March 2013

 In this issue:
DarkwoodBrew webcast combines star stuff and theology
BioLogos selects grantees to address evolution and Christian faith
New Missouri House bill promotes teaching of intelligent design
 

DarkwoodBrew webcast combines star stuff and theology

A new web series at www.DarkwoodBrew.org is looking at current scientific theories on the creation and evolution of the universe. It has sparked a broad online discussion of science as a way to inform personal faith.

The first lecture in the series, which is in collaboration with the Adler Planetarium and The Clergy Letter Project, featured the science behind the formation of the universe with Dr. Grace Wolf-Chase, astrophysicist at the Adler framing the science and religion dialogue. Bruce Booher, member of the Lutheran Alliance for Faith, Science and Technology and ordained ELCA pastor, discussed his passion for astronomy. He said his sense of awe and wonder inspired by science drives what he shares with others. Booher’s viewing parties give people the opportunity to connect with galaxies 70 million light years away. “The light you are seeing there, that little fuzzy ball of light, is hundreds of billions of stars like our sun and that light has been traveling for 70 million years at 186,000 miles per second just under your eye,” he said.

Non-profit group WesleyNexus sponsored a viewing of the webcast in coordination with Evolution Weekend, attracting more than 120 participants to the United Methodist Church Baltimore-Washington Conference Mission Center. According to WesleyNexus, the conversation continued in an expert panel. Panelists included Nobel Prize winner Dr. John Mather; Dr. Connie Bertka, co-chair of the Smithsonian Human Origins Project; Rabbi George Driesen, Founder and President of the Institute for Science and Judaism; and Thomas Burnett, who has worked with the BioLogos Foundation team and now the National Academy of Sciences.

Wolf-Chase returned for a second DarkwoodBrew webcast exploring the idea of probability of life on other planets. Another webcast featured Dr. Lea Schweitz, director of the Zygon Center for Religion and Science and member of the Lutheran Alliance for Faith, Science and Technology. She spoke of the relationship between God and humans in the light of evolution.

BioLogos selects grantees to address evolution and Christian faith

The BioLogos Foundation, founded by geneticist Dr. Francis Collins in 2007, has awarded 37 grants to support projects and network building among scholars, church leaders and parachurch organizations in the area of Christianity and evolution.

The Evolution & Christian Faith (ECF) grantees will participate in a series of summer workshops over three years and will be charged to build a sustained network of scholars and church leaders who are serious about addressing the concerns of the church about evolution. Then in 2015, BioLogos will host a large conference open to scientists, scholars and church leaders from around the world.

The grants were funded from a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation awarded to BioLogos, which says it received 225 letters of intent. Each grant ranges in size from $23,000 to $300,000. Thirty of the grantees are domestic, while seven are international, hailing from Canada, France, Great Britain, Netherlands and Spain.

Unlike the Scientists in the Congregations grants, also funded by Templeton, these grants are primarily to universities. Some examples of the projects are:

• Theologian Oliver Crisp of Fuller Seminary will take an analytic theology approach to ask to what extent a theological account of the origin of human sin depends upon the evolution of modern humans from a single ancestral pair. Crisp will especially study the ramifications of the possibility that that pair does not appear to correspond to what we would think of as modern human beings.
• Pastor Michael Gulker and philosopher James Smith, leading a large team from The Colossian Forum, ask a related question: if humanity emerged from non-human primates—as genetic, biological and archaeological evidence seems to suggest—then what are the implications for Christian theology’s traditional account of origins, including both the origin of humanity and the origin of sin?
• Biologist Dennis Venema of Trinity Western University and New Testament scholar Scot McKnight of Northern Seminary will write a book on the evidence for evolution and population genetics, with informed theological reflection on how these issues interact with orthodox Christianity.
• Biologist David Wilcox of Eastern University will develop an updated model of human identity which reflects the complex recent scientific advances in genetics and paleoanthropology and yet is sensitive to theological concerns.

New Missouri House bill promotes teaching of intelligent design

A committee in the state of Missouri legislature is considering an act that would put intelligent design on equal footing with the teaching of evolutionary theory. This bill was introduced last month.

Missouri Republican State Rep. Rick Brattin, who introduced the bill, has said that intelligent design is unjustly excluded from the science classroom. Within the “Missouri Standard Science Act,” intelligent design is defined as “a hypothesis that the complex form and function observed in biological structures are the result of intelligence and, by inference, that the origin of biological life and the diversity of all original species on earth are the result of intelligence.” Meanwhile, biological evolution is defined as a theory, and within that definition the legislation reads: “Theory philosophically demands only naturalistic causes and denies the operation of any intelligence, supernatural event, God or theistic figure in the initial or subsequent development of life.”

The bill has proved to be controversial, but it is unclear yet whether the entire legislature will have the opportunity to vote on it. For information on related legislation, see www.ncse.com. 

Covalence, March 2013