As an evangelical Christian, the approach I use to construct origins models relies on two data sets: (1) Scripture, and (2) the record of nature. Ideally, the resulting models should comfortably accommodate both sets of data. Of course, drawing insights from Scripture and the record of nature requires an interpretive process. The approach we adopt…

Here I will quote from several sections in Hans’s response to my first essay and offer responses to each of them. Hans writes: Most intriguing is your concept of non-interventionist objective divine action, the idea that “God acts in nature without blocking, suspending, or undercutting the normal regularities of natural processes.” You also emphasize how…

In response to my first essay, Hans asked whether there is a special category of God’s way of interacting with the world known as ‘special providence?’ It is hard to know exactly what this means. The biblical literature clearly knows of ‘miracles,’ without which there would be no Christian faith. Three words in particular are used…

Just to clarify Hans, the three occasions mentioned in my piece as indicating divine intervention I have extracted from Wallace’s writings partly because I wanted to show that belief in evolution by natural selection does not necessarily imply either atheism or the impossibility of divine intervention in the evolutionary process. Wallace, as Darwin’s co-discoverer of…

Thanks to Hans for this important and stimulating conversation, and for the follow-up questions. I’ll attempt to get to each of them, albeit with a kind of exceeding terseness that will probably only raise more questions! Definitions and Deism It should be obvious that Behe and I are using different definitions of evolutionary creation. As…

The original prompt for this latest Areopagite installment was the following question: Does evolutionary creationism allow for detectable divine intervention? The question is deliberately direct, and perhaps rough-hewn as a result. But our aim was to stimulate a frank discussion among Christian evolutionists on whether God acts in ways that are over and above his…

Theistic evolution is a theological interpretation of evolutionary biology as it is understood through evolutionary molecular biology, natural selection, and population genetics (the Modern Synthesis), as well as epigenetic inheritance, evolutionary-developmental biology (evo-devo), and convergent evolution, to name a few of the most important scientific contributions to the general field of evolutionary biology. The central…

On the day of Pentecost, in one of the most dramatic sermons ever preached, Peter proclaimed that “You killed the author of life” [Acts 3:15]. Authorship is a powerful metaphor for referring to the Christological creation, that wonderful created order in which we find our existence. The New Testament insists that it is through Christ…

It is generally agreed that the most recent and perhaps greatest challenge posed by science to Christianity came with the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Although evolution as a concept had become current and popular in the eighteenth century due to the work of pioneering French biologist Jean Baptiste…

No, the phrase “evolutionary creationism” purposely does not allow for detectable divine intervention. Let me explain why. For any discussion of evolution or creation to have even a chance of being constructive, one first must define those terms, plus any other words or phrases whose meaning is not completely transparent. Otherwise, as can be seen…

The question has been purposefully left rather vague, but of course the answer will depend on what is meant by the relevant terms. Language can be surprisingly tricky, and while dictionary definitions might act as a guide, they really only reflect how people use words—which changes over time (consider “guy” or “gay” or “literally”). Particularly…

On the traditional reading of the Genesis account up until Darwin, God miraculously brought the universe into being through immediate divine action. In all its astonishing diversity, the universe emerged by divine fiat. Charles Darwin would end up toppling that old picture in one fell swoop. Not singlehandedly, of course—he had intellectual forebears and was…