creation Archives - Page 2 of 6

Long Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far, Away

Astronomers in Melbourne, Australia have detected a galaxy that is more ancient than any galaxy ever seen. They have named the galaxy A1689B11 and have determined that the light now reaching earth was emitted 11 billion years ago and has been travelling toward us ever since. That means that this light started travelling toward the…

The Pace of Scientific Advancement

The pace with which scientific and technological advances are happening is astounding. In 2014/2015, researchers had just begun to grasp the potential of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to edit genomes (see my previous blog here). The technology allows scientists to cut out pieces of DNA and replace the displaced DNA with a novel strand. This can…

The Idea of the Necessity of God

“And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

AI and NT: What makes us human?

Two recent developments in science could leave us asking the question, “What does it mean to be human?” First, the October 19 edition of the journal Nature reports on a remarkable computer program that taught itself how to play the ancient game called Go. Programmers set up the algorithms which included the structure and rules…

Life and Death in God’s Good Creation

God created a world in which one creature consumes another to survive. We may wish it was otherwise; we may think it would have been a better world if God had made it so that we humans could synthesize energy from the sun, but that is not the world God created. Besides which, even grass which…

Plan Like a Raven

Many will know of my fascination with crows, ravens, and other members of the Corvidae family. This group of birds also includes the jays, magpies, and whisky jacks (grey jays). I have previously described (blog posts here and here and my favourite here) the great intelligence of these birds (specifically the Corvus moneduloides or New Caledonian crow) and…

Christ and the Cosmos

This past week I spent three days with 300 other people discussing Science and Faith, Evolutionary Creation, Theology, and how we understand our Creator God in the light of recent scientific discoveries. I was in Houston at the BioLogos 2017 Conference. This conference draws speakers and attenders from a variety of fields. We had keynote…

The Problem with Dark Matter

Theorists and observational astronomers alike have a problem: they can’t find Dark Matter! Einstein and others before and since have postulated that there is something out there that we can’t see. Theoretically, Dark Matter is just that, matter in the universe which is dark because it does not interact with electro-magnetic waves. Also, by definition,…

Evolutionary Creation

I just read a marvellous explanation of evolutionary creation in Adam and the Genome by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight (BrazosPress, 2017). McKnight says, “. . . God constructed the DNA of the smallest organic matter to unfold in our direction.” (p. 132) God started with DNA processes in small single-celled organisms and set it…

JCVI-syn3.0

At a biological level, what is the minimal number of genes needed to sustain life in an organism? That is a question that is being asked by a group of scientists who have been engineering the genome of the bacteria known as Mycoplasma mycoides. For a few years, the team has been taking genes out and…