Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a biophysicist, a writer, a theologian walk into a bar. OK, so that’s not actually how Dawn was written, but the diverse backgrounds of the three co-writers–Cees Dekker, Corien Oranje, and Gijsbert van den Brink respectively–do sound more like résumés for the cast of a niche joke than for collaborators on a novel. And not just any novel, but one that spans 14 billion years–from the instants after the Big Bang until the moment the manuscript was sent to the printers (or so it seems, given the current events mentioned in Chapter 23, “Space”). As the subtitle “A Proton’s Tale of All that Came to Be” suggests, the protagonist of this novel is also unique; I’ve never read a book from the point of view of a subatomic particle before. (Talk about your unreliable narrators; subatomic particles make up everything!) So what does a proton have to say?
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Dawn – A Proton’s Tale of All that Came to Be
Evolutionary Creation
Science Reader Question: Evolutionary Project Management
A few months back, I received some questions here on the blog about evolutionary biology and its implications for Christian theology. They probed broadly and deeply, covering original sin, the problem of evil and many of the topics everyone asks about and indeed have been asking about since long before anyone conceived of a theory of evolution. These questions warrant more detailed answers than a few comments can provide, so I will be taking a look at them in some depth over the next few weeks. Looking ahead, I expect that will include some discussion of the upcoming film X-Men: Apocalypse, since Apocalypse is obsessed with survival of the fittest and since the film declared its theological ambitions already. I’ll start this series with the questions I received previously, but feel free to chime in with others as we go along.
[Read more…] about Science Reader Question: Evolutionary Project Management
What about Adam and Eve? Part 2
Introduction
This is the fifth in a series of blog posts concerned with Christian questions about evolution. One of the biggest questions is what to do about Adam and Eve. In my last post I said the Bible teaches that God reveals himself to man in two ways. One is through Scripture (the Bible) and the other is through what we observe in nature (using science). I then compared the stories of the creation of mankind in the two books. While there are apparent differences between the two stories, there must be a way of reconciling these differences since they both come from God.
Reconciling the two stories
The two stories raise several types of questions.
- The origin of humans. Was this due to special creation by God or was it due to God guided evolution. If evolution, then in what sense is mankind set apart from the rest of creation and in what sense are humans created in the image of God?
- Adam and Eve. Were they real people and was Adam the father of all humankind?
- The doctrine of the Fall. Are Adam and Eve essential to the Bible’s central storyline of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation? Is Paul’s teaching about the representative roles of Adam and Jesus essential to the understanding of the origin of sin and the redemption from sin? Does the story of the creation of Adam and Eve and their fall communicate real history or does it simply communicate timeless truths?
- The relationship between God’s two books of revelation. Does one have primacy over the other or is it possible to settle the apparent conflict in a way that respects both sources of revelation?
The way that I want to address these questions is through the review of a book entitled Four Views of the Historical Adam (Zondervan, 2013). There are a spectrum of views among Evangelical Christians about how to reconcile the story from Scripture with the story from nature. This book presents essays from four Biblical scholars who represent the four major Evangelical positions. [Read more…] about What about Adam and Eve? Part 2