About the BioLogos Forum
The BioLogos Forum is designed to foster a serious and comprehensive discussion of Christian faith and the sciences. We believe that charitable engagement of different perspectives within the Church helps sharpen our thinking and deepen our commitment to the truth that is hidden in Christ. So while many of the articles and videos under the distinctive Forum banner come from BioLogos staff and Senior Fellows, we feature a range of voices, including those that disagree with us and with each other. Unless otherwise noted, views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. You can read more about what we believe here, and join the conversation in the comments section at the end of each post.
Evolution Basics: Genomes as Ancient Texts, Part 2
… these observations indicate that there is no biological need for nearly identical genes at the amino acid level, or even at the DNA level, in different species. Numerous amino acid sequences, and even numerous DNA sequences, are equally capable of performing the same function. Yet, what we see time and again (across whole genomes!) are nearly identical genes, with a few (often shared) differences – exactly what speciation events would be expected to produce.
Evolution Basics: Genomes as Ancient Texts, Part 1
…while errors made by human scribes tend preserve a meaning of some kind (even if it is an altered meaning), DNA replicating enzymes do not check to see if meaning (i.e. function) is preserved as they copy. (The functional check for a DNA sequence will come later as that particular organism develops (or not) and reproduces (or not). In other words, natural selection is the check for “meaning” for a DNA sequence).
Breaking Away from a False Dilemma
With a high-school level understanding of science and theology, I was convinced by this "either-or" argument and, to my knowledge, became the first Young Earth Creationist in my local Nazarene church. I knew the enemy and the enemy had a name. It was Evolution.
God Did It (But I Don’t Exactly Know How the World Was Created)
After we both exhaled some relieved laughter, I whispered, "I believe God created the world and holds it together. Just how he did that is up for debate, but whatever conclusions you come to about the earth's origins, God did it. Okay?"
Introducing Our New BioLogos Commercials
We’re pleased to introduce the first official commercials for BioLogos, produced by Ryan Pettey of Satellite Pictures and featuring BioLogos vice president Jeff Schloss, philosopher Alister McGrath, and theologian NT Wright.
Belief in God in an Age of Science: John Polkinghorne, Part Two
Science rejoices in the rational accessibility of the physical world and uses the laws of nature to explain particular occurrences in cosmic and terrestrial history, but it is unable of itself to offer any reason why these laws take the particular (anthropically fruitful) form that they do, or why we can discover them through mathematical insight.
And God Saw That It Was Good
What shall we make of all this? We need to be cautious about what things in nature we attribute to the Fall. It’s too easy for us to take our conception of how we would make a good creation and assume that’s how God made it. By studying God’s creation, we might learn that some of our ideas are wrong.
A Perfect World?
Astronomy and geology give us clear evidence that the fundamental laws of nature have remained unchanged since the beginning of creation. Whatever the effects of the Fall, they do not seem to have changed the basic laws of physics.
Evolution basics: From Variation to Speciation, Part 4
For those “early” flies that were attracted to this new, but somewhat similar fruit in their environment, the result would be twofold: (a) finding a food source with reduced competition from members of their own species, and (b) finding a mate with similar tendencies of attraction to apples. What was previously a “losing” genetic combination (hatching too early, without sufficient food or reasonable prospects for a mate) was now a “winning” combination.
Evolution Basics: From Variation to Speciation, Part 3
Once populations become spread out over a wide geographic area, the differences between the populations at the extremities (populations A and E in our diagram) can become quite significant. In some cases, interestingly enough, the populations on the ends of the string can be different enough that they do not recognize each other as members of the same species, despite the fact that they are genetically connected through a series of intermediate populations.
Archaic Homo Sapiens in East Asia, Part 2
The genetic link between archaics and moderns throughout Eurasia was further supported by the work of Green et al., who presented a genetic sequence of Neandertal DNA. Their results strongly suggested that Neandertals interbred with other archaic Homo sapiens populations in Eurasia and that, because of the presence of Neandertal DNA markers in modern Asian populations, there was continuity between archaic Homo sapiens and modern Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia.
Archaic Homo Sapiens in East Asia, Part 1
Taken as a whole, these skulls clearly represent a transitional phase between Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens, occupying the same general period of time as those from Europe and Africa, although it is harder to ascertain chronological dates for these finds.
Belief in God in an Age of Science: John Polkinghorne, Part One
The world is not full of items stamped “made by God”—the Creator is more subtle than that—but there are two locations where general hints of the divine presence might be expected to be seen most clearly. One is the vast cosmos itself, with its fifteen-billion-year history of evolving development following the big bang. The other is the “thinking reed” of humanity, so insignificant in physical scale but, as Pascal said, superior to all the stars because it alone knows them and itself.
Does Evolutionary Psychology Explain Why We Believe in God? Part 2
From childhood, people are sensitive to evidence of purposefulness in the environment and concerning objects in that environment. In fact, there may be a tendency to attribute design to such things even when evidence is thin—in a way that is similar to the hypersensitive agency detection device. This tendency is sometimes called “promiscuous teleology” or, used in the context of inference to supernatural agents, “intuitive theism.”
Does Evolutionary Psychology Explain Why We Believe in God? Part 1
When we look across times and cultures and find very similar beliefs concerning the nature of physical, biological, and psychological reality, those similarities cry out for some explanation. Since these different individuals have a very diverse range of experience, something other than common experience alone just might account for the similarities of belief. In some cases we can fairly conclude that there is a common nature – some fundamental similarity in how human cognition works – that underlies broadly shared beliefs.