“The reason for this is simple: there is nothing particularly theologically or exegetically unsettling about gravity working through a material mechanism (ordinary means or proximate causes). ”

The “problem” of many scientific conclusions is that they call into question the history as presented in the early chapters of Genesis. Since we are not all educated by Enns (and indeed, since he himself never quite says it) denying the history of said chapters completely and outright denies innerency for most. I know I have been a broken record on this, but I STILL struggle with this myself. It just seems infeasible that the human population was bottlenecked down to 8 people a mere 4-5k years ago (and don’t get me started on animal distribution, such as Australia, which quite clearly tells a story of common descent over millions of years, not 2 animals of all kinds in one location). And yet I have just as hard a time understanding the way God communicates if what seems to be history is in reality mythology.

Thanks for the kind reply. The new book might still be a year or more out - I haven’t even sold the idea yet. This summer, however, I do plan to release this series on Science and Christian Education via on-line video. The title of the series will be “From Scientific Swords to Plowshares of Discovery: A Model for Science Education in Private Christian Schools” and I believe it will get Christian educators to start thinking about the natural sciences as tools of learning about all that God hath made, rather than as weapons of spiritual warfare. That’s the idea anyway. The reason I’m turning the seminar into a series of blog posts is to get some initial feedback from my audience before producing the final product. I hope to freely distribute the series to promote BTF.

Steve,

Thanks for buying the book. Because of your positive encouragement, I’m going to start the next post tonight!

-GJG

Of course, I am convinced that the primary - and utterly unavoidable - challenge comes in with the question of how we are to interpret Scripture. “I mean, it says plainly right there in the Bible that God created the world in six days!” “If there was no Adam, how could Christ be the second one?” Hermeneutics are crucially at issue here. Until Christian science educators can concoct a quick and snappy way of presenting this, or until we get Christian theology educators to present it, the evolution thing is a big can of worms that a lot of educators value their jobs too much to open. Perhaps you can address the best way of dealing with these issues.

Once we turn science into dogma, it loses it’s ability to adjust, react and correct itself to keep pace with our increasing ability to gather data; and instead becomes conscripted into the service of [atheistic] apologetics. Rather than treat the natural science[s] as means to humbly learn about the infinite wonders of [the cosmos] in all of its peculiarities, [materialists] instead use them as a tools to reinforce [their] worldview assumptions. Welcome to the world of [atheistic] “folk” science.