I am an old earth creationist (OEC). The question posed to me is straightforward: since I accept what science says about the age of the earth, why don’t I also accept what science seems to be saying about human evolution? In short, my answer is twofold: 1) the science concerning human origins (particularly the Darwinian…

The question on its face is fair given that old earth creationists (OEC) appear to accept scientific consensus on everything but human evolution. But the question’s assumptions must be examined and its terms should be defined. First, I do not believe scientific consensus should dictate what I believe regarding human beings if that consensus appears…

First, let me outline my approach to Scripture and science briefly. In seeking to integrate Scripture and science as the “two books” of God, I allow each to critique the other. This makes many people uncomfortable: some would allow science to critique the Bible, but never the other way around (the “eager-to-please” position), while others…

Christians are those who strive to believe and obey the voice of God, revealed and preserved in holy writ. It is a classic position with implications for faith in the modern world, not least the tensions that some experience between biblically informed convictions and many of the claims of natural science. Even if scholars might…

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…

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…

What Did I Mean? The word “creationism” means different things to different people, so it is necessary to define it right off the bat in discussions like these, so as not to result in more confusion than progress. In my essay I wrote that I understood “creationism” as: “the idea that some parts of nature…

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…

Deerfield, IL – The Henry Center for Theological Understanding, a ministry of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and its faculty, has been awarded a 4.2 million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation to continue the Creation Project, a multi-year initiative on the Christian doctrine of creation within evangelical theology. The Creation Project aims to recover…