Cleaning out the in tray here, and came across this from science writer John Farrell, a while back, at Forbes, on evangelicals (BioLogos types) “coming out” for Darwin in a recent book:
While I appreciate the candor in There is more to the challenge of evolution than just accepting the age of the universe and that all species, including humans, are deeply related.
…
The way the world came to be has to say something about the character of its creator, according to many theologians.many of these essays, the book could have cut even closer to the bone.
And how does “evolution” portray the world? As Farrell quotes contributor Schneider,
Schneider, in particular, lays out this challenge: worth quoting from an article he wrote for Zygon in 2011:
Evolutionary thesis, the Darwinian World, depicts the planetary and biological past as one in which entire biomes have come and gone in apparently purposeless and brutal fashion, and reveals that ours is merely one of them. In his recent book, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Murray ably describes the deep conflict that this depiction creates for Christian theism. Was this wrought by a loving and kind God? More.
Farrell is polite about the BioLogos sucker punch drunks, but there is no concealing that rejecting design in nature means embracing naturalist atheism in the end. The trick is to spin out the “religion” schtick long enough that people don’t notice. Being nice helps.
By the way, he also notes,
Notably absent from the pages are the thoughts and reflections of Karl Giberson, John Schneider and Peter Enns. All three scholars (Giberson a physicist, Enns and Schneider theologians) also found themselves ostracized from their schools for embracing evolution and criticizing biblical literalism. Giberson and Enns, as I understand it, were also early leaders of BioLogos but soon left.
Well, one reason could be that both Enns and Giberson were just to far off any mainstream interpretation of Christianity to avoid frightening the herd. For Enns, see Theologian Peter Enns talks about why BioLogos did not renew his contract
and
Does Karl Giberson represent the new face of American evangelicals, “accepting” Darwin?
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