The Little Friar

I  wonder what comes into people's minds when they hear the word creation .  If you're a Christian I'm pretty sure that most folks would think of the opening chapter of Genesis, which indeed the Good News Bible entitles "The Story of Creation".  But then when you read Genesis 1, what  then  comes into your mind? If you're American, turns out evolution  comes to mind.  And in light of Pope Francis' recent comments that evolution and the Gospel are not contradictory, maybe it's time I set out (yet again) what I think about all this.   Evolution, of course, is one of those issues that plague Christians in America. Because we invest it with so much crappy science to begin with.   When I say evolution  I do not mean by it some naturalistic positivistic science -- as if nature and science are all that is.  That's crappy science.   And  crappy philosophy.  (Not to mention heretical Christian faith.) The "issue" is so content...

Some Christians get enthusiastic about Big Bang cosmology or Intelligent Design.  They think that both contribute to a notion that life, and even the very universe, has a beginning.  A "moment of creation". But I think that excitement rests on a basic misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of creation.  The doctrine of creation is not an attempt to describe the way the universe or life  began -- it isn't a quasi-scientific statement about the origins of the universe or life, and it thus has no special interest in questions of life's early history. Charles Darwin once put it this way:  "I had no intention to write atheistically.  But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design ...  There seems to me too much misery in the world.  I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the parasitic wasps with the express intention of their larva f...

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of "natural theology".  My mentor, Stan Hauerwas, said it best in his 2000 Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe :  Natural theology, far from giving us causal explanations ("god") for the universe, merely results in a theologia gloriae , leaving no room for the cross.   But here's my new idea:  What if, instead of the usual "first cause" arguments that we get with natural theology, it instead offers us a unification  of lots of different explanations?  In other words, what if all the various (strange) phenomena in science could be brought together in a wholistic way theologically, under the rubric of natural theology ? What if nature bears transcendence, but not in a "natural" way?  Not out of its own essence, since there's  no mere  uninterpreted nature, but only different constructed "readings" of nature (think Young's Double-Slit Experiment from your general physics da...

I grow tired of the "debates" between creationists and evolutionists.  Neither, I discover more often than not, have taken the time to read  Charles Darwin's Origin of Species .  It's just easier to demonize the man as an "atheist" and thereby dismiss his life and work.  What I want to tell today is a story.  A narrative that I wish more Christians knew.  Because it should reframe how we think of Darwin and his revolutionary idea.  Darwin, when you look at pictures and at biographical accounts, was a quiet man. His unassuming ways seem far removed from a guy responsible for a seismic shift in the way we think of The Origin of Species .  Where did his ideas come from?  What drove Darwin? We know  Darwin inherited a fierce anti-slavery abolitionism from his family, on both his side and his wife's.  Both the Darwin and the Wedgwood families (Emma Wedgwood was Darwin's wife and the  Darwins and Wedgwood frequently intermarried ) we...

With the most recent Ham and Nye debate about evolution and creationism, I thought it only appropriate that I put out there some of my own reflections on the debate.  And I want to begin with a letter that Karl Barth wrote to his niece (found in  Karl Barth Letters: 1961-1968  edited by Jurgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt, translated and edited by Geoffrey W. Bromily [T& T Clark,1981], p. 184): Dear Christine, You have had to wait a terribly long time for an answer to your letter of 13 Dec. -- not because of indifference, for I am sincerely interested in your welfare, and in that of your mother and sisters, and am always pleased to have good news from Zollikofen [near Bern, Switzerland].  Has no one explained to you in your seminar that one can as little compare the biblical creation story and a scientific theory like that of evolution as one can compare, shall we say, an organ and a vacuum-cleaner -- that there can be as little question of harmony between a...