Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christianity

  • Getting to the Biblical Side of Evolutionary Creationism?

    Steve Martin lists ten books that have been written since 2003 (and pretty much none before that) on evolutionary creationism, starting with my favorite, Richard Colling’s Random Designer.

    The good news is that there are so many new books looking at evangelical Christianity and evolutionary theory from a positive perspective. The bad news is that it is all coming from scientists.

    This comes as slightly surprising news to me since my own journey from young earth creationism to theistic evolution started from a change in my understanding of the Biblical materials, a change that resulted from things I learned form conservative professors in Biblical studies classes. They may not have intended the result, but it happened.

    But on thinking about it further, I’m wondering if the problem if the problem is not in how much about Biblical studies actually gets taught in churches, to lay members. Many of those involved in Biblical studies have no problem with evolutionary theory, but it is simply not their major area of interest. They don’t feel like discussing it because they don’t have time.

    I do it because I’m a popularizer and am not working professionally in the same field for which I trained. But one runs the risk, or more likely the certainty, of saying very embarrassing things from time to time, because one lacks training in many of the fields. I feel very uncomfortable when I write a post that discusses the science in any sort of detailed way, because it is very hard for me to do.

    Teaching Biblical studies broadly in the pew would be a very difficult thing, especially in American protestantism because we don’t exactly do Biblical studies in the same way as we profess. There is a large amount of tradition and experience in the way we apply the Biblical text, and one doesn’t get truly consistent results. What I mean by that is that the road to doctrine is not quite as direct as many of us would like to believe. It’s difficult to get people to take Genesis 1-2 figuratively if you want them to take Leviticus 18 literally, for example, if for no other reason than that the categories “literal” and “figurative” don’t directly apply in any case. They are dangerous oversimplifications.

    Of course, not being evangelical, I have my own perspective on this, but I would say that any hermeneutic that allows Genesis 1-2 to work with evolution will also allow a certain freedom with reading the rest of scripture. I think this is a good thing, and that the same freedom is necessary, if for no other purpose than to read Leviticus 18 in a more humane manner, or to realize that while genocide may have been a common goal in the ancient near east, fortunately not very efficiently accomplished, it is not an eternal principle.

    On the more liberal side, I would commend the work of John Haught in relating theology to evolution, but for evangelicals, I agree there will be more work.

  • Religious Attitudes and Worship Styles

    One thing I have observed over the years is that relatively few debates in church congregations center around serious theological issues. A few are about administrative and financial issues, but there is nothing like the order of worship to produce an angry debate. Some congregations spend years fighting over things like whether one should raise one’s hands during singing or not.

    But there is an interesting theological point tied up in all these debates. From time to time those who prefer a less structured style of worship will accuse those who prefer formality of having a religious spirit. For those not into the charismatic vocabulary, you can translate “religious spirit” to “ingrained religious attitude.” Attribution of the state to a resident spirit or not is irrelevant to my point.

    I have encountered this when I question certain activities in worship services that seem disruptive or unwise to me. I have been asked if I’m sure I don’t have a religious spirit. Of course having a “religious spirit” is pretty much the bottom of the heap in terms of spiritual maturity.

    Yet at the same time, those who prefer the wilder form of worship often look back at the more traditional folks with very similar criticisms of their worship service. Repeating the Lord’s prayer is “vain repetition.” Preferring a weekly celebration of the Eucharist is “strange.” Multiple scripture readings as part of the worship service is excessive and boring. Following an order of service results in a service that is dead.

    It seems to me that both of these sets of criticism depend on the externals. There are certainly arguments to be made in favor of one or another style of worship under particular circumstances for particular people, but the majority of these debates in churches are really about what makes one feel comfortable and what one enjoys. If those debating them could recognize that we would perhaps have a great deal more peace.

    The problem arises because we identify what feels comfortable to us personally as “right” and what makes us uncomfortable as “wrong” when the best thing to do is to recognize many of these items as matters of taste.

    There are some matters that are more than matters of taste, and for those the accusation of some kind of excessive religious tension, religious attitude, or a religious spirit simply makes it harder to discuss the matter rationally. The accusation of a religious spirit is, in my view, a manipulative technique to prevent one from examining the practices in question.

    But if there is any sort of religious attitude involved, it seems to work pretty regularly on both sides.

