The BioLogos Forum: Daniel Harrell
Daniel Harrell is the Senior Minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota. Before stepping into this role, Harrell served as associate minister at Park Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts for over twenty years. He is the author of the book Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith, and is author of the forthcoming book How To Be Perfect: One Church’s Experiment with Living the Book of Leviticus.
In addition, he has written several articles for Christianity Today and Christian Century.
Series by Harrell
Hutchinson on Atheism (1 Parts)
In this five part series, Ian Hutchinson seeks to draw a sharp line between science and scientism. Scientism holds that all truth emerges from scientific study and explanation. Hutchinson, however, disagrees as he points to science’s inability to establish truth about, for example, the events that have occurred in humanity’s history on earth. He specifically engages Richard Dawkins assertions (as put forth in his book The God Delusion) that God is a scientific hypothesis that has been essentially disproved by science and that evolution explains religion as nothing more than a natural phenomenon, offering excellent critiques of both arguments. Posts by Harrell
A Pastor’s Perspective on Death and Evolution
March 9, 2011
If death did not exist before Adam and Eve, how could God have used evolution to create man? And what about predators and natural catastrophes such as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, which both imply the existence of physical death before the Fall? Today, we look at two videos from Daniel Harrell, Senior Minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota, addressing these questions.
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Daniel Harrell on Embracing Truth
February 17, 2011
In this video, Daniel Harrell affirms that science is not the only way to pursue truth. Rather, truth happens in a variety of different ways and each one ultimately leads to an understanding of God.
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Daniel Harrell: On Embracing Science
January 19, 2011
In this video, Pastor Daniel Harrell encourages the Christian community to embrace science as an element which can harmonize and strengthen, rather than attack and undermine their understanding of theology.
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How Science Can Inspire Faith
October 27, 2010
In this video “Conversation,” Daniel Harrell, Senior Minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota, discusses what often gets in the way of getting Christians to consider evolutionary science. Christians immediately see it as a challenge to the biblical authority because it upsets a literal interpretation of the creation narrative found in Genesis.
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God Revealed in Creation
July 25, 2010
In this video, pastor Daniel Harrell looks at how we can worship God by understanding the world around us as revelations of God’s nature. Harrell notes that, to him, faith must correspond to how things are, not merely how we wish they could be. Thus, exploring nature can be seen as a way to also explore our faith.
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Adam and Eve: Literal or Literary?
June 17, 2010
Adam and Eve are often seen as polarizing figures based on our answer to the following question: Do we understand the Bible’s first couple as literal people or literary figures? If they are literary people, then that raises questions about the rest of the Biblical cast. Are Moses and Jesus fictional characters too? If they are literal people, then the trove of evolutionary and DNA evidence can’t be right.
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Daniel Harrell on Adam and Eve
May 5, 2010
In this video, the Rev. Daniel Harrell discusses how there may be some “middle ground” in the way that Christians understand Adam and Eve. Harrell points out that the historicity of Adam and Eve does not necessarily conflict with science. Rather, the claim that conflicts with science is the idea that Adam and Eve were the first humans, who were the only original biological ancestors of all humans today.
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A Pastor Reflects on the Scientific Method
April 24, 2010
In today’s video, Daniel Harrell reflects on the rigors of the scientific method, reminding us that what gives scientific discoveries their weight is not the individuals who make them, but the methods of science themselves, which instill in us a level of confidence.
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Death’s Resurrection
December 18, 2009
Death has occurred since the first breath of biological life (and some would say since the first “breath” of cosmological life), long before Adam inhaled. Ironically, therefore, death must be a part of God’s good creation. Moreover, human death due to sin must be something different than the physical death we all die.
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Reading Nature and Reading Scripture
September 11, 2009
I recently led a seminar on faith and science at a large Christian music festival (of all places) in rural Illinois. One pugilistic gentleman bulldogged me all week, insisting that geologists and biologists were misguided and mistaken. "If evolution is right," he said, "then the Bible is wrong―about everything."
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