Christian Darwinism

Anyone who studies design in nature will have heard it a million times, usually from theistic Darwinists: “Identifying design in life forms is risky to faith because once we find out how it really happened, your faith will be diminished. Protect your faith by assuming that God played no direct role.” Yes, but what if

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Philosopher Michael L. Peterson explains junk DNA for us at BioLogos in “Evolution and the Deep Resonances between Science and Theology, Part 5” (July 20, 2011):

Evolution is the only rational way to account for the molecular uniformity of all organisms, given that numerous alternative structures and fundamental processes are, in principle, equally likely. Moreover, the accumulation of damaged or “junk” DNA (mutations that do not affect function and thus are not subject to negative selection), passed on over time to species further down that branch of the Tree, makes the probability that evolution did not occur infinitesimally small.

Okay, so that means that if much that is thought junk turns out not to be, “the probability that evolution did occur infinitesimally small.” Right? Read More ›

Photographer-philosopher Laszlo Bencze offers us this prayer, for spiritual Darwinists, Christian or otherwise, reflecting on one of their recent conferences:

We believe in Darwin, the father all-sovereign, explainer of all things visible and invisible, and in one Thomas Henry Huxley, the bull dog of Darwin, begotten from the substance of Darwin.

We believe in his son, Julian Huxley, of one substance with his Father. Read More ›

Recently, Caroline Crocker offered us AITSE’s bunk detector for Rev. Michel Dowd and wife Connie Barlow’s recipe for “evolutionizing” your life for fun and profit:

This course in life management looks too good to be true. And it is. Married couple Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow promise you a “joy-filled life” and “lighthearted strength.” All you need to do is take their on-line course and learn how to “master your biological instincts and impulses.”

Okay, so the course maybe doesn’t pass the bunk detector, but the amazing part is this: Read More ›

If “them” are the new atheists, here’s the kind of thing you’d get in response: Read More ›

In a popular lecture delivered in Vienna I 1900, the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the fathers of statistical mechanics and the kinetic theory of gases, declared that the nineteenth century would be remembered as the Century of Darwin, then stated: In my view all salvation for philosophy may be expected to come from Darwin’s theory. … What then will be the position of the so-called laws of thought in logic? Well, in the light of Darwin’s theory they will be nothing else but inherited habits of thought. … One can call these laws of thought a priori because through many thousands of years of our species’ experience they have become innate to the individual, but it seems to be Read More ›

In “Signature in the BioLogos” (June 28, 2011) at his The Hump of the Camel blog, retired British doctor and BioLogos contributor Jon Garvey blasts the Darwinthink treatment of Steve Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009):

What struck me in all this was that every single contribution contained at least some degree of ad hominem attack, and most included dire warnings about the damage the book threatened to science, religion, society or all three. That, combined with the protests of many that the BioLogos articles were misreprepresenting Meyer’s arguments, made a good case for assessing it carefully, my reading informed by 18 months of confutation rather than vice versa. 

Briefly, reading the book made it absolutely clear to me that indeed Meyer had been misrepresented, and without any real excuse since Meyer is a good writer and makes his case clearly (and it has to be said, a lot more even-handedly than his opponents).

Better: Read More ›

That their existence is part of the foundation of Christianity. Anglican Curmudgeon usefully points out the reasons that an “evolutionary” interpretation of Christianity is impossible, citing atheist (and former Christian) Michael Ruse’s arguments in From Monad to Man: Let me be open. I think that evolution is a fact and that Darwinism rules triumphant. Natural selection is not simply an important mechanism. It is the only significant cause of permanent organic change. And that bias permeates his subsequent investigation into the conflicts, particularly when it comes to considering monogenism, the idea that current humans are the descendants of a single set of original parents. Citing the work of evolutionary biologist and Dominican priest Francisco Ayala, Ruse writes (pp. 75-76): Francisco Read More ›