  • Resident Alien, Agent of a Foreign Power, Patriot

    I planned to post this yesterday, but both work and family intervened, leaving me with insufficient time to complete the task. Work involved family as I helped my brother with a computer problem at his office. Family was in the form of listening to my stepson play baseball via the internet, as the Pensacola Pelicans lost to the Grand Prairie Air Hogs. While it isn’t fun to listen to your team lose, I wouldn’t miss it! Now that it’s Saturday, however, I’m going to finish the post.

    As an advocate of separation of church and state, I’m often mistaken for an advocate of separation of faith, ethics, and politics in one’s own life. This misunderstanding is encouraged by the effort I put into learning to express goals in a secular or interfaith context. But this separation does not exist in my own mind.

    As a Christian, everything centers around the incarnation, and my acceptance of that belief. I put my faith in Jesus as the anointed one of God, and if God invaded human space in the form of one Jewish man in 1st century Palestine, then that has to be the central fact of my life.

    Now before someone determines from this that I mean that anyone who doesn’t have the same faith I do is less ethical, less trustworthy, or even is evil let me say clearly that I mean no such thing. I mean that my view of life centers around that one point of trust. I acknowledge that I live in a secular world when I express my political goals in secular language. I acknowledge that this is my own commitment and choice by saying that it is best that faith and spiritual commitment not become a matter for the use of force. Thus starting from my roots as a committed Christian I conclude that for the sake of both church and state the church and state should stay apart. But that’s for other posts . . .

    As a committed Christian, I live in a world shaped by metaphors, and in the literary sense myth. One of these metaphors is that of the alien and stranger in the land. This shaping story goes all the way back to Abraham. Israel was formed first as strangers and aliens, and only afterward as residents of the land. (This is one aspect that should be part of any struggle we have with the genocide recorded in Joshua.)

    In the book of Hebrews (11:13) this metaphor is presented to Christians, who have taken it up and embraced it as their own. When we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” we are talking about another country, a kingdom not of this world, that will transcend our concepts of “nation” and “kingdom” so much that we probably cannot imagine it.

    So while I am a citizen of the United States in an earthly and a secular sense, my primary citizenship, as a Christian, is in the kingdom of God. If my prayers frighten you–and they should not if you don’t make the same faith commitment I do–then you should be afraid. I sincerely pray for a new kingdom. If you realize, however, that I serve the one who said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight” (John 18:36), you would also realize that I will never use the tools of force to advance God’s kingdom. In fact, I believe it is antithetical to that kingdom for me to force you or even manipulate you into proclaiming your acceptance.

    I’m a resident alien, serving and praying for another kingdom, an outside sovereignty.

    One of the great concerns I have with American Christianity is that we have forgotten this fact. Our nation, in fact every nation on earth is contingent and temporary, always assuming we really believe the core elements of our theology. We serve a greater sovereign. When his commands come into conflict with the commands of our secular rulers, we have the example of the apostles in obeying God rather than men, though we also have ample advice to make sure it is God we’re obeying rather than our own desires (Romans 13). In fact, their temporary nature is part of the reason one should obey them in all ways possible.

    Second, and derived from the fact that I’m an alien, I’m also the agent of a foreign power. I am a representative of my sovereign Jesus Christ in the world. I serve him. I report to him. I give him my allegiance. He says to keep on living here until he comes, and I do that.

    I think we should frequently pray and meditate on the Lord’s prayer. When we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” do we, as Christians, actually mean it? Is our primary concern that God’s will be done on earth? I ask, because it seems that in politics we have tended to equate our own nation’s desires with God’s will, and have often failed to live as resident aliens who are agents of another power. But I think that the Lord’s prayer clearly says that.

    The interesting thing is that my foreign Sovereign doesn’t tell me to subvert my earthly country, but rather to be a voice there for what is good and right. Sometimes that will place me in a position to challenge actions. That’s why I take a firm stand against torture, why I believe that the unnecessary and counterproductive killing in Iraq ought to stop. It’s why I think my country should live up to its proclaimed ideals and follow its own constitution. Integrity demands it if nothing else. Integrity is a feature of my Sovereign’s kingdom.

    And that leads me finally to patriot. I am a patriot. Many interpret the first two points as a mandate to work to overthrow and subvert the government. And I do, in fact, believe that there are circumstances in which such a things would be appropriate. If you have a government that is oppressive, that refuses, for example, to allow you to live for your other Sovereign, then there may be a time when one must resist that sovereign.

