The Environment: Should Christians Care?
Do Christians have a legitimate interest in environmentalism, or might it be a distraction from the real work of the gospel?
Do Christians have a legitimate interest in environmentalism, or might it be a distraction from the real work of the gospel?
A review of the book, Beginnings: Are Science and Scripture Partners in the Search for Origins? Published in Origins n. 60.
A review of the book Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature. Published in Origins n. 60.
A review of the book The Evolution-Creation Struggle. Published in Origins n. 60.
The debate raging around ID is not one of scientific fact versus religious faith. The real clash is an ideological one in which scientists are seeking to maintain the intellectual and cultural dominance of the humanist/atheist worldview.
In this article, we will review the contemporary status of the design theory and examine some of the major criticisms leveled against it.
Three claims have been made that, if true, might suggest that scientists should be wary of intelligent design.... What is the status of these claims? Published in Origins n. 59.
This paper describes three models of the relationship between religion and science, which differ in their view of the nature of theology and how it should or should not interact with science. Published in Origins n. 59.
Is God real? Is the Bible true? What about all those amazing stories in the Bible? Specifically, what about the Genesis stories? Did God really create the world and all that is in it in a literal week? Did that Creation occur only some 10,000 years ago? How could all these biblical accounts be true when so many brilliant scientists advocate otherwise?
This article explores the usefulness of the idea of intelligent design in the context of modern (scientific) efforts to understand nature. Among the questions to be considered are whether intelligent design is a necessary inference from the properties of nature, and whether its incorporation into science would improve our ability to explore and understand nature.
Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection was inspired not primarily by his observations of the natural world, but by Thomas Malthus's theory of scarcity.
Review of Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. Published in Origins n. 58.
Review of the book, Thinking About God: First Steps in Philosophy. Published in Origins n. 58.
How should the Bible and natural science be related, explained, or studied? At least two positions seem possible. On the one hand, there are those who hold that a conservative understanding of the Bible and the findings of science cannot be harmonized. On the other, there are those who believe that conclusions drawn from the two disciplines can be harmonized to fit into one overall view of the world.
The world is not divided into the good creationists and the bad evolutionists. Many scientists have never had opportunity to see reasonable alternatives to a materialistic evolutionary process. Many scientists, though convinced by the evidence for evolution, are unwilling to give up on God and/or are searching for some meaning in life. Do we want to draw these people to us or drive them away?
The argument to design is that nature shows evidence of design but does not attempt to identify the designer. The argument from design is that the design seen in nature is best explained as the result of a specific designer, most often the Christian God. Published in Origins n. 57.
A review of the book, The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God. Published in Origins, n. 57.
Whenever religion and science have a dispute about some question of fact, religion always loses. So goes a common belief. The implication is that religion should never make any factual claims, as it has no contact with reality. For some religions, such an assertion is irrelevant, as these religions do not make any claims about the physical universe. But for biblical Christianity, such an assertion would be fatal.
Many models have been proposed that tend to blur some of the contrasts between the biblical and naturalistic theories. A number of attempts have been made to develop intermediate models in which elements of the biblical story of creation are mixed with elements of the scientific story of origins. All of these models share the biblical idea that nature is the result of divine purpose and the “scientific” idea of long ages of time, but all suffer from serious scientific problems or are entirely ad hoc and conjectural.
Darwin’s view of God is contrary to the biblical view of God and should give Christians pause before buying into Darwin’s naturalism and attempting to wed it to the supernatural in a theistic evolutionary synthesis.