Virtual Methodist

After the brief triviality of last week's supplement, here are a few beefy posts for this Saturday. Two of the most controversial items in the contemporary church are evolution and homosexuality. One of my favourite bloggers, Rachel Held Evans, pointed to posts on both in her own weekly round-up last week : first a superb series on biologos aimed at helping us to understand evolution , which are both scientifically and theologically literate, and then a heart-rending piece in the Huffington Post by  Maria Burnham  about the time she "came out" to her Bible Study. In evangelical (and Methodist) circles, the only thing that could run evolution or sexuality close on the controversy stakes is alcohol, which is perhaps why I, as someone who enjoys the odd pint (some of them very odd) also enjoyed this piece from Hull concerning a Beer and Cider Festival hosted in a church that ran out of beer... It reminded me of a certain story in John's gospel concerning a wedding ...

There is a basic principle that underpins the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, and that is the survival of the fittest. The theory suggests that this is most potent at times of environmental stress such as an ice age or other global catastrophe. We are currently in the midst of an economic ice age, a global economic catastrophe. And nature, red in tooth and claw, will out. The big predators on the financial markets have been bringing down the slower moving beasts, be they banks or entire countries, while our esteemed political leaders seem to be applying evolutionary principles to their policies and exercise of power. The recently passed Welfare Reforms, allied with cost-cutting measures that disproportionately affect the poorer members of society, has produced a situation where people will be perfectly fine so long as they don't lose their jobs, get ill or grow old. It is, effectively survival of the financially fittest out there. Unless you make personal pro...

I awoke this morning to the news on Radio Ulster that our esteemed Minister at the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Nelson McCausland has written to the National Museums of Northern Ireland to ask for them (and presumably he means their recently renovated flagship, The Ulster Museum which he is pictured here re-opening) to give more prominence to Ulster-Scots, the Orange Order and alternative theories on the origin of the universe. I already had a sore head, and this did not improve it any. The claim is that this is in pursuit of the Northern Ireland Executive's Shared Future agenda, and given that I have worked with Mr. McCausland in the past on good relations issues I have no doubt of his sincere desire for such an end. However, given that he previously also has been an outspoken advocate of Ulster-Scots and a prominent member of the Orange Order, and that at least one member of his political party has been vocal in his demands for Creationism to be given a prominent plac...

This is not about a singer of songs and his critics, but the bioethicist Peter Singer at Princeton, and his many critics, of which I regard myself as one. A friend sent me this article from Christianity Today on some of his views. It is, as my friend wrote to me, "Worth a read." In case you haven't come across Peter Singer before, he is a quietly spoken, polite yet unabashed utilitarian and as I said in a reply to my friend, his views are broadly reflective of the development of Darwinian thought that ultimately produced Nietzsche, and would be held by many of my old biology lecturers… quietly content with the idea of nature red in tooth and claw applying to modern human biology. I do think that the article takes a bit of a cheap shot in closing by saying that he is the rare example of an honest atheist. An atheistic evolutionary approach does not necessarily lead to the twin poles of advocating both animal rights and infanticide. Dawkins, for example would argue that th...

Yesterday was Charles Darwin's 200th birthday! So I half expected to be buried under assorted Darwinania and various mailings from the fundamentalist wing of evolutionary biology... But no, instead they stood back and left the floor open for "the other side." And true to form, the first piece of news to come across my RSS reader yesterday referring to Darwin was from the same brains-trust that gave us a NI Enviroment minister who doesn't believe in Man Made Climate Change... with a news story from the Guardian referring to DUP MLA Mervyn Storey who is threatening to mount a legal challenge to the Ulster Museum under equality legislation if they go ahead with a Darwin Exhibition... I despair... But... what if their bluff was called and, under equality legislation, they were given exhibition space proportional to the properly peer-reviewed scientific research in support of either evolution or Young Earth Creationism, or even Old Earth Intelligent Design? I'm sure t...

As well as being the 500th Anniversary of the birth of John Calvin this year it is also the 200th Anniversary of Charles Darwin , and the 150th Anniversary of his publication of his " On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection " (a snappy title if ever there was one!). A Methodist studying Calvin's Institutes may be a strange phenomenon, but some would believe that an evangelical studying Behavioural and Evolutionary Genetics, which was the the subject of my honours dissertation in my primary degree, is even more bizarre. I am increasingly dismayed by the tendency within evangelicalism (particularly in America and Northern Ireland) to hold to literal belief in the Genesis creation stories (even though the accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 are "literally" contradictory) and "scientific" creationism, as a touchstone of "soundness". Add to that the tendency of evolutionists such as Dawkins (whose "selfish gene" theory was cor...