    But when one has the ability to argue and act for one’s beliefs in the public square, when elections are generally open to anyone, when ideas can be exchanged freely, one has a legal way to advocate for the right.

    I love America as my home. I served it as a member of the United States Air Force. I continue to serve it loyally. I also criticize some of its actions. I am appalled that Americans, even many Christian Americans can sanction the use of torture or even long term confinement without a proper trial. I feel that it would be disloyal to my country if I failed to protest those actions.

    There’s a certain contradiction in 4th of July celebrations. There are people who call themselves American patriots who object to any protest of their own country’s actions, who call those who oppose war, torture, or other oppression disloyal, and yet they are celebrating the time when America’s founders acted violently against their legal sovereign, George III, ostensibly over a matter of taxes.

    Now the point went deeper than that. It went right down to the foundation, to the notion that one person could not be devalued over another, or one group of people (Englishmen on this side of the Atlantic) cannot be treated as inherently less than another (Englishmen on that side). Even with that foundation, this nation still continued to treat some people–slaves, for example–not merely as less than, but actually as nothing, not people at all. It took more patriots protesting laws and policies that were wrong to change that fact.

    I can’t help but believe that many of today’s American patriots, had they lived at the time of the American revolution would have been Loyalists and might have moved to Canada (not a bad place to live!).

    For me, the best loyalty that I will give my earthly nation is that I remain totally loyal to my Sovereign whose kingdom is not of this world. And I think that loyalty is the best kind of loyalty of all. May God help me live up to that goal.

  • Christian Carnival Plug

    It’s time to start thinking about submitting for the next Christian Carnival which will be hosted at Crossroads.  The submission form is at http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_1551.html.  Submissions are due Tuesday night by midnight each week.  The upcoming hosting schedule is at Parableman.

  • The God Exception – Opening Shot

    I’m going to try to divide this one up, because the topic promises to get a bit long. Also, objectors please note that I am aware of various approaches to theodicy and am not discussing them here. My point is simply that we assume some good explanation will be available for certain things, while do not do so for one particular topic.

    One of the regular objections I hear to a Christian believing in evolution is the violent nature of the process. And indeed many creatures have died in the course of the evolution of life on this planet including more than one major extinction. It seems to be a very bloody process.

    The objection then may take one of two directions. The first is that the example of survival of the fittest (the expression most commonly used in these cases) provides a violent and bloody example, and thus that those who think they are the product of such a process will feel justified in being violent, weeding out the week as nature does, and generally doing a bunch of other unloving things.

    The second is that if we believe God is love–and we know from the Bible that he is–then we cannot imagine him using such a violent process in creation.

    There is a third angle, but it is not as closely related to my topic. The [partially] random nature of the process is said to remove our sense of purpose, and thus make us into immoral beings. I’m not addressing this last point, though it is closely related.

    The question that comes to me in these cases is this: In what way is the God potentially portrayed by evolution (the God who would do things that way) any less loving than the God portrayed in scripture? After all, in scripture we have a God who decides to destroy all of his creation except for eight human beings and selected pairs of varies animal groups (Genesis 6-9). Further on, in Numbers 31, we have the same God dissatisfied with the amount of killing carried out by the Israelites in battle, and ordering them to kill many more. In Joshua we have the depiction of the invasion of Canaan, with the command to kill everyone in the country. Finally, we have a God who is willing to throw a substantial portion of the people he created into hell. Just how many we’re not told, but lots.

    Now the issue is not whether there is any way to read these chapters in a way consistent with a loving God. There are in fact, quite a number, with quite variable degrees of plausibility. The issue, rather, is why it is that we feel that we should construct such explanations for these Bible stories, but somehow if evolution is true, it is an indelible stain on God’s reputation.

    Whether evolution has taken place or not, and I’m convinced it has, there are quite a number of violent events that need to be explained, always presuming we can explain them at all. Theodicy is alive and kicking, even if often not in such good health. I do have to say that the concept of theodicy occasionally amuses me. What can we do with God if we find we can’t justify his behavior?

    It seems to me that evolution is one of the most minor issues of theodicy. The flood (even if it didn’t happen as such) or the Canaanite genocide (even if that didn’t happen either), require much more explanation in the light of God’s character.

