read through it now – or at least the relevant articles – and I thought I’d post up a quick review.
The introduction, ‘Know your enemy’, starts off promisingly:
Children are born primed to see god at work all around them and don’t need to be indoctrinated to believe in him.
This is interesting information. But we’ll come onto that a bit later on.
This is not an apologia for god. Religious claims still wither under rational scrutiny and deserve no special place in public life … [But] religion is deeply etched in human nature and cannot be dismissed as a product of ignorance, indoctrination or stupidity.
Ah. Religious claims still ‘wither under rational scrutiny’? That’s a bold claim to make given that many scientists are, in fact, Christian – see, for example, Wikipedia’s list of Christian thinkers in science. Alienating some of your readership is not a smart move in any magazine, and in this particular case it seems like unnecessary sniping. Also, one logical conclusion of children naturally predisposed to believe in ‘god’ is that there is a possibility that ‘god’ might exist – a possibility which seems to escape every writer throughout the magazine.
Still, it is good to see that atheists are coming round to the idea that religion is not a product of ignorance, indoctrination or stupidity: hopefully this will signal the beginning of the end for the Dawkins school of atheism, which seems to hold that every religious person is hopelessly deluded.
This is the final post in my mini-series on “Creation, Evolution and Evangelicalism.” In my last post I looked at what the ground rules would be for interpretation. So in this, the last post on the subject, I will give you the answer you’ve all been waiting for: all your questions about Genesis, Paul, Creation and Evolution will fall away and you will never have to wonder about it again! … I wish. Part of the frustration with a topic like this is that I don’t think there is a clear answer, a clear synergy.
That’s the main reason why I’ve been somewhat putting off writing this post – because I can’t really give “an answer”. However, I think there are some interesting things I’ve learnt along the way, which I will share with you.
At some stage in the future I will consolidate all these posts into one, hopefully iron out some of the unevenness which naturally arises from blog posts (well, my blog posts anyway). But for now, here we go…
Who was Adam?There are a variety of explanations, some of which I think are more valid than others.
One explanation which in some ways is very attractive is that of ‘federal headship’. This is the view Denis Alexander explains in his book. He posits the view that God chose a pair of neolithic farmers (a man and a woman) to be ‘federal heads’ for all of humanity. They then sinned, and that then became the sin which Paul refers to in e.g. Romans 5. This view is attractive because it would fit in well with evolutionary history as far as we know, it would seem to explain about Adam and Eve being farmers at the approximate time period that the Bible seems to indicate they were around, and would seem to fit with God ‘choosing’ people (e.g. God chooses Abraham, God chooses Israel etc.) Under this view, Paul’s reference would not be to Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all mankind in a biological sense, but in a representative sense.
Such a view might also shed some light on Genesis 6:1-4: It’s an interesting exercise to read that passage in the light of this theory, the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men” … but then, it’s a very difficult passage to interpret any way you look at it. It would also seem to solve the perennial problem “where did Cain get his wife?”, although there are – again – all sorts of options on that subject for every view of origins.
I’ve heard that Alister McGrath is a proponent of a view like this, although I haven’t been able to find any hard evidence so I’m willing to stand up to correction on that one.
Of course, there are problems with this view, for example: it seems to do damage to a doctrine of original sin, and leaves unsatisfied the question of what happened to all the other neolithic people.
Another view is to place the creation of Adam way back approx. 150,000 – 200,000 years ago, to the first hominid pair. Although this would be much earlier than the traditional dating of Adam and Eve, if the Biblical chronology would allow a much longer period of time during Genesis 1-11 it would seem to gel more neatly. Apparently Hebrew genealogies don’t function in the same way that we might write a genealogy, they picked out key people and allowed for the possibility of gaps – of course, 150,000 years is a lot of gaps but then Genesis 1-11 is unique.
One suggestion which Henri Blocher made is that the reason for the slow development over the course of time after the initial Adam was to do with the fall – i.e. the fall impacted negatively the development of mankind.
I think it’s difficult to be proscriptive about the question of origins when there is so much that is still unknown. One thing I’ve been encouraged by is that a lot of the people I’ve read who are conservative theologically also take the question and science of evolution seriously: as such, people like C. John Collins, Henri Blocher and Tim Keller all seem to believe in evolution even if it’s not 100% clear how we fit it all together theologically. (I’ll link to some of the relevant books below).
What I’d like to conclude with is a quote from Henri Blocher’s essay in ‘Darwin, Creation and the Fall’:
We should not be embarrassed to conclude with uncertainty: it is a mark of a mature faith, properly based on adequate evidence and serenely bearing the tensions of a pilgrim’s progress by faith, not sight. Free from a neurotic need for certainty on every matter, we trust the trustworthy Creator and Redeemer.
Here are a few of the books which I’ve found helpful:
This is the fourth instalment of my mini-series “Creation, Evolution, and Evangelicalism”. Note that the series is still technically on hold, I just wanted to expand on a couple of things I mentioned in previous posts, namely to do with Genesis chapter 1. All clear? Good! 😉
But first, a clarification: I mentioned in a previous post that I had problems with ‘creationism’. I probably should have been clearer in this post but the particular version of creationism which I have a problem with is ‘young earth creationism’ (which for brevity I shall refer to as YEC from now on): obviously, all Christians are “Creationists” in the sense that we believe God created the world and “the fulness thereof” (a phrase which Mike Ovey is particularly fond of, from the King James version of Psalm 24:1). However, what I am arguing for is that being a ‘creationist’ does not conflict with being an ‘evolutionist’, in the sense that one can believe both in the creative acts of God and the biological process of evolution.
The second thing I’d like to clarify is that I’m not necessarily arguing for evolution in the sense that “I’m a scientist and I believe this to be true”. I think my point is more general, that I believe science and Christianity should never be in conflict: that we can accept what science to be saying, provided that it doesn’t come loaded with any metaphysical connotations (i.e. I don’t believe evolutionism is required by science, despite what people like Dawkins would have you believe. Evolution is a scientific model / biological process, it has no concerns with God.) In other words, if scientists come up with a better theory than evolution (or a more refined version) in the future, I’d be happy to go with that.
That turned out to be a slightly longer clarification than I intended, sorry! – but anyway, what I’d like to talk about in this post is something which is contested by the aforementioned Creationists. I touched on this in my previous post on creationism but I’d like to expand on it now: how are Christians to read Genesis 1?