BioLogos has lost it
Jerry Coyne on the strange ugly mess that can result from attempts to reconcile religion with evangelical faith:
…. here’s the president of BioLogos, Darrell Falk, trying to explain to his flock how hard it is to reconcile science with their faith. But first he lays out what that faith involves:
We at BioLogos believe that Jesus, fully God and fully man, walked on this earth 2,000 years ago in order to show humankind how to live life to the full. Jesus died in order that we, sinful humankind, might be clean. His shed blood has made us clean. We need not live under the power of sin any longer. We are called to an infinitely better life that is made possible because we have been forgiven through the event of Calvary, and because of the resurrection power that raised Jesus from death to life. That death to death at the tomb near Calvary was not metaphorical, and the new life we live in Christ is not metaphorical either. We are empowered to live fully gifted lives; we are empowered to live out our calling, enabled by the resurrection-power of God’s Spirit which dwells in us. The Church has existed through these past 2,000 years because the Power of God’s Spirit is alive in God’s Church. We believe the Bible, a living document through which the Holy Spirit continues to speak today, is the divinely inspired Word of God.
At least he declares unequivocally that the Resurrection was not metaphorical. But given that BioLogos thinks that Genesis and the idea of Adam and Eve as the parents of humanity are metaphorical, it would be nice if Falk could tell us how he manages to discriminate between those parts of scripture that are empirically true and those that are just instructive stories. And how can he be so sure that Jesus was the real prophet and not Mohamed? Is this discrimination based on evidence? Or is it just what Falk wants to be true?
Things don’t look good at BioLogos. The science, always in an uneasy equipoise with faith, is now being pushed aside by evangelism. I predict that Templeton will withdraw its support; at least that’s what they should do if they want to retain any credibility with scientists.
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