    What I’m calling the God exception here is this: There are a group of violent events that are part of the Christian scripture and tradition that we tend to protect from blame in influencing evil events. We do not allow the process of evolution such a free pass, or assumption that there is, somewhere, an adequate explanation. We make exceptions for some of the most difficult material, and then get hung up on the relatively easy.

    (I describe this as an opening shot because I expect to say more on the topic.)

  • Christian Carnival CCXL Posted

    . . . at Fish and Cans.

  • Peter Enns Writes on Inspiration and Incarnation

    Earlier this year I commented twice on Dr. Peter Enns and the actions by WTS regarding his theology and writings. Now he has posted some additional information on his views and some responses to prior reviews of his work. (HT: An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution, though I should note that this does not have to do with evolution.) I think it’s appropriate for me to provide a link to this newer material as well.

    You can find a collection of links to material he has posted at I&I – Inspiration & Incarnation. This material was extremely important for me in clarifying his views, since I have not yet managed to read his book, though I very much intend to. I found this response to a review particularly helpful, after reading all of the five essays he presents on I&I.

    I do want to respond to part of his statement on inerrancy, since I have written some on that subject myself (see my book When People Speak for God). He says:

    I affirm that I am committed to the Bible’s inerrancy as a function of its divine origin. If I may offer a thumbnail definition, the Bible as it is is without error because the Bible as it is is God’s Word.

    To get directly to the point, if this is inerrancy, then what is there to argue about? I do not affirm the doctrine of inerrancy, yet I could say pretty much the same thing. I usually phrase it as “the Bible is precisely what God intended it to be.” Perhaps some of my readers could tell me if I’m missing something here, after reading all of Dr. Enns’ referenced essay, of course. (For more of my view without having to pay for it, see Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy.) Looking at it from clearly outside the inerrancy camp, that doesn’t look to me like what most people who espouse Biblical inerrancy are saying, however.

    As an example, I say that God speaks into the cultural matrix of the people who are addressed. He will work with what they believe on everything other than the truth he is trying to add. For a simple example, if one or both of the genealogies of Luke and Matthew are in error, one explanation could be simply that the communities involved would believe those particular genealogies and get the point–Jesus as human son of David and Adam. If one ancestor were wrong, for example, it would be harder to add something like, “Well, your genealogical records are incorrect, and the Holy Spirit is telling me to correct them.” That would uproot the teaching from history in the minds of the readers/hearers.

    Now please note that this is not something I am attributing to Dr. Enns–this is something I am saying. I’m simply not seeing where it would contradict his statement of inerrancy, yet I’m pretty sure that most who espouse the doctrine of inerrancy would find my explanation unacceptable.

  • Todd Bentley Obedient to the Lord?

    Dave Warnock links to this disturbing video of Todd Bentley. He discusses it further in his post Reflecting on cancer healing – Todd Bentley style. Peter Kirk writes on a related topic at Gentle Wisdom.

    Before I comment further, let me simply say that both of these are men whom I have to respect. I appreciate their ministries as best as I can follow them on the internet. Nothing here is intended to get personal.

    Frankly, the video is gut-wrenching in more ways than one. My 17 year old son died after a five year battle with cancer. At a revival meeting a pastor told him that God had told him (the pastor) that anyone on whom he laid hands and prayed for healing would be healed of cancer. James was 12 years old at the time. He wasn’t healed. That pastor said something false in the name of the Lord.

    Now I didn’t decide that everything that happened at those revival meetings was not of God based on that one incident. Yet at the same time, it illustrates a problem of extremely active revival meetings. What exactly guides or limits what one says or does? People who label themselves “Spirit led” often look down on the people who are totally focused on the written Word as dry and powerless. Yet one would hope that there would be some limit, some control on what was said and done.

    My question here is just what standard would limit what Todd Bentley could say God had told him to do? My personal standard would be this: “Kicking someone in the stomach is bad. God isn’t telling me to do that.” I apply an ethical standard to my behavior. If I think God is telling me to do something that is wrong, I’m going to let my behavior be guided ethically.

    Update (7/4/08): Peter Kirk has objected to the term kicking, and Dave Warnock adjusted the wording. I noticed the knee thing, but didn’t regard it as significant. Perhaps that makes me worse than others who didn’t notice it. I would say precisely the same thing about kneeing him in in the gut as about kicking him. Further, I have viewed this video, in which Todd Bentley talks about kicking people. Unfortunately I don’t have the clip without someone else’s commentary.

