Literature Review A review of the book By Design or By Chance? The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life in the Universe. Published in Origins n. 58.

Design in nature can be detected using criteria similar to those for searching for extraterrestrial life, such as purpose, extreme improbability, or specification. Published in Origins n. 56..

When all is said and done we are forced to answer the question that Yahweh posed to Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?." We are forced to admit that when it comes to origins, the entire human race is ignorant. The only way to pacify our ignorance is by exercising faith. The question is, “In what will you place your faith?”

Did God create the world and its environs in six days or did He use a natural process through billions of years? Two studies help to answer this question: an examination of methodological naturalism in the light of recent contributions made by the Intelligent Design movement and an examination of Scripture as revelation.

The concept of a monotheistic God, who is the same yesterday, today and forever, not a plurality of capricious gods, suggested the universality, consistency and coherence of His creation. Among the contingently created beings were humans created in God's own image. This led to "the idea that we lesser rational beings might, by virtue of that Godlike rationality, be able to decipher the laws of nature."

The claim that religion always gives way before the authority of science is discussed and challenged. Published in Origins n. 55.

A review of the book, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. Published in Origins n. 55.

Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. Published in Origins n. 55.

Creationism is a robust paradigm, fully capable of undergirding the scientific enterprise in the new millennium. Wider acceptance of creationism by the scientific community in the future will depend, in part, on how well theologians can convince scientists of the priceless value of revealed information.

Animals can change in small or even large ways to adapt to their surroundings, but humans were created as God’s perfect climax to all that had thus far been created.

The Intelligent Design movement is crucially important for all Adventist educators, especially for those in science, in the integration of faith and learning in their classrooms.

Review of the book, Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution. Published in Origins n. 53.

In two recent publications, Alister McGrath cites John Calvin in support of divine accommodation in a theory of origins. In order to evaluate the validity of McGrath's use of Calvin, it is necessary, first, to look briefly at the concept of divine accommodation and its use as a hermeneutical tool.

Literature Review

A review of Summer for the Gods. Published in Origins n. 51.

Historians of science have suggested that the Judea-Christian environment of western Europe and the belief in a monotheistic God were responsible for the development of modem science in that culture. Today students can still see that Christianity and physics are compatible and that similar assumptions underlie both.

There has been a long and arduous search for a plausible evolutionary mechanism that would produce complex organized life. We shall look briefly at the past two centuries of this search.

Science and Scripture are built, according to Boyle, on the same epistemological features of revelation, reason, and experience but with different relative contributions from each.

Newton was an unusual person—absent-minded and generous, sensitive to criticism and modest. He faced a series of psychological crises. He had trouble maintaining good social relations. Yet, he was one of history’s rare giants—a brilliant physicist, a superb astronomer and mathematician, and a natural philosopher.

Review of the book, Scientific Theology. Published in Origins v. 24, n. 2.

As biological knowledge has increased, the argument for design has been revived and expressed in more sophisticated ways, such as the argument from “irreducible complexity.” The existence of certain features that could not survive in intermediate stages is evidence of a Designer. It is also evidence of a Designer God who created by special intervention—Creation—and not through a continuous process such as evolution.