    Now I admit that I don’t know the full context of this action. I’m not going to proclaim myself an expert based on a YouTube video. Nonetheless I am having a hard time imagining the context that would make me think this was ethically right. If someone could suggest something that went before and after that would make it look good, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

    The only thing I can imagine would be a complete healing of the man in question, but even then I’m likely to apply something I say very frequently: God knows how to answer prayers better than we know how to pray them. In other words, even if the man was healed, I would be inclined to believe that God was showing him grace and mercy (perhaps because he was kicked in God’s name?), rather than that he was confirming a kick as the proper action.

    At the same time, the question I run into is one that Dave Warnock has to deal with, as do some of my friends over in the Lakeland area of Florida. How do you respond?

    Here is where I remain convinced that the wheat and the tares is the better option. If you become a blanket critic of anything, you will be very limited in your ability to respond to those who are involved or considering involvement.

    The problem at the center of this is hurting people, people who are looking for something. In fact, I believe what sends many people off the rails is that overwhelming determination that something has got to happen, that somehow there must be a physical demonstration of God’s power. If it isn’t happening in the normal course of events, let’s force it.

    Now it’s not bad to try to get life into our Christian lives. At the same time, once you get desperate, the controls are off, and it becomes very hard to discern good from bad. You think, “Maybe a kick in the stomach wouldn’t be so bad if it would just bring healing.” If you’re at that point, beware.

    As I’ve said before, while I try not to do blanket approvals or condemnations–I often don’t do a blanket approval of myself; never, in fact!–particular things can be labeled properly. Prosperity teaching-bad. Kicking in the stomach-bad. I’m pretty certain of those two!

  • Looking for a Good Sermon?

    OK, I’m blogging on a Sunday morning before I go to church, but I will use as my excuse the fact that I get up substantially earlier than the world, or so it seems, and thus I do reading and such well before it’s time to go to church.

    I expect to hear an excellent sermon at First UMC Pensacola later this morning. Besides the knowledge that both our senior and associate ministers generally produce great sermons (the associate, Rev. Geoffrey Lentz, is preaching today), I actually got a foretaste of the sermon in conversation with Geoffrey. He’s tackling the book of Joshua in a series of sermons he and the senior pastor are doing on broad themes in Bible books. It’s a tough one to preach from and he had some great thoughts.

    But I also read another sermon for the second time this morning, Just What Is The Right Thing To Do?, by Tony Mitchell. It’s probably too late to urge you to find Dover UMC where he will be preaching and go there if you’re in the area.

    There is always some new survey to distress us about the state of American Christianity. We can wring our hands and bemoan the deterioration of our culture, or we can ask ourselves how we’re going to respond to the realities that we face. This sermon falls into the latter category. It’s a keeper.

    Now you’ll probably think I say this just because I’m quoted in it. I can tell you that’s not the case. (OK, don’t believe me!) It’s after that section that I really started to get on board with the sermon. In any case, whether you think I’m biased or not, check it out.

  • Evolution as God’s Tool

    A post on the Panda’s Thumb today calls attention to this post from Uncommon Descent, which claims that theistic evolutionists must believe contradictory things:

    I would not have a problem understanding evolution as God’s “creation tool,” if TEs conceived of evolution as a “tool” in the strict sense. A tool in the strict sense is fully in the control of the tool-user, and the results it achieves (when properly used by a competent user) are not due to chance but to intelligence and skill. . . .

    I immediately thought of the six sided “tool” that might be encountered in a casino or in a role playing game or other simulation. Of course, there are many other “tools” used to generate random or pseudo-random results. But those tools, used properly, produce random results, or nearly so. One may, of course, have the goal of cheating, in which case one tries to prevent the tool from functioning correctly.

    There are a number of failures of logic in the referenced article from UcD, but I want to focus on just this one. There seems to be a tendency both on the part of advocates and opponents of Christianity to assume that all elements of the faith must remain static. If one doesn’t adjust to a new scientific discovery, one is stubbornly clinging to outdated ideas, and if one does adjust, one is obviously abandoning the faith.

    But I believe that God created the universe and I believe that as an obvious corollary of that belief whenever we discover new things about God’s creation, we may discover new things about God. There is no direct information. Science is ill-equipped to study God. Yet the process of science is admirably suited to discovering information about the physical world. If I tie to that the belief in creation I must also acknowledge that the created thing can say something about the creator.

    Unfortunately, many Christians have tried to do precisely the opposite. Because they assume that certain things are true about God, they believe that there are certain things that must be true about the created universe. When one [seems to] discover something that contradicts this point, one challenges the data based on the assumption of what must be. In effect, this argument tells us that what must be, is.

    The universe does not seem to bow to this logic. It does not conform to what I expected it to be when I was a child. I thought that God had created the universe specifically for human beings, that the earth was the center of the spiritual universe. (I studied astronomy almost as soon as I could read, and realized that we were not physically the center of the universe.) I thought that each kind of plant and animal had been lovingly designed by God’s hand to have a precise set of features.

    When I became a man–and after much struggle–I put away such childish things and realized that the universe is what it is, irrespective of what makes me feel better. And therein lies my major beef with the term “theistic evolution,” because that phrase suggests that theistic evolution is a different theory regarding the diversification of life than just plain evolution. For some, it implies that one must somehow shape one’s understanding of evolution in view of one’s belief in God. Theism becomes the means of making evolution more palatable.

    But evolution is what it is. The theory of evolution is the best explanation we have at this point for a large and varied array of physical observations–the sort of stuff that science does well. The important issue is whether the theory of evolution is valid or invalid, not whether it is troubling or comforting, demeaning to human beings or affirming, or whether it is too bloody to be the tool of a loving God.

    So could evolution be the tool of the God posited by orthodox Christianity? Well, that depends on just what one calls orthodoxy. Personally, I accept it, and I repeat the apostle’s creed without my fingers crossed, one definition of orthodoxy that I sometimes use facetiously, though I do have a point. Often we are dealing with embellishments to the creeds when we find objections to scientific data, not the creeds themselves.

    There are some problems, however, and some adjustments to be made. If you want to make human beings, as such, the intended result of evolution, then you’re going to have to play with the randomness somewhere. If you even believe that God intended to create sentience, and did not have even the contingency that it might not happen, I believe you are talking about a process that is not entirely random.

    Now there’s a perfectly good theological fall back point here, even though it is one I choose not to use. One can suppose that at the most basic level–some theists use the subatomic level–God intervenes, but in a way that cannot be detected. I think it is fairly likely that one could conceal quite a lot in the masses of random movements of particles. If that gene over there is mutated rather than this one here, and the two were of equal probability, who is to detect that God interfered?

    For me, however, this seems a little odd. Why is it that God wants to make things happen a certain way, but pretends that they are happening a different way? Why make things appear to have a strong random component, while actually accomplishing a predetermined result? I don’t see any contradiction in this, simply because we are talking here about a personal God who chooses, and while I may find the choice weird, it doesn’t contradict anything except my sense of aesthetics.

    But I suggest a different option–a God who actually does take chances, one who does, in fact, play dice with the universe. I suggest that evolution is much more like the random tool I describe at the beginning than like a fabrication device. To truly create free creatures, I think God had to allow all options.

    As I have noted before, I do remain open to interventions, provided those interventions are designed to communicate with free creatures in a non-coercive manner, in other words, they do not change the way the universe functions. I’m actually much more comfortable with a resurrection, which happens once, is clearly contrary to the laws of nature, but doesn’t alter the way the physical universe works in general, than I am with the idea that God provides an appearance of randomness, but guides it to a predetermined goal. The resurrection seems more blatant, but actually has substantially less effect.

    This may not be very comforting. It means that human beings might not have existed. Perhaps there was a moment when if a landslide had gone a different way, some essential line of development would have been cut off and humans would never have appeared. Just for fun, think of giant, intelligent cockroaches digging up the fossilized remains of our potential, but doomed, ancestors.

    I think it would be quite easy to imagine an earth than went through it’s entire life cycle as a planet without producing intelligent life. For the entire universe, it would be vanishingly unlikely that no such life would develop anywhere, but I suspect that is a contingent possibility.

    Does it make you feel insecure? It did me when I first read about the possibilities and thought about them. But if there is one thing that the study of the universe should teach us, that is that physical life is risky and ephemeral, on the universal scale of things, and even when we look at it very locally. It seems to me that the nature of the universe suggests that God likes freedom much more than he likes security.

    (I’m working on another post dealing with the bloodiness of evolution and the implications of that, which I will hopefully post yet this week.)